Recipe 2.4. Importing Acrobat PDF Content

Problem

You want to import content from a PDF to your Flash document.

Solution

Import the PDF directly into Flash.

Discussion

Since Flash MX 2004, Flash has supported importing PostScript files, including PDF. That means that you can directly import your PDF content without any additional converters. And Flash gives you several options when importing the content that allow you to control how it will treat things like text, layers, and pages.

To import PDF content, complete the following steps:

1. Create or obtain your PDF file.

2. Open or create a Flash document.

3. Choose File Import Import to Stage if you want to import the content both to the library and to the stage at the same time. Otherwise, if you want to import the content to the library only, choose File Import Import to Library. If you import to the stage, youll still be able to remove it from the stage if you want to at a later time.

4. Navigate to the PDF, select it, and choose Open.

5. In the Import Options dialog box, you are prompted for several options:

   1. PDF documents can consist of multiple pages. When importing the content, Flash will import the pages to either different scenes or keyframes. In most cases, we recommend that you use the keyframes option.

   2. You should also choose how you want Flash to interpret the PDF layers. By default, the layers in the PDF translate into layers in Flash. However, you also have the option of having each layer import into its own keyframe, or you can flatten all the layers so that they import on a single layer in Flash.

   3. If you have multiple pages in your PDF document, you also need to decide which of those pages to import. You can import all the pages or specify a range.

   4. Lastly, you are asked whether to import invisible layers, whether to maintain text blocks as editable text in Flash, and whether to rasterize the entire import. If you choose to rasterize the entire content that you import, you can choose the resolution at which to rasterize the content, specified in dots per inch.

6. Click OK to import the PDF content. Flash will import it to the current timeline.

Importing PDF files can be resource-intensive. Larger PDFs may take a long time to import on everything but high-end machines.