Chapter 3. Adobe’s Trials and Tribulations Toward Rich-Media PDF

If you are planning to produce an interactive PDF that will contain some form of audio, video, or animation, it’s important to understand the limitations of the PDF specifications. Not everyone has Adobe Reader 5 or later installed, which is required to play the basic rich-media file formats available inside a PDF. If you “overbuild” your production, assuming it will work everywhere, you will become frustrated by the complaints you’ll soon receive from people who can’t view your work as you intended.

File format and version incompatibilities, not to mention the “bugs” that slip by Adobe’s quality control department, are found in the PDF format. Many multimedia developers to this day ...

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