TIP 104: Embedding Movies and Multimedia in PDF

When Adobe released Acrobat 6, it included the amazing ability to embed interactive multimedia content such as QuickTime movies and Flash files right inside the PDF. This means Adobe PDF files can now be robust containers for compelling interactive presentations that include a variety of file formats. It can all be stored in one file that can be viewed by anybody with the free Adobe Reader (www.adobe.com/reader).

Retaining Rollovers

New in GoLive CS2 is the ability to preserve JavaScript rollovers as PDF rollover effects. Make sure to enable Honor Rollover Effects when you export the PDF for an Acrobat experience that is more faithful to the original Web page.

If your Web pages include movies, they can be embedded inside a PDF you create with the PDF Export feature in GoLive. There are two important options you must enable in the General section of the Export Adobe PDF dialog (Figure 104) for the conversion to work correctly:

• Compatibility: Make sure this is set to at least PDF 1.5, because only Acrobat 6 and Acrobat 7 viewers support the new embedded multimedia content.

• Multimedia: Choose Embed All to embed multimedia files such as QuickTime and SWF in the exported PDF. If you don't check this option, the multimedia might still work, but you'll need to always keep the PDF and multimedia files together.

Figure 104. Adjust the settings so the multimedia is embedded in a PDF 1.5 or 1.6 file.