Most of my time is spent enhancing PDF files into interactive documents, complete with links, bookmarks, buttons and actions. These kinds of enhancements entice your viewing audience to actually read your documents.
Long PDF files are enhanced with bookmarks, allowing the reader to find specific chapters or topics quickly. PDF files that are released for review are annotated with electronic comments. The next trick is to somehow get your audience to use these features.
I have found that the most irresistible feature for customers is a button. You hope folks will click on your bookmarks, but if you include a button, they WILL click it!
PDF buttons are designed with either the Button Tool on the Advanced Editing Toolbar, or the same tool in the Forms Creation Interface. The Actions tab on the Button Properties dialog box is where the button is 'taught' what to do.
An action is triggered by any mouse event. What many people don't realize, I am finding, is that any mouse event can actually trigger multiple actions.
I designed a form for a client and thought it might be interesting to have the buttons not only perform their expected function, but to sound an audible click for both the mouse down and mouse up states. You can see in the picture below how this is done. When the mouse button is down, it plays click.wav. When the mouse button is released (mouse up), it plays clack.wav AND executes the menu item:File>Print.
The sounds are very subtle, but the client loves it, and it compels the audience to be more interactive with the documents. That client never let me give him another form WITHOUT the noisy buttons.
The sky's the limit with stacking actions. Simply revisit the Add button to include yet another action.
Click, Clack! Nice.
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