Let me start by saying I’m not a frickin imbecile. I know how this is all supposed to work. It ain’t hard. I’m trying to create a simple slideshow type deal with a navbar on the side. In other words, you click on navbar button for Photo 1, photo one should come up. You click Photo 2, photo two appears…etc. Basic. However, InDesign CC just will NOT render properly when I export to Acrobat. Sometimes I get half the buttons showing and the other buttons gone. The ones that show seem to work the way they’re supposed to. I delete everything and start from scratch, same problem. Could it be that my using object styles to handle the text frames is causing conflict? I thought it also might be because I had the navbar buttons and the photos in separate folders, but when I lump it all together, still I get the problem.
Here’s what I do. I place a montage of photos, group them, turn each of them into buttons. That parts done. Now onto the navbar buttons. I create a text frame (with Auto Size enabled) and create two paragraph styles, one for the normal state, one for the rollover, which is nothing more than a color change. I make an object style out of these and use step and repeat to create as many soon-to-be-buttons as I need and assign them the normal state object style to start.
Then I turn each object-styled text frame into a button. Give the button a name. And do the Show-Hide thing in the Click state (which I’m not even certain I need to check the box in there to make this work, I just do so to be on the safe side). I enable an eyeball for the photo I want to use, click the eyeball with a line through it for the ones I don’t want to show, and leave the rest of the things set with the x through the check box. I have also made sure all the photos (now turned into buttons) are hidden until engaged (except the first one corresponding to the first navbar button)… I check and check again and again and again to see if I’ve missed something, something minute, and it all seems in order, but InDesign just flatly refuses to cooperate.
If I was General George S. Patton and this was a soldier, I’d have him summarily shot.
Could this just be some cheesy programming in InDesign? I realize the whole interactive PDF functionality now available within the works of InDesign (so we don’t have to suffer through Acrobats clunkiness) is relatively new, so I suspect some cruddy programming is afoot? Any suggestions would be welcome. I spent a huge amount of time creating templates for a project, never suspecting the simplest of things would be standing in the way of achieving success.
Thanks