Is there a way to access arbitrary Acrobat program arguments in JavaScript?

[cschmelter]

I have a folder-level JavaScript file installed in the user javascript folder. I'm wondering if there's a way to pass a URL as a parameter when launching Acrobat and to have the folder-level JavaScript code access the URL so that it can use that particular URL. Is this possible?

[try67]

Not really. You can access a web-service using the Net.HTTP object, but you can't just access a URL and use its contents (unless you convert it to a PDF file first, which is very tricky since it's done asynchronously).

[Joel Geraci]

Is the URL local (file:///...) or HTTP?

[cschmelter]

HTTP

[Thom Parker]

No

[Thom Parker · Accepted solution]

Ok, there is a way, but it's old and I haven't tried it.  There are a set of command line parameters you can use when opening a PDF.

http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_open_parameters.pdf

One of these is a references to an FDF file. The FDF file could easily contain either a script that sets a document level variable, or it could fill a hidden form field.

[cschmelter]

Thanks for the link. I see in that PDF:

Acrobat.exe /A "zoom=1000" "C:\example.pdf"

So I was hoping I could so something like:

Acrobat.exe /A "foo=bar" "C:\example.pdf" and access "app.foo" or "this.foo" in JavaScript but it doesn't seem to work. So an FDF file is the only way?

[Thom Parker]

Not only is an FDF file the only reasonable way to pass data into the PDF using these options, PDF was built for FDF. It's a fantastic way to get stuff into a PDF. Its not just form data, its all kinds of things. For example, you can update page content with an FDF.