In the last few days I’ve been playing around some the interactive features of InDesign. I created a few buttons with effects and text and because there’s no way to test these features within InDesign, I attempted to export a PDF with all of the appropriate settings: Acrobat 6 compatibility, Include Interactive Elements and Embed all Multimedia Content.
The result was nothing. No PDF and no error message generated. Generally, I enjoy a good mystery, but this one had me baffled.
After some testing and conferring with a few other folks, it became apparent that the combination of text and the bevel/emboss effect on the button was causing the issue. Sure enough, converting the text to outlines or getting rid of the effect resulting in a successful PDF export.
When I posted this information on the User to User forum, I was directed to a thread that discussed this issue. It turns out that the “fix” for this is toggle the Create Tagged PDF setting to whatever it wasn’t set to. I had it off so I enabled it and sure enough, the PDF exported successfully with text and effects on the button. This reminded me of an older issue with PDFs suffering from what I like to refer to as “bunched text syndrome” where a section of text is all pushed into a small area. The toggle trick usually works to fix that, too.
This article was last modified on December 19, 2021
This article was first published on June 20, 2008
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