July 2007

Portable dynamic documents

While the image persists that the Portable Document Format is intended only for static, to-be-printed documents, a growing number of document creators and publishers are making more effective use of PDF's built-in capabilities for adding a variety of interactive features. They can range from adding some basic navigational elements —bookmarks, internal and external links, linked indexes and so on —to the inclusion of either embedded or linked multimedia files.

A couple recent examples: 

BNET's Business Blogs offer several articles on relevant management topics that not only take advantage of Acrobat 8's PDF Package functionality for combining related files, but also showcase the use of an interactive cover sheet that includes an explanatory sticky note, an email-forwarding link and a related video clip. For example, the package titled "Make Your Meetings Matter" includes several other combined PDFs covering "How to Run an Effective Meeting," "Shake It Up: Alternative Meeting Strategies," "Surviving Your Worst Meeting Nightmares" and "Ten Tips to Tune Up Your Teleconferences." The cover document features a linked video clip that gives practical tips and advice to improve meetings.

The Harvard Business Review Online published its first interactive case study that allowed it to expand from its traditional approach of having four experts present differing viewpoints on a fictional dilemma facing many managers. HBR invited its community of readers to participate, resulting in almost 200 user responses. They published not only a winning submission, but also snippets from a broad selection of entries. The resulting PDF-based case study includes a brief video-clip interview with the author summarizing the highlights and key issues.

If you haven't yet started to take advantage of the rich-media capabilities of Acrobat and PDF, and could use some help understanding why, when and how to do so, there's probably no better place to start than buying a copy of the book (which includes a CD version) "Dynamic Media: Music, Video, Animation, and the Web in Adobe PDF" by Bob Connolly of pdfPictures.com. It's easily the best available resource on the reasons, tools and processes for creating interactive PDF documents of all kinds, based on many of the author's own case studies conducted with and for a variety of clients.

With the author and publisher's permission, we've posted a complete sample chapter on "Digital Magazines and Rich Media" — all media files are embedded — from the book. Note that the download is a ZIP file so that the PDF won't attempt to open inside a web browser. The chapter is intended to open full-screen in either the latest version of Acrobat or Reader.

You'll never again look at PDFs as print-only documents!

Best Regards
~ Kurt, Editor, AcrobatUsers.com