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Interactive PDFs

Lesson 15 from: Creating Interactive PDFs

Jason Hoppe

Interactive PDFs

Lesson 15 from: Creating Interactive PDFs

Jason Hoppe

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Lesson Info

15. Interactive PDFs

Next Lesson: Multimedia PDFs

Lesson Info

Interactive PDFs

Interactive pdf so what you can do with pdf so this is the wild factor here these are the things that make everybody look at your pds and say wow is that a pdf and you'd be like yes and I can do that it will be even more impressed so when we're dealing with an interactive pdf here what we have is a pdf that can look kind of like a web page so in order to go and start working with interactive content here what we're going to do is going to our tools panel and we're going to go to content and we have right here and our edit interactive object well what could that be? I don't know let's just start randomly pressing buttons and find out what we can do so interactive pdf here if you want to go in and create a link to a page or you are l navigate through things, click on buttons to go someplace place sounds plays video in bed flash files you could do this all within a pdf then in the second half of this afternoon we're going to go into acrobat or in design and show you how to do that as well...

two buttons rollovers, pop ups things I can't fantastic so what I mean to start off with is creating different types of links within a pdf links are pretty easy to use and create and sure enough, I have a pdf file here that happens to be the handout of interactive. Pdf. So what better thing to do then actually go in and create an interactive pdf that is, in fact interactive to create any sort of link, click on our links button and the tools section of content, and we can create a link to anything anywhere from anything in our file. So say I go and I want to put a link around acrobat ten I want to link this to adobes website, so if I click on acrobat ten right, here you go and they're launched adobe website or send an email to somebody, whatever it may be, once I draw the link around what I want to link up comes my create it link window. What type of link do I wanna have? So I want to have a visible rectangle around there or an invisible one if it's a visible rectangle that will answer the question yesterday, when somebody says, when I create links, why is there a black box around everything? Well, that black box is a visible rectangle, it is a solid line and it is you guessed it black, you don't want that create an invisible rectangle around the whole thing, then you don't have that, what is this link going to do? When you click on this link I can go to a page view which allows me to go to a different page in the document there zoom inner zoom out I can open a file I can open a web page or it can create a custom link so if I go to a page view and I clicked next it will ask me. Okay how do I want to go and use this page view? Well, this is a very rudimentary way of going in and creating a link within a pdf. So if I want to bring this to some sort of link within the pdf here this is all that you do. Don't go ahead and cancel this out here. It's has used the scroll bars, mouse and zoom tools to select a target view than press settling to create the link destination in translation is go all around. Move this all away scroll through your document here, make your page look like you wanted to look like zoom in, zoom out, put it where you want to in the page and how you see it on screen is exactly the way the link is going to be set. Once you get to that page that page view that size orientation, then you choose set the link and you've just created a link to that page. Could it get any more simple no, but let's find out if that really worked. So when you're testing out all your links here all you do is going to go to your hand tool click on your hand tool and when they hover over this right here you'll see my hand tool goes from five fingers toe one finger that chose that I the link right there I click on this section what just happened? It did exactly what I wanted it to dio I had said it so that when I click here it went to this page there's my link isn't that the coolest thing ever? Well, now you know interactive pdf ce so aren't we time for a break? Cause I know yesterday we had chocolate cookies for our break they really want those chocolate cookies doesn't it anyway getting back to setting links right here so that was a were able to go in instead of linked to some place in the file so we took our link we're able to go in and do that and if we set our link we could go in and draw a link around something else. How do you want this to go open a file so I could navigate and I could have a launch of the particular file here I could open a web page let's do that open a web page what's the url www dot creative live dot com and do that wonderful click on my hand tool see if this works when I hover over a link to a u r l what happens is I hover over this you'll see inside my hand I get a w telling me it's a link to the world wide web and up comes the little tool hint showing me that this is the web address that it's going to I click on that it gives me a security warning saying do you trust this website? Not really because I teach here but I'm going to go ahead and trusted anyway so I'm going to allow this to happen just this once and it will launch the website and look here I am teaching interactive pdf so isn't that amazing how it all comes together that's not me ok you know we could make that interactive wouldn't it be cool where you could click through all the pages? Well let's do that then but first let's get through all this other stuff let's not put the cart before the horse ok so that was going in and creating a link to some place in our