Losing Reader Extension Rights After Saving

[Former Community Member]

Hi,



I have a form I have had extensions enabled. When a user opens the doc with Reader 7 for a start it works fine, they can fill in the fields and save the form. However, when they come back later to make more changes to the form (after saving and closing it once) they receive this message:



"This document contained certain rights to enable special features in Adobe Reader. The document has been changed since it was created and these rights are no longer valid. Please contact the author for the original version of this document."



At first I thought this must just be the way its supposed to work, but then I downloaded a sample enabled PDF from Adobe. I was able to open the sample, make changes, save it, and reopen it and make more changes and save again. I created another test form with a couple of fields and enabled it and it worked fine too (so its not my copy of Extensions software).



Does anybody have any idea why this is happening to my form, or experienced the problem? It does use a fair bit of java script to automate filling, but I don't see how that could hurt it.



Thanks in advance,



David

[Former Community Member]

Hello,



we are actually experiencing the same problem. My first thought was that we missed something in the rights, but other rights didn't change anything in the behaviour. Have you found out the cause for the problem?



Regards, Karin

[Former Community Member]

This is a guess: you can't test out the performance of reader on your computer because you have the full functioning software on the computer also. To test performance of my forms I have to send them to my daughter who only has the reader. By the way,until she got 7.0 reader, she was unable to work with the forms. No level of 5 would work.

[Former Community Member]

A PDF file is basically a collection of objects and when adding rights to a PDF, Reader Extensions walks the tree structure containing the objects and selects all the structural objects in the tree that should not change in the PDF. It then creates a hash signature using the objects that should not change. This hash is then checked whenever the document is opened to ensure that the structure of the document has not been altered. This is done to ensure that users do not rights enable a document that is then used to create other rights enabled documents by modifying the structure of the original document thus bypassing Reader Extensions.



I suspect that the form you are using contains javascript that changes the visibility of fields depending on user input. For instance when the form was rights enable you may have had a field on the form that was invisible. A user then opens the rights enabled form and then because of some action they perform the invisible field is made visible and the user saves the form with the field know visible. Doing this changes the structure of the PDF as a new entry must be made in the list of objects to be rendered by Reader the next time the PDF is opened. However making this change to the PDF file invalidates the hash generated by Reader Extensions resulting in the



"This document contained certain rights to enable special features in Adobe Reader. The document has been changed since it was created and these rights are no longer valid. Please contact the author for the original version of this document."



message.

[Former Community Member]

Your explanation of this problem sounds good but what do we do to fix this problem.



We are having this same problem, only the message appears when the form is first opened, the user is not allow to do anything on the form. The weird thing is that this in only confined to one PC, when the user opens the same form on a different machine the form opens without problem.

[Former Community Member]

Hi Denver,



thanks for the explanation, that gave me the right direction. We had color changes of fields in our form which was saved as static form, and this also seems to be a 'structural' change. When I saved the form as dynamic it worked fine because structural changes are expected in a dynamic file.



Regards, Karin

[Former Community Member]

If you have a acroform where you are changing the visibility of fields then please make sure that you add the right to "Add and Delete Fields" when extending the document. If you forget to do this then your rights will be invalidated when a field is hidden or made visible.



Denver

[Former Community Member]

I have a user that is getting the same error message whenever she opens any pdf document that has commenting rights available. The same forms are able to be opened and commented upon by others. Her installation of 7.0 is the only one that has the difficulty at this time. Formerly another employee had the same problem, and I was unable to fix it. Because he worked with these documents as a major part of his job, I actually rebuilt his entire computer (which took care of the problem). I had previously uninstalled and reinstalled reader, etc.



Does anyone have any idea how such a thing would happen?

[Former Community Member]

I think is a matter of time on different computers. I mean hours and minutes. When you create RE pdf on computer on which is f. ex 15:22 (add rights) you can not open it on computer with hour 15:19.

