Acrobat How-To: Working with Layered PDFs

Ted Padova

1

---

PDF files are great, but they are so one-dimensional. Acrobat lets you produce nice flat compact files that contain all the design integrity of your original document, but once you’ve created the PDF, there’s only so much you can do with it. You can’t see alternate views of the same layout, for example, unless you make separate PDFs reflecting each state of the document. And that’s just the way it was.

That is, until Acrobat 6.

As this excerpt from Ted Padova’s “Acrobat 6 PDF Bible” shows, Acrobat 6 lets you work with layered PDF files so that, just as in Photoshop, you can create a rich document in which you can turn layer visibility on and off. That means you can send a client a PDF comp that contains several design ideas. By toggling through the layers, your client can survey options.

Best of all, InDesign CS and Illustrator CS let you create layered files when you export your projects in the PDF format, giving you even more options. (Note that this book was released just prior to the launch of the Adobe Creative Suite, and as such only mentions AutoCAD’s and Visio’s support for layers.)

We’ve posted this excerpt as a PDF file. All you do is click the link “Working with Layers” to open the PDF file in your Web browser. You can also download the PDF to your machine for later viewing.

To open the PDF, you’ll need a full version of Adobe Acrobat (4 or higher) or the Adobe Reader, which you can download here:

.

To learn how to configure your browser for viewing PDF files, see the Adobe Reader tech support page.

Excerpted from “Adobe Acrobat 6 Bible” by Ted Padova. Copyright © 2003 Wiley Publishing. All rights reserved. Reproduced here by permission of the publisher.