document creating a link to where you are all right there and we can try something else and it's just a matter of drawing right over the page there or right over the object and create a link now we're going to create a custom like well what is a custom link well, a custom link is something that you can go in and create an action for. We have basic links that you go someplace in the document order you r l you want to do other links here? Sure accustomed link becomes an action. Well, I could go in and I could play a sound or read an article or reset a form run a java script, import form data goto a page view so I could go to a certain page and have a look a certain way. So let's, try that goto a page view. I'm gonna add this to there and look, it comes right back to our simple way of adding a link creating links in and design really easy to dio if you can draw a link and basically point to where it's going, you can get a link, not rocket science here. I know it would be absolutely amazing to you do something different, but that's how it is easy, it is to create a link within in design or go to something outside of it. And I'm sorry acrobat, not in design. I'm getting ahead of myself, but I'm so excited about what in design khun d'oh do they all need to be done individually or can you ah, can you copy and paste them? Once you create them, you can copy and paste them. But when we settling to someplace in the document, we still have to set the destination every time right within the document. But let's say it was like a web address. You could take that box and then just place it over each word that made were that was applicable. Yep, absolutely. So another type of interactivity that weaken dio is bookmarks and bookmarks were kind of like links deal where we could go through and set these now over in our pages panel here or where all their pages panel large we have bookmarks and this little bookmark icon. This is exactly what it is a little bookmark. So because this is digital here we don't use the little paper bookmarks there. I want to go in and I want to be able to break this down into sections so that I have this big pdf. And I want to be able to go and set chapters or set section headers so people can click on that bookmark if they want to learn something about this particular portion of an interactive. Pdf. I want to bring them right to that in the web page so how I do this is a little bit differently than setting a link. What I do is I actually go and I get the page the window and give that page you just the way I wanted to be. And then I go in and I create a bookmark and when they create a bookmark, what you see on screen right there, we've just bookmarked. Previously, when we did a link, we went and we went to the page or the view that we wanted to zoom dim, zoomed out, got to the page and then set the link. A bookmark is just like this, so we said it first and then we go and we had a bookmark. There it is. So I'm going to scroll to page two here and I want to get paged to just where I wanted to be looking exactly the way the zoom everything I can go in and create a new book, marcus well and simply type in page two and I could go to page three. Go to my bookmarks here, make it look exactly the way you want it to look, because the way you have it on screen is exactly the way the book mark is going to capture it. So I click on new bookmark on I get page three, you see how this works, right? But what happens if on page three here? Oh, pastry is buttons so I want to go in and I want to highlight buttons page three is a bookmark here, but I want to get you right to buttons here so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go and I'm gonna zoom in here two buttons and I'm going to put buttons in right here and I'm going to put that kind of front and center right there so you can read all about buttons because I have resumed in large if I go in and I place a bookmark here I'm going to say ok, create a new book mark and I'm going to call this button's right there it goes ahead and adds that as a bookmark how do these work simple take your hand tool click on the bookmark over in your books mark bookmarks panel there's the cover page there's page two there is page three and there is everything about buttons super easy you could make it more difficult. Um I don't know how what's neat about this is that these are all top level bookmarks but buttons is also one page three here. So I want to make sure that this buttons is kind of like a subset of page three and in order to do that I can click on the buttons here and I can kind of drag it up and tuck it into and this you can see it's barely visible here if I drag it up here I can change where these go but if I dragged us up here you'll see it'll go right there drag a little further and I get that slight little in dent right there that allows me to make page three as a bookmark with all of the other bookmarks right there on page three as well so I can kind of cluster my books mark bookmarks together on individual pages and it's just a simple as a click and drag takes a little bit of finance to get there but page three may have multiple bookmarks I click on the little twirly yes that's what it really is called you never know because you're in jeopardy it's the daily double would you want to lose sixteen hundred dollars by not knowing this is a totally I don't think so it's that important to know so I can nestle is together an outline form which is great so any time you set up your page in a certain way you can capture a bookmark right there you're done that's how you do a bookmark I always encourage people to do bookmarks on here especially in large documents it makes things so easy now when you do a large file and in design bookmarked or created automatically by your headers and so anybody ever uses paragraph for character