Animated PDFs

Since I first began learning Flash I’ve been interested in the possibility of inserting animation into PDF documents. This interest reflects my profession—I’m a freelance writer and illustrator, mostly for high-tech clients. It also reflects my interest in how “written” communications are changing. I think it’s likely that over the next few years many types of documents (e.g., newsletters, whitepapers, corporate backgrounders) will incorporate active multimedia.
There are two aspects of this situation I find particularly interesting:

1. 
   Information resolution. Edward Tufte, a pioneer in information visualization, talks about how a well-designed illustration or page can be information dense—that is, it communicates a lot in a small space. Animation greatly increases the potential for creating high-resolution documents. A simple example would be a customer success story where you have a line graph showing improvement. In the space that a static document requires for one such graphic, you could successively show or simultaneously compare the results of several customers. That’s not very exciting, but the possibilities for more creative content are open-ended.
2. Bridge documents. Many younger people coming into the workforce never click on PDFs; they prefer to consume information in video or audio form. In contrast, many people 35 and older have little patience for these linear media. I, for example, rarely click on video or audio since I don’t like having to sit through a linear stream when I don’t know what it contains. A lot of folks like me find text a more efficient medium since we have highly developed skills for scanning it and quickly pulling out just what’s important. Animated PDFs could serve as a bridge for text-oriented people, enabling us to selectively consume multimedia and become accustomed to it.

So how does the potential for animated PDFs compare with today’s reality? Over the past couple of weeks, as the opportunity to do a project for a client arose, I set out to explore the state of current capabilities. Here is what I found out:

• PDFs currently support only AS2. I hadn’t realized this, but Adobe didn’t update Acrobat along with the other CS3 applications. The next version of Acrobat, which should be out around the end of the year, will likely support AS3 and, one would hope, eliminate some of the limitations, described below.
• One major limitation and disappointment for me was that embedded animations are not visually seamless. Even if you use the same background color for your Flash movie and your text page, there is a hairline frame around the movie. And when you activate the movie, it often flashes before it plays. (This is probably because it is swapping out the still “poster” image you’ve chosen for the actual movie. Neither I nor the Adobe tech support person I spoke with was able to get the “retrieve poster from movie” option to work.)
• Movies can’t currently be layered over text, and I’m not sure they can be placed on multiple layers even if they don’t overlap with anything. That’s too bad because the Acrobat layer views offer a lot of high-resolution opportunity. For example, you can easily create a bilingual document by putting the languages on different layers and then providing the user with a button or link for choosing the version they want. If you could put layer movies that way, you could increase the density of a single page quite a bit. (Incidentally, while Acrobat lets you create buttons and links to display one or more layers—in the same way that you can use them to go to display a different page or even zoom into a place on a page—you must create the layers first in InDesign then export the InDesign document as a PDF.)
  

There’s not much useful information about this on the web. Most of what’s available is old (pre-CS3 or even pre-CS2). The best resources I found are books: Padova/Adobe Acrobat 8 PDF Bible and Kvern & Blatner/Real World InDesign CS3: Industrial-Strength Page Layout Techniques.