How to export an animated .PDF from InDesign?

Question

I am trying to export a .PDF from Adobe InDesign which contains some animated layers in it.

But when I export it as interactive .PDF, the animations are not playing in the .PDF File. It only shows a flat design of the animated .PDF without playing any animations.

When I export it as a .SWF file, the animations play. I need the animations to play when I export it as a .PDF from InDesign.

Is there any other way to create a animated .PDF...? Or please help me out to export a, animated .PDF from an InDesign file.

Here am attaching the dropbox link for the sample files. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/utjbtbgrcjc463e/AADIgUJAgm_NU8szuhromVpIa?dl=0

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

PDF is traditionally not a standard format for animations. The best you can do is save it as an "interactive" PDF (or whatever Adobe is calling it) and embed flash movies inside the PDF.

And the way to do this is select the Adobe PDF (interactive) option from InDesign's Export options.

When you move the PDF, include the animation file and keep the path and file names intact. The animation file does not import into the PDF, it is "linked" to it.

Answer 2

There is a manual solution that can help with the SWF-PDF problem mentioned by bemfesign.

In order to get the SWFs to play in your PDF you have to export each individual page out as a single SWF and then place it back into InDesign.

You should place them on their own SWF layer. After the SWF’s are placed back in the layout you just have to turn the original design layers off and keep the SWF layer on. Now you can export your presentation to PDF and view the animations.

Exporting each page of a 20 page presentation can be really tedious, so you can use a script for it. One option would be Layout Zone script. The SWF Presenter script automatically exports each page to a swf and places them back into your layout on a new layer.

Answer 3

InDesign creates Flash when saving "interactive PDF".

There are some possibilities to do animations within PDF, without Flash. It requires a little bit of (Acrobat) JavaScript programming, and it has to be done in Acrobat.

The methods used for the animations are setTimeOut() / clearTimeOut() and setInterval() / clearInterval() .

setInterval() executes a JavaScript function every specified interval. There are a few code samples in the Acrobat JavaScript documentation (which is part of the Acrobat SDK, downloadable from the Adobe website).

The Flash example could be easily emulated with Acrobat JavaScript.

However, in order to work, you still need a PDF viewer which is smart enough to deal with those Objects. There are a few beyond Adobe Acrobat/Reader on computers, but so far, I am not aware of any one running on tablets.