How to get rid of the white box behind your PDF animation

How many of you have been completely peeved by the ugly, white box behind your animated PDF? When exporting your Adobe InDesign CS5 file to an Adobe PDF (Interactive) file, there is a bug. This bug creates a white box behind your animation. This ugly, white box makes your document look like crap when viewing it in Acrobat. There is nothing you can do about it in InDesign, or is there?

The good news is that there is a fix! There is a free script available for download SWFpresenter.fxbin. In this article, I am going to tell you how to install and apply this script to your InDesign CS5 document so that your interactive PDF will view pristinely.

Follow these steps to solve your problem.

1) Download the script from the above link and place it on your desktop (for ease in location later).

2) Open your InDesign CS5 document.

3) Within the CS5 ID software, go to Windows-->Utilities-->Scripts.

4) Right click the User folder and select Reveal in Finder. This action will launch your browser.

5) In the browser, navigate to the desktop and select the file you downloaded, SWFpresenter.fxbin.

6) Click Open.

The script is now installed in your InDesign CS5 library for use.

To apply the script to your interactive document, follow these steps:

1) Make a folder to hold all of your SWF files for that document. I like to create this folder in the same location as the ID file itself. I name mine SWF for ease in location.

2) Go to File-->Export

3) In the options box, select the following settings and options:

• Export = all pages
• Scale = 100%
• Background = Transparent
• Interactive and Media = Include all

4) Click ok. This automatically creates a new layer in your layers panel called "swf.presenter"

5) Now export your interactive pdf. Go to File-->Export-->Adobe pdf (interactive)

6) Select the following options in your dialog box:

• Pages = All
• View after exporting

7) Click ok.

This will automatically launch your interactive PDF in Acrobat for viewing. Congratulations, you are now rid of that hideous, ugly, troublesome, white box behind your PDF animation. Now every one of your animations on that document will look pristine!