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Sandy Silva
Inspiring
August 17, 2016
Answered

When creating interactive PDFs in InDesign, buttons are dropping in Acrobat DC/Reader

  • August 17, 2016
  • 2 replies
  • 670 views

Hello Acobat Forum:

I am creating an interactive ebook PDF that I'm having inconsistent issues with. I've spent a considerable amount of time trying to troubleshoot this and I have yet to come up with a solution. I have some navigation setup on a master page that I have to modify on the page level. These buttons have to have an inverse effect, so the rollovers have to swap. The majority of the times these work. It's the 25% of the time that is a problem. And when it is a problem, they do not show up. The final PDF is created from an InDesign book with 5-6 ID documents in it. It has 6 layers with the top most layer non-printable.

This is what I have tried:

  • Made sure all the layers in the ID book are exactly the same.
  • Combined all backgrounds for the navigation and buttons on the same layer.
  • Exported with only the navigation layer turned on. This fixed the problem with the navigation, but once all the other elements were added back the problem came back.
  • Changed the orders of the layers. Same result with the loss of elements.
  • Extracted the page with the dropped buttons and they appear. As soon as I replace the page with this extracted page in the full document they drop.

I'm using the latest version of InDesign (2015.4 Release) and Acrobat DC (2015.017.20053 release).

I have many more of these books, so it is imperative that I find a solution going forward.

Thanks.

Scott Silva

Nashua NH

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer Sandy Silva

After much trial and error trying to figure this issue out, I came up with the solution that fixed my problem. The issue had to do with the naming of the buttons. The majority of the buttons were on master pages. But certain pages had a different look on certain pages. So I was activating the master page button to the page level. Once this happened, it changed the name of the button. Now because I'm using the "Export Book to PDF" feature, when this was done in the other ID files within the book, there was conflicts in the naming of the buttons. Once I renamed the buttons to an unique name, they showed up on the page.

2 replies

S
Sandy SilvaAuthorCorrect answer
Inspiring
August 25, 2016

After much trial and error trying to figure this issue out, I came up with the solution that fixed my problem. The issue had to do with the naming of the buttons. The majority of the buttons were on master pages. But certain pages had a different look on certain pages. So I was activating the master page button to the page level. Once this happened, it changed the name of the button. Now because I'm using the "Export Book to PDF" feature, when this was done in the other ID files within the book, there was conflicts in the naming of the buttons. Once I renamed the buttons to an unique name, they showed up on the page.

try67
Community Expert
try67Community Expert
Community Expert
August 17, 2016

I always recommend to only create form fields in Acrobat. Even InDesign does a pretty lousy job of it, unfortunately.

S
Sandy SilvaAuthor
Inspiring
August 25, 2016

I can only say that I have had good results with creating interactive features in ID and translating to PDF. The only issue that I have not been able to figure out is how to create buttons that work in iBooks on an iPad. I've come up with a work around. I think this may be an Apple problem.

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