Talking to Internet Explorer embedded Acrobat Reader via COM

[Zoltan_Olah@adobeforums.com]

Hi all. I'm developing an Internet Explorer BHO (browser plugin) and was wondering whether it's possibly for me to communicate with Acrobat Reader via COM. I have read through the SDK docs and it's not clear whether this is possible. I'm using unmanaged c++.

I think if this can be done I think I will need to call get_document(IDispatch *p) on the webbrowser control, then using p->QueryInterface(...) to gain access to the Acrobat document. However, to do this I will need to pass in a REFIID to QueryInterface. As such I need to find some documentation on the supported COM interfaces and various IDs I will need to use.

If anyone could point me in the right direction, that would be great.

thanks,
Zoltan!

[Leonard_Rosenthol@adobeforums.com]

Adobe Reader has no COM interface. Adobe Reader does include an ActiveX control that you can connect to, with limited APIs.

Can you give us some more idea of what yo uare trying to accomplish?

Leonard

[Zoltan_Olah@adobeforums.com]

Thanks for your reply. We are writing a web annotation tool as an Internet Explorer plugin. The web annotation part of it is complete, and now we are looking at being able to make annotations on pdf documents loaded within the browser.

Where can I find information about the limited APIs on the ActiveX control you mentioned? Do you think we should be looking at a different approach?

thanks,

Zoltan

[Leonard_Rosenthol@adobeforums.com]

PDF already supports it's own annotation functionality. You would be better served writing a custom plugin for Acrobat/Reader that would integrate your plugins with PDF annotations.

Leonard

[Zoltan_Olah@adobeforums.com]

This is certainly an option for us. Is it possible to load plugins into the embedded viewer (activex control)?

[Leonard_Rosenthol@adobeforums.com]

the plugins would already be on the user's computer as part of their installation of Acrobat/Reader, but yes, a plugin can choose to load into an external window or not.

Leonard