styles and in design you can actually set your paragraphs styles to automatically be your top level ones that automatically create bookmarks when you generate a pdf file so you don't have to go through and do this afterwards it's an automatic feature you're going to the table of contents or index it doesn't automatically for you and you can set it up and that's an end design but manually super easy to dio doesn't take much time at all if you can click and type in zoom you're good I can do two of those three I can't type so here we have it so that's way of setting bookmarks through there so we can set links we can set bookmarks here and we can also do buttons and of course we've done buttons before but buttons could be a whole lot more fun so we're going to go in and pursue buttons a little bit more we've repeated this whole thing so we're going to have some fun with buttons here and buttons can be a whole bunch of items here I'm not going to name my button yet but there's a lot of things that I can do with a button and in this case I could go to a certain page view I can open a file I can open a web link well I could do that when I just draw using my links file but I can do it as a button as well I can read an article which means I could actually have this go through the entire thing and have it read to me because there's nothing like listening to books on tape. Plug in your pdf to your iphone haven't read the article, you press on it. There comes to your stereo system driving long gets so completely enthralled what you're doing just drive right off the end of the road because it like, what was that? How do I press that button? So we can do that? We can reset a for everything that we can do as well as execute in menu item. Well, executing a menu item brings up a whole bunch of different things. Now what we didn't have here is we didn't have the ability to really go from page to page and a pdf document here using just our normal links. We could if we said it said a link to go to the next page, but when we choose our action here and executed menu item, one of the menu items is we can go back to the first page, the previous page, the next page, the last page, or have them actually enter in a specific page that they wants to want to go to. So in theory what I can do is I could create buttons that were actual little arrows. You know, one point into the right one pointing to left one pointing up so I could go back home and I could continue on through what it is that I'm doing so I'm going to use the next page navigation here as an action for this button and I could actually put an arrow in there to show that it's going to the next page and I click ok, I add that action there I clicked clothes and this button is here I need a narrow in this button so I'm gonna make what time to go to illustrator sort of a new file and I'm gonna make a quick little arrow here there we go do you that take this go in rotate the entire thing a little bit there we go chop off the end of it join it together put that down there go in make that stroke big and heavy right there maybe make that whole thing black oh wow look att fantastic arrow wonderful great now I'm going to save this as an arrow here and because this is acrobat it understands illustrator files just klein I don't have to save it as an illustrator file I conceived as a pdf doesn't matter either one is going to work just fine so I'm going to save this as an arrow and I'm actually going to use this arrow as my label for my button and why double click on my button and call it my button properties this is where the appearance are the options come in I don't need a label on this I'm going to just choose an icon and the icon is going to be my arrow that I just made I can put anything in there j peg whatever it is so I'm going to choose the icon no that's not going to be my fish I need my arrow here so to the desktop there's my arrow I click ok that's my arrow that's going to be my arrow on my icon there and under the appearance here I don't want to have a gray phil behind there I'm just going to have that and I clicked clothes and I go back to this and that's what it looks like so of course I can put this arrow any place that I want to on the page here and I can just take this and to be able to go in and move this all around wherever I want tio right there so if it's like this move it over here this obviously indicates this is the next page take my hand tool will it work? Probably not yes it does no way well how did that happen? Well it happened by going in and doubleclick I said the action the action was executed menu item go to the next page I want to do this on every single page copy paste, copy paste, copy paste, copy paste and there I haven't it goes from page to page here is an interesting thing since a button is an interactive element, but it's also part of forms here, you'll notice how I'm not going into forms to get this button active when I click on my hand tool here, it just shows me the button, but you notice when I want to get back in here and edited, I don't go into forms to edit this button. What I do is I go back under the select object under the interactive portion here, which allows me to access the button that I just true or my link without having to go into the edit forms, okay, because links are not part of the forms, but he button is but a button straddles that between forms and interactive, so I could go in and edit this whole thing as a form. But it's just much too tedious. Aiken just select the object, double click on there and get that just like that, I want to put this on multiple pages copy do my page down, hit paste and put it right there. Now, I don't think we have we don't have paced in place, which would be really nice that you could go in and paste in the exact same location every single time but because