Disable Print

[Former Community Member]

Hi,

Is there a way to disable "Print" on the ADOBE reader menu item for a form built in LC ES? I tried app.hidemenuitem("Print"), but didn't work.

Thanks

[Former Community Member]

If you have Acrobat Pro you could apply password security to the document and disable printing.

Steve

[Former Community Member]

Thanks for the reply Steve. I do have professional, however, another aspect of my requirement is that the users should be able to print the form when all the required fields are filled in.

[Jono_Moore]

You can put a script on the prePrint event to check for mandatory fields, etc. This event fires before printing no matter how the print command is called.

[Former Community Member]

But will this prevent the print window from appearing. In this case, a validation check will happen, but the user will still be able to print the form.

[Former Community Member]

Disabling print is a problem given there is alway screen capture and screen print. Companies go to great lengths to discourage printing, whether it is through password security, rights management through LiveCycle Rights Management (including watermarking), or any number of kludges.

On the topic of kludges....I have seen hidden sub-forms that are made visible when print or submission is done and the sub-form covers the entire page and it may simply be filled with solid white or it may be an image to watermark the form.

Steve

[Jono_Moore]

My view on this is that there is only so much hand-holding you can do with the user. You can put a popup in explaining that the form needs to be finished before printing - if they go ahead and print anyway then they run the risk of not having their form processed.

There's xfa.event.cancelAction - which is supposed to work in v9+ but I just tried it and it didn't seem to work.

I just found this post from Stefan Cameron which has a solution that works in v8+:

http://forms.stefcameron.com/2008/04/13/prevent-printing-pdf-forms-in-acrobat-8/

[Former Community Member]

Thanks a lot for your help. I think I'll go with an informational message to the user and thn leave it to his discretion whether to print or not.

[green_paper]

I managed to actually prevent the print window from appearing using  the xfa.event.cancelAction feature that Jono Moore mentions.  However,  it only seems to work consistently in versions 9 or better; anything  older and I had inconsistent results.  More details in this post:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/2986124

I'm going to combine your method with mine: using an informational message and leaving it up to the user for older versions of Acrobat/Reader, and the xfa.event.cancelAction feature for newer versions.  Hopefully xfa.host.version will give me the info I need to make this decision.

Cheers!