The Tendo View

PDF documents aren’t just for reading anymore. With Acrobat 8, Adobe’s latest, you can enhance PDF documents with audio and video clips, animated graphics, 3D images that can be manipulated by the user, and forms that can be filled out digitally—all without a live internet connection.

This makes for some pretty cool e-brochures. But the technology isn’t quite ready for mass adoption yet: media-rich PDF files are way too big to be attached to an email, and reading them requires Adobe Reader 5 or later, which many Web users are yet to install.

There are plenty of uses for interactive PDFs in the meantime, such as downloadable catalogues, books, and presentations. Users may not be able to forward these documents, but they’ll retain the same display and print quality as you would expect from a PDF.

To learn more, check out Bob Connolly’s book, Dynamic Media. —Selena Welz, associate managing editor