Is it better to use Adobe Acrobat or InDesign for interactive PDF layers?

Question

There is an interactive PDF product my workplace has done for years, built with Adobe Acrobat. The end result includes buttons to navigate between pages, go back to the title page, etc. However the biggest component of this product is 1 page that contains an "interactive" infographic. We use Acrobat to take a various vector layers stacked on top of one another and manage the layers in a specific order/position on the page. So when the end user opens the finished product and goes to the page with the infographic, they'd expand all layers in the PDF reader, and toggle whatever components of the infographic on/off to their liking.

I know Adobe InDesign has interactive PDF tools to build buttons that can navigate between pages, do hyperlinks etc, but I'm primarily wondering about the interactive infographic page. The end user wouldn't be clicking on the infographic to toggle layers, we'd want them to see all the possible layers and use the PDF reader siderbar to toggle layers on/off.

Does InDesign have a way to manage PDF layers stacked on top of one another the way Acrobat does? I'd like to move this product to InDesign instead of Acrobat but it's the only part of the product I'm not certain how to build in InDesign. What do you think?

Answer 1

InDesign is the perfect program to create all kinds of publications, and while it offers a significant number of options in the interactivity section, perhaps some are better to do from Acrobat.

You can create most of the possible interactive job in InDesign and the rest in Acrobat.

InDesign Secrets explain that it is not possible to change the visibility of layers from the program itself, but the tutorial is about InDesign CS5. I just checked in InDesign 2018 and there is also no option to visualize/hide layers in the interactivity panel.

Since layer visibility isn’t a button Action we can set in InDesign, we’ll next export our document to create an interactive PDF file