Introduction

Welcome to pdftracker.de, a site that allows you to embed Javascript code in your PDFs that enables you to track the viewing habits of your readers.

This is a free service, both as in beer and as in speech. You can find out how pdftracker works and even download the complete source code, which is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Parts of it are still beta quality, please send me feedback on how it works (especially if it does not).

Update (11/11/2005): Today I received an e-mail from Adobe saying that in 7.0.5 (which is not available for Unix systems yet), they show a dialog for every HTTP request. And yes, they do so, which obsoletes most of this page.

Update (03/05/2008): This page just moved to a new server which does not have all the prerequisites installed, so some stuff (most notably the PDF generation) is broken. As this page mainly exists for historic purposes anyways, I indent to keep it that way for now. If you really want it to work for some reason, drop me an e-mail and convince me to work on it.

I don't like spyware!

Of course. So do I. Even though pdftracker is technically not spyware, I understand your concern. pdftracker was born because I wanted to show what is possible. This is why this site features explanations on how to disable the tracking features in Adobe/Acrobat Reader and lists alternative PDF viewers.