Problems with Acrobat Reader, animation, sound, JavaScript etc.

Problems with Acrobat Reader, animation, sound, JavaScript etc.

[Michal Kvasnicka]

Good morning.

I'd like to ask a little off-topic questions but closely related to 
ConTeXt.  I'm sorry I bother you with this, but I need it. My interest 
is not purely academic. I'd like to prepare fully interactive documents 
for my students to work with at home and prepare to my classes.

My questions are like this: Theoretically, PDF can contain sound, movie, 
and JavaScript.
1) In practise, the movie plugin I have found only in the Acrobat Reader 
5.x under Windoze; in Linux and in Adobe Reader 6.0 under Windoze it was 
not present. Can I download it somewhere?
2) What are limits of QuickTime JPeg in the PDF? It worked with a movie 
included in the QuickTime viewer under Windoze, but not with a movie 
from my digital camera (Olympus C730UZ). How can I convert it (for free)?
3) How can I include sounds to my PDF? Does it work with all Readers 
under all platforms, or not? What do I need to install?
4) Some JavaScripts work only under Windoze, not under Linux. Why? How 
can I fix that? Mr. Hagen's clock example, and Mr. Gundlach euro-anim 
example are just two cases.
5) Does Adobe still support Linux? There is a reader version 6.0 for 
Windoze, but only 5.0.9 for Linux.
6) If I want to learn how to use JavaScript in the ConTeXt, what Adobe 
document should I read first? Is somewhere explained to integrate it in 
the ConTeXt (more that the widgets manual)?

Many thanks for any hint. I apologize one more for this slightly 
off-topic questions.
M.K.

Re: Problems with Acrobat Reader, animation, sound, JavaScript etc.

[Patrick Gundlach]

Hello again,


> 6) If I want to learn how to use JavaScript in the ConTeXt, what Adobe
>    document should I read first? Is somewhere explained to integrate
>    it in the ConTeXt (more that the widgets manual)?

If you are looking for an adobe document, search for 

Technical Note #5431
Acrobat JavaScript Scripting Reference


Patrick
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Re: Problems with Acrobat Reader, animation, sound, JavaScript etc.

[Henning Hraban Ramm]

Am 14.09.2004 um 10:41 schrieb Michal Kvasnicka:

> 1) In practise, the movie plugin I have found only in the Acrobat 
> Reader 5.x under Windoze; in Linux and in Adobe Reader 6.0 under 
> Windoze it was not present. Can I download it somewhere?

On MacOS it depends from QuickTime, on Windows I don't know (perhaps 
try QuickTime).
On Linux I don't know either, probably it depends from the installed 
multimedia extensions (isn't there also QuickTime for Linux?).

> 2) What are limits of QuickTime JPeg in the PDF? It worked with a 
> movie included in the QuickTime viewer under Windoze, but not with a 
> movie from my digital camera (Olympus C730UZ). How can I convert it 
> (for free)?

Perhaps look for QuickTime docs at Apple.

> 3) How can I include sounds to my PDF? Does it work with all Readers 
> under all platforms, or not? What do I need to install?

You can't include them, you can only link to them (as like movies); I 
heard you could include media files since PDF 1.5 (Acrobat 6), but 
never tried.
AFAIK all multimedia extensions work only with Acrobat (Reader) and not 
with any other PDF viewer.

> 4) Some JavaScripts work only under Windoze, not under Linux. Why? How 
> can I fix that? Mr. Hagen's clock example, and Mr. Gundlach euro-anim 
> example are just two cases.

Adobe changed Acrobat's JavaScript implementation several times. And it 
has/had different bugs/features in every edition.
Acrobat 4 e.g. had a wrong or undefined state of some variables at 
startup...
Some things are rather strange: I tried to access user's settings (like 
measure unit), but that's not possible, at least in Acrobat 5.

> 5) Does Adobe still support Linux? There is a reader version 6.0 for 
> Windoze, but only 5.0.9 for Linux.

5.0.9 is rather new and fixes some bugs of previous versions (on Mac 
and Win there was only 5.0.5),
but they don't seem to plan an Adobe Reader 6 for Linux.
But there is a Distiller 6 Server for Linux. I guess they see Linux 
mainly as a server platform.

> 6) If I want to learn how to use JavaScript in the ConTeXt, what Adobe 
> document should I read first? Is somewhere explained to integrate it 
> in the ConTeXt (more that the widgets manual)?

There's no document I know of that gives a good introduction into 
JavaScript for Acrobat. You should know JavaScript "for Web" to 
understand Adobe's docs.
I started writing some simple extensions for Acrobat 5 some weeks ago 
and didn't find much what I could use.
Perhaps look at these:
http://partners.adobe.com/asn/acrobat/docs.jsp#javascript
http://partners.adobe.com/asn/webseminars/archive.jsp
http://www.planetpdf.com
http://www.pdfzone.com

(Sorry, I will be off from tomorrow to end of September.)

Grüßlis vom Hraban!
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Re: Problems with Acrobat Reader, animation, sound, JavaScript etc.

[Vit Zyka]

>> 3) How can I include sounds to my PDF? Does it work with all Readers 
>> under all platforms, or not? What do I need to install?
> 
> You can't include them, you can only link to them (as like movies); I 
> heard you could include media files since PDF 1.5 (Acrobat 6), but never 
> tried.

I include sound annotations into the PDF file. It worked even with PDF 
1.4 (AR 5). The macros are described in the Czech TeX Bulletin 2/2002
(http://bulletin.cstug.cz/pdf/bul_022.pdf); unfortunately only in Czech 
language. But macro language is international ;-)
Only article is here
ftp://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/pub/cmp/users/zyka/publ/tex/bul/pdf-3/sound-bul.pdf
All needed files are here
ftp://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/pub/cmp/users/zyka/publ/tex/bul/pdf-3/birds.zip

According to PDF Spec 1.4 (and newer) it should be possible even vith 
wideo annotations. But I was not successful to do it. I suspected that 
annotation plug-in does not fullfil all kind PDF Spec (e.g. Embeded file 
specification, URL - not local specification).

Multimedia support in AR for Win is slowly increasing. For Linux there 
is no support for video/sound annotations yet. I do not use Mac but I 
think the situation is similar to Win.

Vit Zyka


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