Popups in PDFs? Say It Ain’t So!
One of the things I like about the PDF format is that it does what it says it does without any surprises. Unfortunately, it looks like that’s going to change. PDF Page Pro is in pre-launch mode and will probably be heavily promoted by various marketers. That in of itself isn’t a bad thing, but PDF Page Pro is software that adds popup windows to PDFs, which is definitely going to be annoying.
The popup windows are done using JavaScript. The sales page makes it sound like this is some great discovery on their part, but Adobe Acrobat’s JavaScript is well-documented, it’s just that no marketer’s really taken advantage of it before. This software even lets you automatically open up a web page after a popup (either an entry popup or an exit popup) is dismissed.
What’s really annoying, though, is that turning off these popups is non-trivial. Oh, the sales page makes it sound easy enough:
You see, with this software, although your pop-up URL always shows up for the first time, if your prospect doesn’t want to see it again… Then in their acrobat browser, they can just go to Document –> Security settings and stop the pop-up coming up again and again!
But I doubt the non-techies will figure that out. They’ll need to invest in a PDF cracker to remove the embedded JavaScript.
I really hope we don’t see a lot of popup PDFs popping up because of this product….
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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
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AdSense, Adobe, JavaScript, PDF, popup
Comments
One Response to “Popups in PDFs? Say It Ain’t So!”
And, of course…this follows closely on the heels of pdf now being the attachment of choice for spam email.
There are times when I wish I owned a machine gun…