techie help please

[malladin]

Hi to any techies out there.

I'm trying to integrate some ideas for 'more interactive' pdfs but don't know how to go about it.

I'm using word to write and layout the work and then distilling it with acrobat 5. I've set up my word document so that it has an interactive menu, but this doesn't carry over to the pdf. Is there any way of doing this?

Also, Word seems to have some bookmarking function, but I can't seem to get this to work. Does anyone no how and can I get these book marks to carry over to the pdf?

BTW, I'm a programmer by trade, so you can throw technical answers at me, but I'm used to UNIX based database programming, so all this windows stuff is new to me.

Thanks in advance,

Ben

 

[jmucchiello]

Word Bookmarks and PDF bookmarks are not the same concept. Word's bookmarks are more like anchors that can be used to create references. You create some text, say the name of a spell, instant death, and then highlight it. Go up to MENU|Insert|Bookmark and give the bookmark a name SPELL_INSTANT_DEATH. Somewhere else in the book you can then say "See the instant death spell on page X" using to reference fields. "See the {REF SPELL_INSTANT_DEATH } spell on page {PAGEREF SPELL_INSTANT_DEATH \MERGEFORMAT *}" Generating a field is done by hitting F9 if you know all of the codes, or by using MENU|Insert|Field... The good thing about using the REF for the spell name is that if you decide to change the name it gets updated throughout your book.

Goto MENU|Insert|Field and hit the help button. There's a ton of info in there about references, stylerefs, pagerefs, etc. For example, I think you have Joe's Book of Enchantment. Word generated the "dictionary" headers in the skills, feats and spells sections. I did this with the styleref field.

Unfortunately, I know nothing about getting this to work in Acrobat. There are some PDFs on the net that explain how to do this using the "PRINT" field but Word is pretty annoying in that it will not create a hotspot smaller than 1 inch by 1 inch. But since you say you are a programmer you should looking into PDF programming on the Adobe website. There is a whitepaper on how to insert PDFMARKs into postscript. Perhaps they contain information you could use to improve Words PRINT field.

Me, I hand edit the PDFMARKs for creating PDF Bookmarks and leave the intratext anchors and hotspots out.