I've gone in and use the command to go to the next page here, I don't have to put in a specific number page number. So no matter what page I have, I can go to so I could also go in and I could copy this as well, and I could have this go back so I could set this one right here to execute a menu item I could go in and I get edit this and here's the weird thing about editing and action right here. If you click on the mouse up, I can't edit it. If you click on the actual coming and I can't edit it, what you have to do is you have to click on the main item that you did in order to edit it. I don't know why, so I edit this and I can say go to previous page here for this one right there. I could also go into the general here and rotate this one hundred eighty degrees so that that arrow now goes this direction and it's set up differently, so this will go to the next page. This will go to the previous page next page, previous page, next page, previous page, nothing like repetition to get it in next page previous page. So really simple way to go in and use buttons for navigation. You could draw a little picture of a home and use that as your icon as well are also could copy this with a select object copy it, rotated ninety degrees, change the action to be go to the first page or go to the last page and I've got navigation aiken groupies altogether make a nice and small copy and paste them on every single page in my pdf and I've now got navigation throughout the entire thing just by using these great little buttons people like how do you do that? Well, you buy the course, be able to find out nothing like a shameless plug. So the whole thing so buttons khun be really fun, but buttons don't just stop for navigation either. There's a lot of other things we can do for buttons here that are quite helpful in many cases. We want to go in and execute a menu item. We could do a lot of things, so if I want a print of file, I can go ahead and create a print button that just when you hit print automatically opens up the dialogue box for you to go ahead and print I could also go in and search. So if I want to find something in document, aiken great, a button that just calls up to find menu, I'm gonna do advanced search if you're looking for something I can navigate, but they can also zoom this to fit in the window. Second grade a button that just says fit the window actual size. So these buttons can take the place of having somebody going through and using the menu items who may not be familiar with acrobat, but weaken. Set these up his buttons to go through and set this up. However we want to, we can also do really cool things as well. You may have an attachment that's on this file and you may not know how to get to the attachments. Well, one of the action items that we can have here is be able to click on this button that will open the attachments menu and open it right up for you. You start off and it's like I want to see the bookmarks. Well, I can open up the books march panel and this whole thing will fly out when I press the button. Wonderful. So any time that you want to see this, you can certainly do that another thing when we get into presentations later on, when we do presentations. We can set it up to be in full screen mode and sometimes people don't like to be forced into full screen mode, but I consent of a pdf with a button that just says bring me into full screen about so if you want to do a presentation which we will do and not have me force it into full screen mode here can put a button that says go into full screen mode click on this and it'll take over as a presentation so lots of really cool stuff I can even go in and be able to zoom or select the hand tool just by clicking on a button and have it perform in particular action. This is great for people who know nothing about acrobat people who are stuck on doing power point presentations you khun set up all these little buttons here, they click on it, they follow through the whole thing and they're like, this is amazing. How did you make power point? Do this and just smile and you say, well, this is the new version of power point it's called acrobat and they're like, how did you do that? It's like I bought them the live teachings here so multiple things we could do with buttons basically go in center actions and anything that we want our button to look like we can go in and make an icon pdf png file I think you could do a tiff is well j peg things like that and be able to set that up but that's not the on ly thing we can actually create buttons with behaviors and states this is amazing. So right now we have our behavior with just in the up mode okay? So just static well, let's go in and do something else that's going to be I find what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to do a push mode hmm what's push well, if you know what poll is it's the opposite well push mode is basically what's going to happen with his button is not just gonna be a static but here we're going to be an amiable tio push information so when we choose push mode we have up down and roll over bodes for this right here and in up mode we can go ahead and have it look and say something a particular way we could go ahead on down when we click down we can have a look a certain way and unroll over we can make it look yet a third way so on up these air different states this's all one button but multiple views on how this looks so if I go in here and I choose my arrow for my upstate right here for down what happens when I push down on this what does it look like well what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back in here to illustrate or I'm going to create three different arrows here one for up one for down and one for roll over so this is obviously my arrow that's going to be in the upstate as you normally see it there but