Extend Usage Rights for Adobe Reader

In this series of fun with LiveCycle Blogs, I am presenting here one of the very common problem faced by the Adobe Customers:

How do you let users with free Adobe Reader save the data in PDF?

First let me jot down what is the difference between Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat Professional.

When you buy Adobe Acrobat Professional you get some of the following things :

You can save the PDF.
You can Digitally Sign it.
You can comment on it.
You can edit the fields on it.
You can convert nearly every file format (Word,Giff,Tiff,AutoCAD..) to a PDF.
You get free LiveCycle Designer Tool to create and design PDFs.


And with the Free Adobe Reader you get to "read" the PDFs.

Fair enough!

So what if someone wants its users to save the PDF or may be add comments on it or digitally sign it without having to buy the Acrobat.

The answer to all this lies in something called as Reader Extensions.
If you Reader Extend a PDF document then these few things are available for free Adobe Reader Users.

So what is this Reader Extensions. Well let me share a secret here, the code behind the Free Reader and the Acrobat Professional is more or less same!! quite a revelation?

So Adobe Reader is nothing but Acrobat with blocked functionality, and when you Reader Extend a document you unblock some of the features of Acrobat to be available for free Reader.

So how do we Reader Extend a document.
Reader Extension is possible by using Acrobat Professional and LiveCycle Reader Extensions.

By using Acrobat Professional :
Open the document you want to Reader Extend in Acrobat Professional
Go to Advanced tab
In the advanced tab you would find the link "Enable Usage Rights for Adobe Reader" or Extend Usage Rights for Adobe Reader.
Click on that and then save the PDF.
You are done.
The thing to remember here is if you do any change in the PDF the Reader Extension would break and you have to again Reader Extend it and then save the document.

Another method would be through LiveCycle Reader Extensions, Adobe LiveCycle REader Extensions is a server component of Adobe LiveCycle ES.
It is a server where you can choose many functionalites of Acorbat to be available for the Reader. LiveCycle provides you with the APIs to do so, there is something called as WorkBench where you can design the process and apply Reader Extensions and it also has a GUI available which enables you to do all these tasks.

Adobe provides you with free trial of LiveCycle ES, so you can download it and try it.
Here is the link.

Keep looking at this space for more information of Adobe LiveCycle Products :)