Staff Writers24 October 2011, 6:36 AM
Once you've created a multimedia document with a source application such as PowerPoint (and exported it to PDF), you edit it in Acrobat X Pro to add more features and functions.
The PDF you've exported from PowerPoint looks reasonable and comes with embedded videos and hyperlinks. However, to really turn it into an impressively rich PDF package, you need to edit it within Acrobat X Pro, which will let you tweak its design and also add more functionality.
1. Fire up Acrobat X Pro
1.1: If you haven't already done so, download and install Acrobat X Pro. This is the latest version of Adobe’s PDF creation tool. The trial version is for 30 days, which is plenty of time to create your rich PDF. We suggest Acrobat X Pro because it will let us do some fancier stuff down the track, but Acrobat X can do everything in this tutorial.
2. Open up your exported PDF document
2.1: We created a document in PowerPoint and exported it as a PDF. Open it in Acrobat X Pro and you'll see that everything has been reproduced faithfully in PDF format. However, we have more to add and tweak.
3. Insert the videos
[You'll notice that although the videos that you inserted in the PowerPoint document work in the PDF version of that document, their poster image appears squashed and, when you play them, there's a grey bar on the top and bottom. This is the result of PowerPoint's default sizing of the video box. So we're going to improve the way these videos appear in the PDF document by using Acrobat X to import them instead. So, if you've inserted the videos using PowerPoint, click Tools in Acrobat X Pro to bring up the Tools pane, and then Select Object, in the Content pane.Click on the video to define it, and hit delete.]
3.2: To insert the videos afresh, but this time using Acrobat, click on Multimedia in the Tools pane, and then Video. The image below shows the page with the videos deleted, so we can start again.
3.3: When your cursor turns into cross-hairs, draw a video square where you want to place the video.
3.4: When you release the cross-hair, you get an insert video box. Find your video and insert it - but make sure that the "Snap to content proportions" option is selected, as this ensures the videos appear in the correct proportions on the PDF, not looking squashed or with bars top and bottom.
3.5: When the video is inserted on the page, you may want to make it appear bigger. Click Select Object in the multimedia pane, hold down the Shift key, and drag the video to the size you want. Holding down Shift ensures it retains its proportions.
3.6: Right click on the video to get the properties box. This lets you tweak properties of the video, something you could not do in PowerPoint.
3.7: The Edit Video dialog box lets you set some rules on how the videos play. We selected "The content is clicked" when telling Acrobat when to start playing the video, but the video can just as easily be set to play when the page is opened. We also added a border to the video. In the Controls tab, you can decide whether the video controls appear only when you click on the video.
4. Insert additional PDFs
You can attach external files to your PDF, just like attachments to an email. In this case, we're going to add two relevant documents to our rich PDF, the Ensemble Theatre's program for 2012 and the booking form.
4.1: On the left, find the attachments "clippit" icon.
5. Ensure your rich PDF opens full screen when read by recipient
5.1: When your recipients open your rich PDF in their PDF reader, you want them to see it full screen, just like a big publication that's taken over their display, without unnecessary menus. Right click on the PDF while you have it open in Acrobat X Pro, and select Document Properties. This brings up the properties dialog box. Go to the Initial View tab and click the Open in Full Screen mode option.
And that's it. We've taken a document originally created in PowerPoint and turned it into a multimedia package, with videos, hyperlinks and attached files - all of which can be read by your recipients with a simple PDF reader.
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