Friday, January 24, 2014

PDFs that allow toggling between images

Authors sometimes want to their documents to be able to display different images in different settings. For instance, color charts often become indecipherable when printed in gray-scale so a separate version with patterns might be preferable. One simple way to achieve this in PDFs is with Optional Content Groups. See this PDF for a working example. It has a link that a user can click and it will toggle images in the PDF. The file was produced using LyX with the tikz and ocg-p LaTeX packages. This zip contains source materials for those who would like to create your own. OCGs don't use JavaScript so this method should be fairly portable.