Plugin for opening a PDF in app but editing & saving outside app?

Question

Hi all, first of all thank you for providing such helpful commentary on the DPS solution so far.
My client is a major publisher of  educational textbooks. They are repurposing content currently to distribute globally and have a sizeable offering of potential digital products. They have been thrilled with the DPS tools so far but we have hit a major snag.
One requirement of their offering is that learners can actually open and edit pdfs (for worksheets and exercises) from within the apps and make annotations, highlights etc. Also fill in text areas, and submit those activities to their teachers via email etc.
I got the PDF opening in-app which we managed to get right fairly easily using the HTMLResources.zip technique which is a URL link to HTMLResources / pdfname.pdf as you know. It is static and cant be edited or saved but viewed perfectly.  So we tried opening the PDF using a link to another app, for example GoodReader, hoping that they could open the pdf in Goodreader and there make changes and interact with it. This also wouldn't work. We tried
gropen://
method (opens a pdf into GoodReader) but it looks for a file locally on the device (which isn't there obviously) as it wasn't bundled in the folio, and it could find one in the HTMLResources file either using that code I tried gropen://HTMLResources/pdfname.pdf too.
I check the URL scheme for Apple devices, in particular the iPad and iPhone and loads of cool things are supported like the ability to call phones, sms, link to app store etc, but not an option to open a file into another app. so that something like this code is supported:
ghttp://www.samplepdf.com/sample.pdf
Is there a solution here that you know of, perhaps a plugin thats exists or can be written for this? This client has scores of books and right now they are looking at scrapping the Adobe DPS tools due to this lack of functionality and going the custom app route.
Thanks for your time, any input would be greatly appreciated.
Eva

Answer 1

Acrobat is only able to work with PDF files. You could convert a jpeg or tiff into a PDF using Acrobat, but I personally would either do a little math to determine if it is print-quality or drop it into InDesign at the size it will need to print and see if it works.
If you have InDesign installed you can use that program to do your layout using the raster images and check their effective ppi using the links panel:
Using InDesign might make most sense for you as you can do the layout for raster images here, and for PDF documents that clients have prepared you could use Acrobat.
The advantages of using both like this are that they have very powerful industry-standard prepress features. These prepress features can do most of your work for you by checking for low resolution images, colors out of gamut, missing links, type embedding problems etc.
More on prepress in InDesign here, this is for CS3, but the process is essentially the same in CS6: (I would skip through to 2:00)
And prepress in Acrobat XI:
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