[Former Community Member]

This is very easy to fix. I have seen this on other forms and this solution has always worked.




BEFORE Reader Extending your form run the form through the Acrobat PDF Optimizer (7.x). In the optimizing options select the "Cleanup" and then "Remove unreferenced named destinations". Leave everything else as-is.



Now, Reader Extend your form and test it. You should find that the form functions normally.

[Former Community Member]

I am creating a form in Adobe 7.0 and want assign user rights but can't figure out how to do so. Appreciate your help.

Anne

[Former Community Member]

What kinds of "rights" are you looking for? The "right" to save off line & comment within a document or the "right" to view the document and not print it?

[Former Community Member]

]This is very easy to fix. I have seen this on other forms and this solution has always worked.

]BEFORE Reader Extending your form run the form through the Acrobat PDF Optimizer (7.x). In the optimizing options select the "Cleanup" and then "Remove unreferenced named destinations". Leave everything else as-is.



I too am having this issue where a form run through Reader Extension server 6.0 can only be saved with Reader once. I tried the above instructions however, a message pops up stating, "This PDF contains an Adobe XML form. Such PDFs cannot be optimized."



Any other suggestions?

[Former Community Member]

I found out the answer in another thread. Since my form is dynamic, the 6.0 Extension server can't handle the added functionality (or something like that). Running the form through a LiveCycle 7.* Reader Extension server allows the form to be resaved.<br /><br />Go to http://<LiveCycle7servername>:<port>/ReaderExtensions <br /><br />Cheers.

[Former Community Member]

I am facing a similar situation like David.



We are using a editable PDF form downloaded from the IRS website. we are using various forms. All we do is fill out the forms for the users depending on the values they enter in our application.



Now, the warning message:

"This document contained certain rights to enable special features in Adobe Reader. The document has been changed since it was created and these rights are no longer valid. Please contact the author for the original version of this document."



only comes up with certain forms and not all...and that too on certai machines. I tried using the help>detect&repair option in Adobe Acrobat 7.0.0 and it worked on my machine and the message stops. But when my colleauge tried the same thing, the message still continues to appear!!



This message can be very intimidating and

[Former Community Member]

It turns that the problem that I was having with this particular form resulted because I had run the "optimise PDF wizard" and un-embedded a font prior to enabling the extensions, reasoning that the font didn't need to be embedded because all our users would already have it installed.



When I skip the step of optimising the form prior to enabling it, it all works fine.



My uninformed explanation for this is that the font is re-embedded in the form as soon as a user enters text into one of the fields which uses the un-embedded font. I believe that embedding a font changes the documents structure. This means that when the form is opened next time the read-extensions digital signature is no longer able to verify that the document is authentic and the ARES rights are lost.



Cheers,



Dave

[Former Community Member]

I had this same issue using the form server and reader extension api's for 7.0.



When I render the document in my adobe form server call I just had to set the option "(RenderAtClient=false)" in the call to form server when i rendered the document originally. Then I pass that document to ares.



I believe what happens is the client renders the document when they open it the second time and invalidates the original security rights. That resolved my problem.

[Former Community Member]

Is there away around this problem that would be easier for a novice? I have a post out there on the same issue:



Document Signature - Popup on 2nd Signature

http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bc43dd5

[Former Community Member]

I am creating documents using Acrobat version 5. I have a form field that I want my employees to enter their name and phone number in. My main problem is employees using reader version 7 being unable to save changes after they enter their contact info. Is there something I can do when creating or saving the doc's or something they can do that will enable them to save changes?? Thanks for any help.

[Former Community Member]

Hi Bob,



If you can get a copy of Acrobat 8 Professional you can "Enable" a PDF so that people with Adobe Reader 7 or later can save the PDF forms they have completed. Note however that there are license restrictions if more than 500 people will be using the form. In this case you would need to think about the high priced Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions.



Outside of these options I don't think there is any way to allow people with Reader to save changes to a PDF form.