Hello Nick, I have done some editing on PDF files I received from various sources over the years, using pstoedit to convert the PDF to fig format, and then do the editing in Xfig. However, this would not allow you to do the interactive tricks directly.
On Thu, 6 Nov 2003, Nick Rout wrote: [ Some interactive graphics, some clickable buttons ] > I wanted to do it with pdf's cos that is how linz supply the title > search info. Plus, it is a format equally well supported on a variety of platforms, and it gives you the best cross-platform repeatability of the look, as well for screen as for hardcopy. > does anyone know if this is possible? Relevance to linux? - I'll prefer > to do it in linux of course ! Yes, this should be possible, as far as PDF and its support for interactive features, and also Acrobat Reader's support for these, are concerned. PDF supports ECMA script (mostly sold as JavaScript), but I am not sure which OSS packages would give you reasonable editing & export functionality. You might want to take a look at the Context package, which is a macro package for TeX like LaTeX is one, but Context was made to create interactive teaching and learning material, mostly questionnaires where you answer questions by clicking one of the multiple choice answers, or by entering a number, and depending on your answer it will continue with one page or the other. There should be a calculator written in Context on the web page... it works all right in Acrobat Reader for Linux. I would also check the TeX packages tailored for creating presentations, like SliTeX, and whatever their names are. Framemaker could possibly cover your requirements easily, but it's not OSS. Is there any way of exporting an Openoffice presentation document to PDF, _and_ maintain the interactive elements? I am not aware of any... but there might be something. If not, a filter could be implemented. With the XML-based internal format of Openoffice, further processing of the presentation files should not be too hard. One relatively straightforward, but really rough approach would be to create multiple copies of the same page, depending on how many different looks a page can have, and just move between them using hyperlinks. Say, you would have one page "map with blue lines", one "map without blue, but with green lines", one "map with green and blue lines", etc. If you put hyperlinks pointing to the other pages on each page, you can do it in LaTeX, you get the functionality you want, but at the expense of a significantly blown-up PDF file size, and no beauty score at all for the style. Have you googled for something like "pdf interactive graphics linux"? If you get too much, try to add some terms like XML, export ... Kind regards, Helmut Walle. +----------------+ | Helmut Walle | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | 03 - 388 39 54 | +----------------+
