Flash==FUBAR

June 21, 2005 8:41 PM

EmergencyFlashFilter: Opening a .PDF from a Flash file.

Okay.

We need to open a *.PDF file from a Flash presentation. The presentation is on a CD, walks through various aspects of a product, invites the viewer to click [x] to open the pdf, which is on the same CD, in the same folder.

Apparently it's impossible to directly open a pdf from a flash movie. The kludge we tried was having the link call an HTML document, which had the pdf embedded. This works on only one computer, and we can't figure out why.

These CD's need to be done by noon EST tomorrow, which means burning starts latest 9am EST tomorrow. Help us, please! Any and all ideas will be entertained at this point.

posted by dirtynumbangelboy to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Haven't dealt with this problem personally, but maybe it's time to call in the 3rd party tools, or maybe use this free file from flash geek?

All results from google.
posted by elphTeq at 8:55 PM on June 21, 2005

Note: the problem is you can only call *.exe files from flash presentations, to answer your question.
posted by elphTeq at 9:01 PM on June 21, 2005

Erm... I may be missing the point entirely, but I've opened up PDFs from Flash before. In fact, I just tested it by attaching the following action to a button:

on (release) {
getURL("bloated.pdf", "_blank");
}

And it worked perfectly. How are you trying to do things?

The reason that your kludge only works on one computer may have something to do with the way that Acrobat is installed on your other test machines.
posted by blag at 2:20 AM on June 22, 2005

Have you seen this? It will convert your PDF into an actual flash file and you could link it that way. That way you wouldn't have to worry about other people having Acrobat installed to view it.
Example here.
posted by banished at 4:46 AM on June 22, 2005