Hybrid CD launching PDFS with awful results, please take a peek. :)

[Jessica lucidiastudios]

Hi,

This question has been covered so many times in many forums but all of the answers seem to be inadequate (only covering Windows not Mac as well, or suggestions to buy software), or I'm doing something very wrong with the answers I have found.

I'm doing something extremely simple: Opening a PDF from a projector on Windows and Mac.

I researched how first, and found I could use getURL("mypdf.pdf"); . I did this, but now I burned and tested and I got very unpredictable results. It works well on Windows, but only here and there on the Mac. I burned a hybrid CD with Toast in OS9, but the getURL will not launch the PDFs in OS9 even though it does have Acrobat. However, it works just fine in OSX.

??? I'm very confused by these results. Seems straight forward.

Researching it further to figure out what else I can try, it seems like getURL seems favoured, as well as fscommand with "exec" and applescript. However, I'm very low on CD space and have many PDF files to launch, so having many applescript files to launch them is not an option.

So what I ask the smart people of this forum is, how can I get consistent results in the Mac OSs (not just X) and Windows with getURL. Is getURL adequate? I developed it with MX if that matters... I am not interested in Third Party software, as I know it can be done without.

Thank you, I am running short on time and really appreciate the advice!

Jessica

[flysi]

I'm having the very same issue, and would be interested to hear a fix for this...I know there has to be a way!!!

[Jessica lucidiastudios]

Hi flysi,

I was able to fix the problem. THE REAL PROBLEM ended up not being the way I was linking to the PDFs, but that the machine running the CD did not have the correct version of Acrobat installed. (If they had acrobat but the wrong version, it would give weird un-helpful Acrobat errors.)

I had no time to find a solid Acrobat version detect solution, so i had to merely provide the install files on the cd with a link in the CD to please install Acrobat "by clicking here" if you have problems opening the files. It wasn't ideal, but in time constraints did the job.

I suggest you look at version installs as your problem, not your code. That fixed it for me. But just in case, here is my code:



I exported the movie as Flash 5.
On the buttons that launch PDFs, I put:

on (release){
     getURL("pdfs/c1/650demag1.pdf");
}

The folder "pdfs" is on the root of the cd with "c1" folder nested within it.


This worked on both Mac and PC, OS 9 and OS X.



Good luck. And if you ever happen upon a good way to detect the version of Acrobat on a cross-platform CD, please reply to this thread. I'd love to know how!

Thanks

Jessica