I can’t tell you what a long and sad story this is. But bear with me.
Billions of years ago, (around the time of Acrobat 5) I wrote a book with two friends all about the interactive features in Acrobat PDF files.
One of the coolest things we demonstrated was how you could add SWF movies from Flash into the PDF files.
This was known as the Rennaissance period for interactive PDF documents.
Sometime later the Dark Ages descended onto the world of interactive PDF.
Something bad happened that caused a version of QuickTime to no longer properly handle running SWF files in PDF documents. (What was not widely known at the time was that on the Mac, all movies, sounds, and SWF files were handled by the QuickTime application.)
Unfortunately both Apple and Adobe began to play a game of “tag, you’re it” blaming each other for the problem. Adobe would do something to fix how SWFs would play and then Apple would do something else to destroy it. Over the years, most of us simply gave up trying to add SWFs to PDF documents.
Then, this year, with the release of CS4, it looked like a new dawn was shining down on SWF files. After all, Acrobat 9 was importing SWF files without any problems.
So it was with great astonishment that I found that while it was totally possible to add an SWF to an ID file for export as a PDF, that same PDF would not play the SWF. On the Macintosh the command to play the SWF would hang at the “Buffering” stage.
But SWFs added directly to the PDF play perfectly. What was going on?
Turns out the answer is simple, but deceptive.
When you add an SWF to a PDF in Acrobat 9 (PDF 1.7) you add the animation as a new annotation type, “Rich Media”, which can
utilize Acrobat’s built-in Flash Player to play SWF content. This is good!
But InDesign CS4 only exports to PDF 1.3 – 1.6. This means that in the PDF’s that InDesign produces, the SWF is contained within the annotation type “Screen”. And like the SWFs placed in previous versions, Acrobat 8/9 uses QuickTime to play SWFs on this type of annotation. And on the Mac, that means there is a problem playing those SWFs within the PDF. (This is also the reason why you can’t choose a poster frame from the SWF in InDesign.)
So, what’s the answer?
Simple, if you want an SWF to play within a PDF file, add it in the PDF, not the InDesign file. Not only will it play correctly, but you’ll have the added feature of choosing the poster frame for the SWF. This is also helpful for Windows users who might be fooled into adding SWF movies in their InDesign files. They won’t have any problem playing the movie in the PDF, but their Mac friends will.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on December 28, 2008
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