Current Date on PDF Document

Question

I have a current pdf document created in Adobe Acrobat 9.0 Professional. At the bottom of each page, I would like for the current date to be displayed whenever someone prints a copy of the document. Can anyone give me an easy way to do this? I added a footer thinking originally that it would automatically update to the current date but I see that it doesn't. It just displays the date of the last update. Thanks.

Answer 1

First, Reader can not add form form fields or water mark by JavaScirpt. This means one can not add a watermark reliably before printing, so one needs to use a form field, and that form field needs to exist before the PDF is opened by Reader. You need to add a 'read only' form field to each page of the PDF and if you give them all the same name, you only need to change the value of one of the form fields. There is no way to add a footer by JavaScript.
There are a number of ways to change the value of the field before printing so if you want the date the form was sent to the printer, you will use the 'Will Print' document action to change the value of the field which will cause the field to be updated when any 'print' is requested from Acrobat's menu, Acrobat's tool bar, or an added button field. And you will have to add a custom JavaScript that obtains the date object, formats the date object,  and sets the value of your field object.
The referenced link is to JavaScript that adds the field and the necessary JavaScript to work.
You can cut and paste the following into the script for the 'Will Print' action:
// get the field
var field = this.getField("PrintField");
// get the date object
var odate = new Date();
// format the date
var cDate = util.printd('mmm d, yyyy', oDate)
// set the field value
field.value = "THIS DOCUMENT WAS PRINTED ON "+ + cDate;