then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do something funky with this we're going to go in and I'm going to change it to blue okay so there it is I've got it blue and I'm going to save this as my blue arrow here has nothing to do with the color blue right there but then I'm going to do something really funky where unroll over I'm gonna freak this thing out let's see what this looks like there we go scribble mmm mmm mmm so this is going to be my there we go what does this have to do with nothing so on my upstate it looks like this on my down state I can choose the icon here which is going to be my blue arrow so that's gonna be my downstate on roll over it's going to be my scribble okay well it work probably not but we'll check anyway so there is my normal state there is my role over oh and my click down there it is no way did I just create a little roll over here and an action that actually looks cool? This is kind of cheesy simply because we have the great background in there but we can change that sure, no color here we go want to do something cool? Absolutely. So there's rollover there's on click everything else wow! Who says you have to go ahead and make it dull and boring? You don't pretty cool huh? So if you want to do an inverted button you can create an inverted button you can have a glow around it a lot of times people do that when you hover over it it glows and when you click on of inverts or something like that it's three separate objects just put in there in each one of the push states that's all up, down and roll over and that's all in reference to the mouth so mouse up mows down and mouse roll over just a button and when you click on these we can go ahead and have an action associated with this when we go ahead and do this that's where the fun part is we've only applied actions to these buttons when we had mouse up well what happens when we dio on mouse down something could happen well weaken set it to be on mouse down on mouse up a mouse enter and mouse exit so obviously on mouse up something's going to happen when we let go of the mouse but what happens if we actually go in on mouse enter so on mouse up say we're going to go ahead executed menu item and that menu item is going to be go to the next page ok great I can put more than one action in here now that's on mouse up but there's more things that have to happen what happens if I just want to go on mouse enter so when they bring the mouse in unroll over I wanted to do something well I wanted to execute a menu item in here and I wanted to play a sound because I need to have them acknowledge that when they roll over this not only does it change to scribble but it plays a sound so it makes them feel like there's something substantial there so I add this menu item and here is well and I'm going to go and I'm going to hunt the sound down and all the files here and you know what we converted these two mp three's and I did that incorrectly so luckily the people in the sound booth can grab those and convert those so we show you we'll show you how to do this when we get into in design as well but I could actually choose my wave files here in fact I have you have the way files here a little bit longer files but you can use that, so I want them on roll over to go ahead and take this so here's a whole bunch of clicks in a way file here I collect select so on mouse up it's going to go to the next page, but if they just hover over this it's going to play this sound something close this file, get back to my hand tool and on house over it plays all those sounds good here that of course you can and all I need is a nod from the sound booth because of course the way we have this set up here so on mouse over you're going to get the sounds being played and if you go ahead and click on this right here, then it's going to follow that command right there so I can have multiple actions in there as well. So works out pretty cool doesn't it? So multiple actions on these things so every time we hover over this it's going to go ahead and play those sounds I've got this whole sound files a multiple of clicks right in there and we're going to separate out one but you just have to do that so little button collectors who was click click click click as you go over there every time and mouse enter it just plays that sound and you can have multiple things in here and for that, april fool's, one that we're going to dio, we're going to go ahead, and we're going to put actions that are not relevant to what it is that they think they're doing and do that, and then we're also going to go ahead and do it really great things with links where your links to something and it goes to something totally different. Yes, you know, we can mask those things out, so a lot of cool things we can do with buttons, buttons aren't just for simply submitting a forum here, but you can actually make them look really cool and interesting on applying multiple actions so again, no need to have just one action on a forum here or a button multiple actions can be played, and they always play in this fashion, so obviously on mouse up, unless we let up on the mouse it's not gonna work so one mouse enter it does this, and if they're in a certain order where you want to play a sound and then do something else on mao center it's going to do the first thing first onda second, and you can see we can go ahead and use the super archaic thing up and down here to move these things up and down in our I think if we're going to do the same thing like I'm mouse up it's going to do this that and most up it'll do this so I could have it go to the next page here and then announce up they can go ahead and play a sound and on and on not so there we have it and I'm sure some people have questions about this you're a mind reader that jason incredible so we have a question from