need to overlay squares on a PDF that can change colors w/ mouse click.
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Hello all,
I'm a novice illustrator user. I work in an oil refinery. We have technical drawings that show lines (pipes) and valves (triangles). I need to find the right application to take a base technical drawing and add an interactive overlay where I can place squares over the valves to show whether they should be OPEN (green), CLOSED (red) or OPEN/CLOSE (blue). The technical drawings are PDFs. Right now, we're using "PDF Annotator" to color our drawings. This is very time consuming and the color squares must be re-done for every new project. A master drawing with an interactive master overlay that allows quick toggling between colors is what I'm shooting for.
Not sure if this is possible in illustrator. I'd appreciate any suggestions or direction you can provide. Thanks in advance.
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it is not something you can do straight out of illustrator. it is something you could do in Acrobat by turning those elements into buttons that hide/show each other (for instance: green is visible initially, click to hide itself and show red, click red to hide itself and show blue, click once more to hide blue and show green). do you have access to Acrobat Pro/DC?
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or you could do the same with an interactive PDF out of InDesign.
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I'll see if our company has a site license for Acrobat Pro/DC. Thanks !
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here's a quick demo file. click on the square to cycle colours.
each square hides itself and shows the next colour in the sequence. all but green are set to 'hidden'.
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I was making a similar one with Layer Visibilty:
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Mr. Fakkad & Mr. Frederiks,
I need to further clarify my goal - I'd like to toggle between a semi-transparent RED - GREEN - BLUE - BLANK box with a very small medium gray border. The "blank" option allows the box to remain in the master overlay fully transparent so our facility operators know that the valve is not "active" for the specific job we're doing. Looks like the functionality should be there in Acrobat Pro - I think my next step is to acquire a version of Acrobat Pro and start experimenting. Just wanted to clarify what I'm trying to accomplish.
++++++ Thank you SO MUCH for your time ! +++++++
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That (semi transparent overlays) should be possible probably with the way Doug described it.
Remember that the Adobe Acrobat Reader is needed to show that kind of interactivity.
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how about using svg? you could open your pdf in illustrator, add the overlay rectangles, save to svg. Then open the svg in your browser and click to cycle through colors. Javascript needs to be added to do the color cycling.
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