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Duff,
the conclusion is essentially to not use any menu item actions at all, but to stick with the according JavaScript functionality (as far as it is possible, anyway). It is easier to take care of, and it would also allow for version sniffing.
But, yes, one must be VERY cautious when developing in Acrobat 6 in order to have things work in older versions.
Actually, I still recommend to develop in 5.05, but to debug in 6...
Max Wyss PRODOK Engineering Low Paper workflows, Smart documents, PDF forms CH-8906 Bonstetten, Switzerland
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Thanks for this statement. I wanted to share an observation that
implies a few intriguing little caveats to assertions of backwards
compatibility. I do understand that you are referring to the spec itself, but not
all users will understand the distinction between the spec and the backwards
compatibility issues that do, in fact, exist.
It is clear that Menu Items have changed form 5.0x to 6.0. Thus, many links, fields and other methods of deploying this functionality in 6.0 simply don't work in earlier versions.
For example, a "Search" link in Acrobat 6.0 becomes a "Find" link when executed in Acrobat 5.0x. There are other examples as well... "Exit" becomes "Close", or so I am told.
Also on this point... many menu items in Acrobat 5.0x often become "dumb" when executed in Acrobat 6.0 - a point of significance for those supporting sophisticated Acrobat applications developed using 5.0x or earlier.
After reading your post, I quickly tested the 6.0 Optimizer feature in this regard. My expectation (ok, hope) was that the Optimizer would adjust menu items to provide the "equivalent" functionality in Acrobat 5.0x. Sadly, this is not the case, although I can't see that this would have been hard to add to the Optimizer.
At a minimum, it would be highly beneficial if Adobe were to publish a list of all changes to menu items between the two versions so that us developers would have a point of reference... or some other method better than trial and error.
In sum, users authoring interactive PDFs using Acrobat 6.0 need
to be VERY careful that they do not include functions that are not supported
in earlier versions of Acrobat. More to the point - they need to know that the
Optimizer will NOT provide assurance of 5.0x compatibility with respect to
these functions.
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