A script for putting page numbers on PDF pages

We had a project in the office recently wherein a large amount of web documentation was converted to a (single) PDF file using the built-in Web Capture capability of Acrobat X (otherwise known as Control-Shift-O), and when we were done, we wanted a page number to appear on each page. It turns out, it's fairly easy to apply page numbers to (any) PDF file using a bit of JavaScript.

Here is a script that will add a page number (as a read-only text field) to the upper left corner of every page of a PDF document. (Obviously, you can adjust the script to place the page number in any position you want, if you don't like the upper left corner.) The best way to play with this code is to run it in the JS console in Acrobat Pro (Control-J to make the console appear). Paste the code into the console, select all of it, then type Control-Enter to execute it.

var inch = 72;
for (var p = 0; p < this.numPages; p++) { 
 // put a rectangle at .5 inch, .5 inch 
  var aRect = this.getPageBox( {nPage: p} ); 
  aRect[0] += .5*inch;// from upper left corner of page 
  aRect[2] = aRect[0]+.5*inch; // Make it .5 inch wide 
  aRect[1] -= .5*inch; 
  aRect[3] = aRect[1] - .5*inch; // and .5 inch high 
  var f = this.addField("p."+p, "text", p, aRect ); 
  f.textSize = 20;  // 20-pt type
  f.textColor = color.blue; // use whatever color you want
  f.strokeColor = color.white; 
  f.textFont = font.Helv; 
  f.value = String(p+1);  // page numbering is zero-based
  f.readonly = true; 
} 

When you're done, you'll have a page number (as a read-only text field) on each page. If you like, you can Flatten the PDF programmatically using flattenPages() in the console afterwards, to convert the text fields to static objects on the pages (making them no longer editable as text fields).

Configurable Web Capture in Acrobat

Today I put in a feature request for a new feature for the next dot-release of Adobe Acrobat X. What I requested is a white-list/black-list (of URLs) capability for Web Capture.

You may already know about Acrobat's incredibly useful Control-Shift-O (Open URL) functionality, which does just what you think it should: It captures a web page as a PDF document. The built-in functionality is already plenty powerful. It walks all the links in a web page and captures all linked-to pages (and their linked-to pages, etc., however many levels deep you want), creating appropriate links and Bookmarks inside the finished PDF document. And you can specify "Stay on the same server" if you want, to be sure the web-capture session doesn't inadvertently pull in content from a partner's (or competitor's) site, say. Which is all pretty neat.

I ran into a situation the other day, though, where I wanted to capture all the web content from a site, but I didn't want to pull down any content from URLs containing /javadoc/. It would have been neat if Acrobat's Ctrl-Shft-O feature had an Advanced Configuration dialog in which I could have specified certain URLs which either MUST always (white list) or MUST NOT (black list) be followed in the course of a traversal. Neater still would be if you could supply white-listed or black-listed URLs as regular expressions. (Follow this pattern, don't follow that pattern.)

I don't hold out much hope that this kind of feature will make it into a dot release, but I figured I would submit it anyway. As they say, no squeaky, no greasy.