Dean's Director FAQ - PDFs
Another FAQ exists at
MediaMacros, which
is new and extensive.
PDFs
Question: How can I use PDFs with Director?
Answer:
First you need to decide if you want the PDF inside Director or just to
launch Acrobat outside of your Director movie.
To launch Acrobat Externally:
1. Use an Xtra like Buddy API to find
the path to Acrobat and open the file. The following behavior will open
filename.pdf is Acrobat (assuming it is the program the computer has associated
with the pdf):
on mouseup me
baOpenFile(
the moviePath & "filename.pdf" , "maximised" )
end
2. If you know the full path to Acrobat you can use the Lingo "open" command
to launch the program. See Macromedia's
technote "Launching or opening an application with Lingo".
Thanks to Adobe's new licensing agreement you can put a full running version
of Acrobat directly on your CD.
3. You could open the pdf in a browser window by using gotoNetPage"FileName.pdf".
The browser will need to have the Acrobat plugin installed.
To include the PDF inside Director:
1. Use an Xtra like the PDF
Xtra. or the newwer Impressario
Xtra.
2. Use an ActiveX control to embed the PDF document into the stage. Only
works on Windows. Macromedia have a technote on this subject: "Viewing
PDF documents directly on the stage using Adobe's ActiveX control"
3. Use an Xtra that embeds a browser into the stage, like the WebXra,
requires the Acrobat plugin to be installed for the browser.