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Developing with PDF
book

Developing with PDF

by Leonard Rosenthol
October 2013
Intermediate to advanced
215 pages
4h 29m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Developing with PDF

Chapter 10. Optional Content

Optional content is a feature of PDF that allows specific graphic objects and/or annotations to be visible only when a certain set of criteria is met. These criteria can be specified by the author of the content—for example, that this content should only appear on the screen and never print—or can be specified by the user via some interaction with the viewer. This feature is useful for a variety of things, ranging from CAD drawings to maps to multilanguage documents and more.

Optional Content Groups

The basic building block for defining optional content is the optional content group (OCG), which is a dictionary that consists of the required Type (which is always OCG), the required Name of the group (which may be displayed by a viewer), and the Usage key, which declares how the group is to be used.

Content State

A group is assigned a state, which is either ON or OFF. States may be set automatically by the viewer (based on the Usage), programmatically, or through the viewer’s user interface. Content belonging to a group is visible when the group is ON and invisible when it is OFF.

Note

Content may belong to multiple groups, which may have conflicting states.

Usage

Content is usually grouped together because it shares some common feature. It may be the language of the content, or that it is only for use on screen. The optional content usage dictionary, which is the value of the Usage key in the optional content group dictionary, declares the commonality (see

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449327903Errata Page