Adobe Acrobat 7 TIPS and TRICKS THE 100150 BEST [Electronic resources]

Chapter TWELVE. Controlling Documents with Links and Buttons

Acrobat 7 Professional provides several tools for linking labels to content, including bookmarks, links, and buttons. Learn about bookmarks in Chapter 13.

A PDF, with all its features, more closely resembles a Web site than an ordinary printed document. Would you go to a Web site and scroll through innumerable pages of content to find information? Would you be comfortable using a Web site that didn't have some sort of navigational structure? Of course not! You expect a Web site to come complete with a system of links that allows you to click through the site to find information.

Although people tend to use Acrobat just to convert documents to the PDF format so they can be shared, once you have converted your masterpiece, you can easily add links of different types or buttons to guide readers through your document.

In this collection of tips, you'll see how links and buttons work. You'll learn how you can use them to perform a variety of actions, from jumping to another page in a document, to opening a document, to playing a movie clip.

A button, as anyone who has ever visited a Web site knows (and who hasn't?), can have different appearances and perform different types of actions. A button can, for example, appear one way when it is static, and then look different in response to a mouse action, such as the movement of the pointer over the button, and then look different again in response to a button click. Similarly, a button can initiate different actions in response to different mouse movements.

We'll look at many of the available types of interactivity in this group of tips (we looked at some of the forms actions in Chapter 8, and we'll check out ways to make a PDF containing multimedia interactive in Chapter 16). Whether you want to link different views in a document or add buttons to open other documents, you've come to the right place.