What is an Acrobat Plug-in?

What is an Acrobat Plugin?

An Adobe Acrobat plugin is a software component that can extend the functionality of the Adobe Acrobat reader/viewer application, a popular program for viewing, creating, and editing PDF documents. Plugins can add new features to Acrobat, such as the ability to create interactive forms, add watermarks, or perform advanced document processing tasks. Some plugins are developed by Adobe, while others are created by third parties. These plugins can be installed within the Acrobat application and are typically activated when a particular action or task is performed within the software.

Why Do We Need Plugins?

To make Adobe Acrobat more flexible and applicable to a broader range of industries and organisations, the number of built-in features must be restricted to the wider community. This is because adding features that serve only a small portion of Acrobat's user base would unnecessarily increase the application's size. Consequently, plugins are required to add functionality as needed by the user.

Adobe provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) that allows third-party developers to create plugins that integrate seamlessly with Acrobat. This approach enables a thriving ecosystem of specialised tools that extend Acrobat's capabilities in ways that would not be practical to include in the core application.

Can Acrobat Plugins Be Used in the Adobe Reader?

Special support needs to be added to the plugin so that it can run under Adobe Reader. However, the Reader plugin will require a special licence and needs to go through an approval process with Adobe Systems Inc.

This means that while most plugins are designed for the full version of Adobe Acrobat, it is possible to make them work with the free Adobe Reader, subject to Adobe's approval and licensing requirements.

Are Plugins Specific to a Particular Version of Adobe Acrobat?

Probably the biggest change in this last year was the introduction of the 64-bit version of Acrobat, which has also meant the rebuilding of our Acrobat Plugins to support it. This has basically meant a rebuild of all plug-ins so that they will run on both platforms. In this process we decided to remove a number of our products that are now decades old and concentrate on maintaining and improving a subset of the products.

While the Acrobat API maintains a degree of backward compatibility, major platform changes such as the move to 64-bit architecture require plugins to be recompiled and potentially updated. Developers must ensure their plugins are compatible with the target version of Acrobat.

Examples of Plugins

Mapsoft has developed a range of Adobe Acrobat plugins that demonstrate the breadth of functionality that can be added through the plugin architecture:

• New security handlers that might be specific to a particular organisation. For example, we have developed security handlers that do not allow PDF files to be viewed outside a particular organisation's offices.
• New annotation types. For example, we created a plugin that supported all of the British Standard Markups.
• Flattening annotations and form fields into the main document. This ensured that they could not be changed or modified and that they would print as part of the document even if the printing of annotations was switched off.
• Adding text and images to PDF files.
• Creating a table of contents for PDF files.
• Automating the creation of bookmarks based on the styles in a PDF file.
• Adding fields for variable data printing.
• Hardware integration of Adobe Acrobat into whiteboards and interactive tables.

Related Resources

• Mapsoft Adobe Acrobat plugin products
• Custom Acrobat plugin development services