SWF Embedded in InDesign PDF Problem Solved (mostly)

David Blatner

1

One of the most vexing problems with interactive PDFs appears to have been (mostly) solved. As Sandee Cohen reported some time ago, when you import a SWF file into InDesign, then export the file as a PDF (with the Interactive Elements checkbox turned on in the Export PDF dialog box), the PDF typically freezes in Acrobat for Mac (you just see a “buffering” messsage). On Windows it appears to work just fine, but Mac users have been out of luck.

I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent trying to figure this problem out. Sure, we discovered that InDesign is writing the SWF as the “wrong” kind of layer (in quotes because it’s debatable), but even then Acrobat should have been able to play it. No one at Apple or Adobe seemed to know what the bug was. However, in an internal memo, someone at Adobe recently noted that it may be a WebKit problem.

WebKit? Why on earth would Apple’s HTML rendering tool have anything to do with how SWF plays inside Acrobat. I can’t answer that, but that comment was just the clue we needed to put 2+2 together and find the solution: Upgrade to Safari 4. (Which currently requires Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.7 or Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.11. Curiously, I believe the Webkit Nightly builds will work in 10.5.6… perhaps even earlier. Wacky.)

Safari 4 includes a newer version of WebKit, and several people (including Sandee, Jose Ramos, and Jean-Claude Tremblay… thanks folks!) have independently confirmed that installing it makes interactive PDFs with SWF files in them work in Mac Acrobat 9.

That said, I put “mostly” in the title because I still don’t really consider this fixed. InDesign needs to write the SWF file into the Rich Media layer when exporting PDF files, so that Acrobat 9 can play the SWF files natively. (FlashPlayer is included in Acrobat 9, but apparently it can’t currently play the SWF files inside InDesign’s PDFs. If InDesign wrote the PDF differently, then we never would have had this problem.)