Technology & Learning - January 2008 - (Page 33)

of the USA showing the number of electoral votes per state, which I added to my document). YouTube has created a section named Enhance your PDF files by adding “clickable” links using Acrobat’s Link Tool. CitizenTube, which is its political vlog (video blog). I decided to put a link to this site into my interactive PDF. Doing so was a cinch. When I converted my Word document to PDF, the URL for CitizenTube, which I had typed into my Word doc, automatically came over to PDF format as a link. A quick click to test it showed me that it worked! Another way to add a link after your document has been converted to PDF is to use the Link Tool in Acrobat found in the Advanced Editing section of the Tools menu. I used this tool to create links to candidates’ Web sites; this time, however, I used photographs of the candidates instead of text as the “clickable” links. I went back to Word and created a new document with pictures of six of the candidates. I converted that document to a PDF and inserted the links by: 1. Selecting the Link Tool as described above. 2. Dragging a selection rectangle around one of the pictures. 3. Completing the Create Link dialog box, making sure to select Open a web page in the Link Action section. 4. Entering the URL. For audio, I wanted to provide some historical perspective on the presidency, so I downloaded President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address from January 1961, which I found on the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) in its Audio section. (The Internet Archive is a great resource for audio and video.) Adobe Acrobat has a Sound Tool that allows the embedding of audio directly into the PDF file. The problem with the Kennedy speech, though, is its size—14MB! To make it more manageable, I used a sound editor called Audacity, which is free to download at http://audacity .sourceforge.net, editing it down to about 1MB in size. The Sound Tool then embedded it into my PDF. Now to embed a video into my PDF document, using Acrobat’s Movie Tool. Going back to the Internet Archive, I found a video of one of the Democratic debates in 2007. I downloaded it and used Movie Tool to embed it. The problem, as with audio, is that it creates monster files—this one was 26MB! For the straw poll, I used the Forms feature of Acrobat. I was able to create a short poll—three questions each with a drop-down menu For a presidenof choices. The tial election form included an project, John e-mail button F. Kennedy’s that would send 1961 inaugural the results to an speech can be linked for e-mail address I students to specified. hear. Designing the form and entering the choices for the menu was easy, as was e-mailing it. The problem was that the data was e-mailed in XML format. I would have preferred a simple text file. Lastly, I combined the different PDF pages I had created into one document. This is done from Acrobat’s Document menu, choosing Insert Pages. A few general issues with creating an interactive PDF: The straw poll PDF, being an XML document, could not be inserted; it needed to be “attached.” Not a problem, just another step. I did not use the PDF with the embedded movie, as it would have been 26MB. Even with just the audio it is more than 1MB. I am not sure how this file will open with other PDF readers. For example, Macintosh has a built-in PDF reader. Will it recognize the interactive elements? All in all, it was an interesting exercise! Embedding audio and video was as easy as it is in PowerPoint, with the added benefit of actually embedding the video into the PDF— not just creating a link to it. Jeffrey Branzburg is a contributing editor and columnist for T&L. Technology & Learning January 2008 | 33 » How To: http://www.archive.org http://audacity.sourceforge.net http://audacity.sourceforge.net

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Technology & Learning - January 2008 Contents Editor's Desk News & Trends Product Guide Reviews Cover Story: Ten Top Tech Trends ERP Makes a Comeback Tossing Out Textbooks LOY Profile Series Higher Ed How To Bottom Line What's New Emerging Tech

Technology & Learning - January 2008

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