My company wants to replace .chm help files for our applications with .pdf files. My job is to find out if this is doable or are we trying to "teach a pig to sing".
The general idea is this.
When a user clicks the Topics selection from the app Help menu, we show the full User Guide. Users navigate to any topic using Bookmarks. Seems easy enough. We test for the presence of the Reader and open it. If no reader exists, send the user to Adobe to get it. (I saw a post about that.)
Some topics have movies to illustrate a task in more detail. I expect this won't be difficult since I can embed href commands in a See the movie link directly on the pdf page.
What I think may be most difficult is to mimic the context help functions of our .chm files. Currently, I can generate ID indexes for my programmers to place in their code. Users press F1 and go to the appropriate topic depending where they are in the app.
I've seen the Dear Lori article about hyperlinking to a page and the OpenPDF Parameters document. Is that the way to go or is there some way for me to easily generate an index similar to .chm?
We have Acrobat 7 Standard. Is this sort of project more easily done in a Pro version and should we be upgrading to Acrobat 8?
Should I be looking at SDKs?
Is this the appropriate forum for my questions.
Thanks for any help you can offer.
The MS Word source document of the PDF contains coding, hidden in fields, that specifies where the named destinations in the PDF should be created when the PDF is generated.
Sadly, my contact who can provide details about the way to set up the Word doc is away on vacation right now. If you need immediate answers on making this technique work, I'd bet you could get that info from HATT--http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/HATT/ (you'll have to sign up)--or elsewhere on the web.
If on the onter hand you can wait a few days, I can get more info for you next week.
--Paul