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Exporting to interactive pdf means some show/hide buttons don't work

Explorer ,
Feb 11, 2021 Feb 11, 2021

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Hi everyone,

I'm currently trying to export my indesign document to an interactive pdf. I have a number of show/hide buttons in the doc. All seems to be set up ok, about 3 buttons with show/hide actions to a page which perform actions on other buttons on the page. When I export to interactive pdf, many of the buttons which have actions performed to them don't show up and for some reason the layer order which puts a constant block of colour on top of the page also seems to be reversed. Any help would be really appreciated for the life of me I can't work out why this isn't working. I've already tried resetting the preferences and that's no good.

 

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Import and export , Publish online

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Community Expert ,
Feb 11, 2021 Feb 11, 2021

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You can have a word or words or an image (such as a button shape) as a document hyperlink to say another page in the document, or to an external website. Some devices, for example, iPads, don't have rollover capability – only click – you should avoid multi-action buttons like On Click, On Roll Over, etc. Multi-state object (MSO) don’t work at all in an Interactive PDFs.

Try InDesign's Publish Online instead of PDF.

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Explorer ,
Feb 11, 2021 Feb 11, 2021

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Hi Derek thanks for your response. To be honest I'm not trying to publish this online as part of a website but more trying to produce a document presentation that brings up different images depending on the button you click so I'm not sure I can use publish online as this is for a university, design submission. I know in the past I have got this to work using commands such as on click and it seems to be alright in the preview, something just seems to go wrong in the export, could this possibly be an acobat problem?

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Community Expert ,
Feb 11, 2021 Feb 11, 2021

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What version of InDesign? What operating system? Which PDF reader are you using?

Note that overloading a PDF with that many buttons has been known to produce unreliable results.

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Explorer ,
Feb 11, 2021 Feb 11, 2021

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I've just updated to the latest versions of indesign and acrobat and am still getting the same result. My OS build is 19041.746 and I'm working on a PC if that helps. At the moment I'm exporting a 3 page document with a total of 18 buttons (6 on each page), I've got a number of colleagues who have gotten this to work with more but I understand this is quite a lot

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Community Expert ,
Feb 11, 2021 Feb 11, 2021

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Again, it's never been very reliable in my experience and I'd rethink the entire project if I were you.

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Advisor ,
Feb 11, 2021 Feb 11, 2021

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Agree with other comments here, and it's hard to understand what you want, and what's going on, without actually seeing the file. Can you post the .indd file? Also, does the file work when published via Publish Online? (which Derek mentioned) Keep in mind that Publish Online documents can be viewed in any browser, so it might be better for your submission to the university than a PDF. Once the file is working properly, of course. 🙂

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Explorer ,
Feb 12, 2021 Feb 12, 2021

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Unfortunately I have to submit as a pdf for admin reasons and would rather not post it online if possible just because a lot of work has gone into it and I'm a bit paranoid. I think I've managed to fix it though by copying and pasting everything into a new indesign doc, there's still a few odd things coming out in terms of layer order but that's fixable. Thanks for the suggestions everyone

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Community Expert ,
Feb 22, 2021 Feb 22, 2021

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If this is something you'll be doing often going forward, it could be worth your time and effort to learn the Javascript commands for hidden and visible. I have produced interactive forms* with many more show/hide dependencies than 18 and they work 100% (in Acrobat and Reader) because they don't rely on InDesign-built show/hide functions. Building the interactivity in Acrobat with Javascript is considerably more relaiable, and not difficult once you get how it works.

 

*Example here: https://www.lutron.com/TechnicalDocumentLibrary/Architectural_seeTouch_QS_revA.pdf

 

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Explorer ,
Mar 25, 2021 Mar 25, 2021

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So sorry about the late reply on this, it's been a crazy month or so! I will definitely look into that after this projectwhen I have a little more time. Thank you everyone for all your help on this, I really appreciate it

 

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New Here ,
Jun 23, 2021 Jun 23, 2021

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I have same issue with my PDF, the show/hide buttons works till 2 layers, after that it's not working...

I attached my PDF for reference, when you selest first two menu items, the buttons were dispalyed, but it's not working for the remaing menu items...

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