- The Race to Rich-Media Domination
- Adobe Steps into the Interactive Arena
- Adobe's Mission: One Application for Print and Interactivity
- Adobe Redefines the Office Workflow
- Page-Based vs. Timeline Formats
- The Cost of Playback
- Adobe Introduces Reader 5.1
- Multimedia Moves to the Web Page
- Acrobat's Best Friend: Adobe InDesign
- InDesign Gets Interactive
- A Polarized New-Media Industry
- Rich-Media PDF and Disruptive Technologies
- Building a Team That Includes Everyone
- Reader 8 (PDF 1.7)
- Commenting and Forms
- Attached Files
- Viewing Interactive 3D Rich Media
- Adobe and Macromedia
Page-Based vs. Timeline Formats
One big complaint about PDF that multimedia developers had (and still do to this day) was that Adobe uses a page-based interactive format, where Director (and its later incarnation called Flash) uses a timeline "cell-based" format (FIGURE 3-2).
Figure 3-2 Adobe PDF uses a page-based interactive format (above). Macromedia Director and Flash use a timeline "cell-based" format (below)
The majority of digital video editing and multimedia authoring applications are based on timelines where you move the playback head to a cell or frame to program interactivity for a particular scene. When these timeline-based developers opened Acrobat to see how the interactive part worked, they were quite perplexed because of the nontraditional programming methods for each PDF page.
Although it is fairly easy to work with once you get used to the pull-down menus and pop-up windows with check boxes, the page-based model was radically different from what developers were used to doing in Director.