mouse over pop up contextual text in PDF - - possible? - Adobe Acrobat

Is it possible to make text appear when one mouse overs part of a page in a PDF document?

What I have in mind is making a simple page and as the reader puts a mouse over an image or section of image or text that a short piece of contextual text will pop up

For html documents I would include text with a link but this is limited in that IE refuses to display these things

I am assuming that one starts with a document in indesign although I suppose go live would also be worth considering

appreciate any pointers

gav

You can always draw a text field (in Acrobat) over the area and add a tooltip.

did a test and that seems to work - thanks

An issue here - not sure if there is a solution

I created the above said pop ups with a few sentences and made sure there were not end of line characters (nothing shows up beyond the first end of line char) and in windows it word wrapped nicely - but on the macs where I tested it - there was no word wrap at all - so the length of text is limited by the width of the screen.

any way round that ?

...and - one viewer with a couple of macs claims that he cannot see the images beneath the text boxes - that the text boxes are opaque and cover the image below

any ideas what causes this ?

thx

gav

This method is broadly successful but unfortunately is not supported by Safari on the less than latest OSX's if they are using the native Mac PDF rendereing engines - they just see opaque white boxes

is there anything one can embed in a PDF that would compensate

....I thought no, but I guess there may be html code that would ascertain if the OS browser combo user should be redirected to a file without these fields

appreciat any further ideas

gav

Make sure to use Acrobat (reader) to open the pdf on the MAc and not the OS X preview application.

Depending on how many of these pop-ups you need, you could use the much more elaborate method of 'showing and hiding image buttons' IF this displays better.

appreciate to know what is this other more elaborate method is ?

typically I would want up to about 10 images on a page and when you mouse over each one I would love to be able to write up to say 3 sentences

the method I did use can look 'cheap' in that one can type in stuff over the pictures at the present time - not a problem on a personal level but if this is to be a prestige business promo document some might get irritated wondering what that is all about

and also the reader does give one a warning about not being able to save form data and the viewer is already getting confused about what they are expected to do with a document I want them just to browse

thanks if you have any ideas

gav

Gavin,
It's a detailed topic in the Acrobat Help (for 7Pro anyway). Just search for 'image buttons'.
It seems a little convoluted until you've done a few...but worth the effort for a polished result. It gets really difficult if you need too many large pop-ups on a page, as they all become visible while creating the links, and can overlap and obscure each other. Nice feature is that even if your image is only text it scales to whatever size of pop-up you draw.