I wanted to share this email I sent over the weekend, to the Adobe Studio Exchange administrator. It is requesting that there be a section created for exchanging Acrobat content. If you are interested, send them a letter (email). I am posting this in more than one forum (Acrobat related) so that everyone sees it.

[email]studioexchangeadmin@adobe.com[/email]

Dear Studio Exchange:

I have come to the Adobe Studio Exchange many times for a variety of applications that I own from Adobe. The Exchange is a great resource for the user's of Adobe applications. I also think that the Exchange is good for Adobe by making its applications more attractive by making them more approachable. I have used the Exchange for Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and After Effects, as well as, other Adobe applications over the years. The many plugin like Actions and scripts are often a quick resolve to a problem but they also serve by example to educate the user on how to build their own scripts, that they too can pass back to the greater pool.

Unfortunately Acrobat or its scripting are not subjects in the current Adobe Studio Exchange. The scripted action sections for Adobe's other applications are great which only deepens the irony that Adobe's most scripted action application, Acrobat, does not have it's own exchange area.

The need for an Acrobat / JavaScript section first occurred to me when I began work on a large Acrobat v5 project for a very large and disorganized corporation. I had to learn very quickly how to create custom batch sequences to process large amounts of PDFs over and over again.

Although, the forums were and are an excellent place to go, they saved my butt, it was piecemeal process at best. Run into a problem, get an answer, run into another problem come back and ask again. Many good folks will answer you but you have to wait, sometimes more time than you have to resolve it yourself. Many times this is because the answer might well have been asked before and now must be repeated, you could call this responder exhaustion. Also, Adobe forums have no function for attaching files as examples, except to supply a download link that the question responder must present and maintain him or herself. its a lot to ask of someone spending their valuable time doing you a favor.

Forms, JavaScript, batch processing, ADBC, FDF, SOAP, XML are all areas of interest for people authoring scripts and other code in Acrobat. In the past, the absence of this opportunity was a minor inconvenience but with the release of version 6 with all of its enhanced JavaScript and XML the need for an area of exchange exploded. The release of Acrobat 7 further increases the need for this service with increased JavaScript in control over media, expansion of XML and Trusted Function integration.

Strangely, I have noticed that the forums themselves manage to increase the need for an Acrobat / JavaScript exchange area. When you add together the reasons given above to the success Adobe has had in getting customers to see and understand the value of interactive PDFs through forms, user experience or media presentation, hundreds if not thousands of folks are coming to the Acrobat Adobe forums, Planet PDF as well, for the first time. They are a secretary, clerk, designer, writer owner of small company or an employee in a larger corporation and they are tasked to make some kind of interactive PDF or create a batch sequence.

Even if they know a great deal about what they need and how to do it, what the result will look like and how it will perform, the concept of scripting is often completely foreign to them. Trying to explain it to them in a brief posted answer or by giving them a snippet of code, often does not do the trick, this only gets worse if you don't share the same language. I have been on both sides of this condition, some concept is completely escaping my ability to grasp or be able to get across to some else.

It often seems that the best way to learn t