Options — the PDF production tool
We are pleased to announce Options 3.01, a major upgrade to our popular tool: fully compatible with Acrobat X/XI/DC, and now includes an Options tool bar when used with Acrobat X/XI/DC — improving your user experience.
See Release Notes below.
Options is an Acrobat plug-in for setting multiple options for PDF files in a batch process using its own functionality or Acrobat's Actions. The open and security options, index, general information metadata (title, subject etc.) and form fields of all the PDF files within a selected directory can be set. There is also a watched directory facility. See the Main Features section for more information on the functionality.
Options will process secure files by asking for the passwords before it begins work, thus enabling operation without user intervention until it has finished.
“Options is AMAZING. Over the years we have built a PDF collection of over 400,000 documents (the world's largest collection of its kind) and we could not have done it without Options. We use the Meta fields for indexing and display purposes and the ability to batch edit document metadata and properties has saved us hundreds, if not thousands, of hours.”
Matt Timberlake, ToxPlanet
Latest Release Notes
Options 3.01 is fully compatible with Acrobat X/XI/DC, and the new features will help you to streamline your workflows by using Options functionality within Acrobat actions (Acrobat X or later), or batch processing (Acrobat 9 or earlier). Find out more about the new functionality in the Actions and Batch Sequences section below.
How Options Works
To process one or more PDF files the user has to:
- Set up the Default Settings to apply from the Options menu in Acrobat. From here, all the required open and security options, information fields (metadata) and form fields, hyperfeatures, indexes etc to be applied later can be specified.
- Select a file or directory to process.
- Process the PDF file(s) with the ‘Apply to File...’ or ‘Apply to Directory’ menu items.
Main Features
| Watched directories | PDF files can have new settings applied by dropping them into defined watched directories. Each directory can have different settings applied if desired. |
| Apply to Directory or Apply to File | You can apply settings to a directory of PDFs or to a single PDF file. |
| Optimisation | PDF files can be saved as optimised for use on the web (i.e. ‘fast web view’ or page-at-a-time downloading). |
| Doc Info fields (metadata) | Export and import document information fields to be processed on a batch of files. Fields can be exported to a CSV file which could then be edited in a spreadsheet such as MS Excel and then imported back into Options for processing. Custom fields can be created and edited as well as the standard Title, Subject, Author and Keywords fields. |
| Form fields | Export and import text form field values to or from a CSV file. As above, these could be edited in a spreadsheet, then import the CSV file to change the field values. |
| Hyperfeatures | You can change properties of links, notes, bookmarks and articles or remove some, or all, of them in batch. You can also copy them from a template document to all the files being processed, and you are able to create thumbnails. |
| Index | Attach an Acrobat Search index to automatically load when the file is opened in Acrobat or Reader. |
Page orientation |
All pages can be rotated to be portrait or landscape. |
Page reversal |
You can reverse the page order in the PDF. Useful with some printer drivers which reverse the output. |
Actions and Batch Sequences
Options 3.0 makes some of its functionality available to Acrobat actions and batch sequences. Using either of those, you can combine several different steps into a multi-step action, thus simplifying your PDF workflow. See below for an example of what you might do.
Acrobat actions are available in Acrobat&X/XI/DC from the Action Wizard group on the Tools pane, or from the File menu (Acrobat X/XI only). In Acrobat versions 5 to 9, you need to look for Acrobat's batch processing, which is available under Advanced | Document Processing | Batch Processing.
You can add any of the following Options functionality as a step to an action, in any order:
- Reverse Pages
- Flatten Form Fields (new feature)
- Search Index
- Copy from Template
- Hyperfeatures
As an example, you could use Options's Search Index (to attach an index) as one step, and process hyperfeatures (links etc) as usual with the Options' Hyperfeatures functionality. Using Acrobat X the action might look like the following when being created:
You can see the functionality available from Options in the list on the left above.
