How can I hide and reveal text in acrobat, so that as e.g. a teacher, one can
- produce pdf on a topic
- hide certain items of text in the pdf
- students can then read the pdf, try to work out the answer, then click somewhere to reveal the hidden text & therefore check if they were correct
I have been searching on forums for the answer to this for ages. It seems like one solution might be to use layers & buttons. I have looked at various links to somehow do this, but I was not able to follow along. So if someone can post simple instructions for this or alternative method I would be very grateful.
Example of what I would like to do (note: I have used 'draw rectangle in pdf' to hide the text underneath & thus illustrate what I would like to do)
I am using Adobe Acrobat Pro XI
Best Answer
This can be done with form fields. You can choose what fits your needs, but one example is below.
**********Edited based on comment
You could set up the text fields and buttons on the first page and duplicate them to the other pages. Select the form elements on the first page, right click, and select Duplicate Across Pages. On other pages you would then adjust the sizing of the boxes as needed.
What to do next depends on your needs. Form elements with the same name perform the same action. If you just duplicate the fields across all pages, hovering over the first button on one page hides the field below on all pages. If your students only view one page at a time and cannot see the other pages (more than one page would be visible when using continuous scrolling or two pages per screen, etc.) you could stop here. I'd recommend spending the time to make sure each text field and each button have a unique name. The name would not have to be special, just something that makes sense to you logically.
Because form elements can be copied from one pdf to another, your efforts could benefit other similar documents. Also, think of fields as floating above your text. If you need to change the text below in your source file, you can create a pdf of the page(s) and use the replace pages feature to replace the text while still keeping the form elements in place.