Animated GIF in interactive PDF

Forum|Forum|14 years ago
December 13, 2011
5 replies
270870 views

Hi all,

I was wondering if someone could help me with the following;

I want to add some animated GIF images to my interactive PDF document in InDesign (also with hyperlinks and video's)

How do I need to save the document, in order to see an animation (instead of just the first layer, without any animation..)

Thank you in advance!

Correct answer Jongware

The PDF format does not support animated GIF: http://forums.adobe.com/message/4056490

brente206

Participating Frequently

Place a still representation of your animation and link to a hosted file on the web. Use a little play icon ( > ) on your images to indicate there's more to discover.

BobLevine

Community Expert

Or don't use PDF.

It's okay to say no to interactive PDF | BobLevine.us

anthonym97034036

New Participant

I'm a bit late to this thread but have seen it still is unanswered so hopefully this work around i've used will help.

While as far as I am aware you can't add animated GIFs to a PDF what you can do is export your GIFs and then convert them to a movie file (.Mp4, .mov) etc which then can be placed into the PDF

I found this conversion site to be very helpful & it's also free - upload the GIF and then you can choose what output type you want

Convert video to MP4 - GIF to MP4 - CloudConvert

I would echo what @javierg28549661 had said though, in that this can mean very large file sizes, but it really depends on what the content is.

Hope this helps

Willi Adelberger

Community Expert

No, don't do it. It will cause problems When you add a movie to a PDF you have to have Flash installed. Only with Acrobat 9 and X it was included into Acrobat. Since XI and DC it is not included and anyone who uses iOS or Android cannot view it and anyone who uses a computer but not Acrobat is not able to see it, it might even stop opening your file. It is a very bad idea to use any GIF in a PDF.

anthonym97034036

New Participant

Great link article Bob, thanks for sharing that

Derek Cross

Community Expert

You can create documents with animations in InDesign CC2015 and export it as a Fixed Layout ePub.

J

javierg28549661

New Participant

Ever wondered why adobe never allowed animated gifs in their pdf documents?
I don’t know, but a very credible hypothesis is that they think of animated gifs as “1980s technology”. Instead, their “brilliant” work-around is to let people add movie players to their pdf documents (Flash files for example).
The results of this “brilliant” piece of thought are:

– A 10 page document with 5 small animations could be as large as 100 MB or more (instead of less than 1 MB using animated gifs).
– Many devices will not be able to run the animations.
– Devices which would normally run animations can’t do so because… the file is too large!! lol.

The irony of all this is that Adobe no longer wants to support flash. Why? is it because there is a technology which can replace flash? well… er… no, not really. HTML 5 will take at least another decade to reach the level of flash. Why then? well… rumour has it that it’s mainly because Steve Jobs said that “Flash sux”, and you know who the best paying customers of adobe are, right? Yeap, apple users.

Animated gifs are perfect for educational documents where a small animation can make life so much easier for a student to understand a concept or idea (not to mention how much more interesting it is to read some documents which include animations).

When a simple html file can offer a better educational experience than a pdf file, you should bloody know that you’ve done something wrong!