PDF Xtra version 3.0 Release Notes

PDF Xtra - Release Notes for Version 3.0.1

What's new in PDF Xtra 3
Improvements in version 3.0.1
Limitations on Mac OS X
Installation
Important note for Macintosh and Windows users
Important note for Director 7 Windows users

What's new in PDF Xtra 3

Now supports Adobe Acrobat/Reader 6.0 on Windows and on Mac OS X, version 10.2.2 +.
On Mac OS X, PDF documents open in a separate Acrobat/Reader 5 or 6 application window,
instead of directly within Director's stage.
There is now a set of FDF behaviors, which allow Director to read from and write to FDF
files that can be interpreted by PDF documents containing form controls.

Improvements in version 3.0.1

In version 3.0.1 of PDF Xtra on Windows, the Acrobat/Reader application is
launched in a different manner, with the result that several related issues
are now fixed and overall performance is improved:

There is now no need to use a dummy PDF sprite to keep the Acrobat/Reader
application open while moving from one PDF sprite to another. The Adobe
application will remain open as long as Director (or a projector) is open.
Because the Acrobat/Reader application is only launched once during the movie
or projector, there is a great improvement in the speed of opening successive
PDF documents.
PDF_LaunchAcrobat can be used to launch a specific version of Adobe
Reader from CD-ROM and this application will remain open throughout
the movie or projector. Therefore there is no need to worry that an installed
version of the Reader will be automatically launched from the user's hard drive.
After calling PDF_LaunchAcrobat, there is no need to wait for any
length of time before displaying a PDF sprite. When the method returns,
the Adobe application is completely loaded and ready to display documents.
At authoring time, starting and stopping a movie containing a PDF sprite is
now quicker.
On Windows, with Adobe Reader 6, the application would hang when a user
clicked the PDF document. This issue is now resolved.
On Mac OS X, the PDF_Open method was not working correctly.
This issue is now resolved.

Limitations on Mac OS X

Because the technology currently available with Adobe Acrobat/Reader
on Mac OS X is not equivalent to that available in previous versions of
Adobe's products on Mac Classic OS, PDF Xtra cannot open PDF documents
as sprites, on Director's stage. Instead PDF documents are opened in a
separate Adobe application window.
The above limitation also means that the PDF documents cannot be
controlled via Lingo methods or Behaviors on Mac OS X. Only the
PDF_Open method and its related behaviors will work in Mac OS X.
In Mac OS X PDF documents will always open with the "Initial View"
settings they had when last saved in Acrobat.
On Mac OS X, PDF Xtra cannot open a PDF document from a URL.

Installation

Make sure Director is not running
Place the PDF Asset Xtra in Director's Xtras folder. This folder is
located in the same location as the Director application (usually
something similar to C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Director 8\Xtras on
Windows or Hard Disk:Applications:Macromedia:Director 8:Xtras on Mac).
Start Director.
Choose File > Preferences > General and make sure Animate in Background is turned on.
Make sure the Insert > Media Element menu contains a new entry named PDF Document.

For Shockwave Auto-download (Windows only):
The latest versions of the Xtra is available on our web site at
http://www.IntegrationNewMedia.com/.
To ensure that your Shockwave movies auto-install the right version of this Xtra,
before creating a Shockwave movie, copy the following text and paste it into the
"Xtrainfo.txt" file (located in the same folder as Director). Everything in square
brackets must be on a single line without line breaks.

;PDFXtra for Director by Integration New Media, Inc. ; http://www.integrationnewmedia.com/ [#nameW32:"pdfasset.x32",#package:"http://www.integrationnewmedia.com/downloads/products/pdfdirector/verisign/3.0.1/pdfasset",#info:"http://www.integrationnewmedia.com/products/pdfdirector"]

Restart Director after changing this text file.

Important note for Macintosh and Windows users

Because PDF Xtra uses Acrobat or Acrobat Reader as a rendering/printing
engine, and due to both legal and technical limitations of Macintosh/Acrobat,
Macintosh/Reader, Windows/Acrobat and Windows/Reader, not all features
are available or supported identically on all platforms. PDF Xtra tries to
standardize those features as much as possible, but some differences remain.
See Appendix 1 of the PDF Xtra User Manual for more information.

Important note for Director 7 Windows users

Due to a bug in Director 7, you must replace the file DirAPI.DLL (usually
located in C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Director 7.0) with the version that
comes with Shockwave 7.0.2 or 7.0.3. Otherwise, projectors may sometimes
fail to execute frame scripts. (This problem seems to be resolved with
Director 8, so no change is necessary if you are authoring in Director 8 +).