Wow, it seems that lots of people want to speed Acrobat Reader 6 up! (Are you listening Adobe??) But people want to know what all the plugins do that they are disabling when they make Acrobat Reader 6 load faster. Here they are, APIs first and folders second, with links as appropriate. Note: there may be dependencies among these plugins!
- AcroForm.api - the API for Adobe Acrobat Forms.
- DigSig.api - "Digital Signature Plug-In (DigSig.api). This plug-in allows the user to digitally sign a document. The signature can be used to validate that the document has not been modified since the document was signed. Any modifications to the document will invalidate the signature. The built it Digital Signature Plug-In uses PPKLite and a user supplied password to create the digital signature. Developers can add their own signature creation and validation routines using the API provided by the Digital Signature Plug-In."
- EScript.api - this is the JavaScript plugin for Acrobat
- HLS.api - Highlight Server API. See this document and look for HLS.
- IA32.api - ok this was a tough one. I looked everywhere and could find nothing about this API. Then I opened the file in notepad, and got at least the description, "Internet Access API for Acrobat". Don't know what this does, but I think it is related to the automatic update feature.
- PPKLite.api - used for pictures/digital signatures.
- SendMail.api - yep, it sends email.
- Soap.api - the SOAP API for using Acrobat with web services
- Updater.api - part of the automatic web update.
- Weblink.api - a higher-level API than the standard link API that allows links to Internet docs in the PDF document.
- XFA.api - "XML Forms Architecture provides a template-based approach to building business form documents."
- Annotations folder - plugins that allow you to annotate a PDF document (notes and memos)
- Picture Tasks folder - plugins that let you work with pictures
- Printme folder - Printing Made Easy.
UPDATE:
Actually you can use Adobe Reader itself to tell you what the plug-ins do. Go to Help – About Adobe Plug-Ins or Help – About Third-Party Plug-Ins. In Adobe Plug-Ins, the window shows the file name, whether it is loaded or not and the version, whether it is certified or not and on what date, a brief description, and a list of dependencies. Note that this list only includes plug-ins that are in the “plug_ins” folder.