vlad can we make a button that will add a few fields for example order products that have that have few fields and the form will change in length depending on the number of items in the order that is a great question and no we can't actually go in and change the size of the fields so like make the field bigger but one of the things we can do is you can make it look like it does that because one of the options that we can do here is show or hide of field okay so we could actually have an order form with multiple fields in there and when you say oh I need more space you can click on a button and it would just simply show more fields that are already built in there I cannot expand the size the fields I have to build those in that size but I can give the appearance that it has this now you can do this by creating one field that small and another field that's large large hide the large field so when you click on this same make this larger you could hide the small field show the large field so it gives the impression that you were actually are changing it you're not you're just swapping out one field for another people think it's like you just made that bigger and it's like then you could have abundance is no bigger even bigger and you could just keep hiding that field and showing a bigger field you have to create them all so we're not actually changing it we're programming that in to do that but yes you can okay then no you can't yes it's way have a question from beauty of the lake and can you put in a page turn animation to work with the arrow buttons so you want to dio a flash based page curl yes yeah that's funny because we're going to do that when we get the presentations well the flash based page curl is actually something that you have to do is click on you can't go in and do an automated page girl that I know of I know we can't do it in here there may be your ex script out there that will do the automated page girl but it's a flash based file that gives you that page curl effect but you do it manually okay and question from net ingenuity can we offer a global option to turn off sounds um yes called your volume off button yeah, I mean, basically if you had tio I'm sure you could go in and you can execute a menu item here and I don't know if the menu items actually allow you to turn off sound here now when you have actual sound files embedded in audio files embedded if the author of the pdf was nice, it'll actually give you volume controls and things like in their other times you can actually limit the use of that so that you can't but generally no, you have to do that that's one of those april fool's things where we go in and they actually have a really loud file so you click on something it's like this is private you click on this and what plays an audio file that you had no idea wasn't it I'm giving away to it, but we're pretty selling being april fool's another question from the view of the lake can you also do the rollover change on text that has a link to make it more obvious actually with links when we do this when we do an actual lincoln here we don't have many options here, so if you put a lincoln here we have the highlights style is either being outlined her invert or inside here so if you see that and we go to a page view here, um, we actually use this what you see when you click on this, how it just inverts that's about the extent of it if you want to do something like that, and what you could do is you do a button that you could put a button over the whole thing like this, and they would then put a button over this. I would make the up transparent, and so my action, my options would be push. It would make the up transparent. I could make that down something like this, but then I'd have to take a copy of this and put it in there exactly the same as the button it's much easier is doing and design that it is to do an acrobat, and yes, you can. But you're gonna have to work at it. So I could just do my label here as a snapshot of this year. And then if I really wanted to get my icon perfect and have to go to my advanced here and move the icon upper down and scale it with my exceptionally hi tech icon scaler in position er right there, which is under the advanced mode here, when you choose icon only so of course filled this with nothing so you can see what it is that you're doing so that's about the only way to do it not high tech it all this is not your mama's pdf well actually very shortly it will be because one of the things my mom said before I took this class is you know, could you do a presentation of all my stuff? And I said charge really you don't want to do that I just learned it, mom. So yes, we are actually going to do some of my mom's stuff can't you just bomb this is your people e funny you should ask also for your time, for one more question for a few more with answers like that I don't like people what would you like to dio? Sure, we've had some questions about applications of this in the business and this is from brightly and I'm wondering if he jason has some savvy ways to grab web pages and has a document run the gallery or slide show from the page to send to a client, for example your engagement photo gallery and a pdf or blogged post from a venue with a slide show. Well, if I understand that correctly, basically you can take a whole bunch of screen grabs or you can go to a website and just download all the images from that particular website and then you can go in and make an entire pdf, and then just put it right to presentation boat. And we're going to show you how to do presentation modes here from existing ones. I could take any pdf that is more than two pages and do transitions in them. You know, have them going on. Makes light show mode, black out, the background. Give play, stop, reverse controls, that kind of thing, be able to draw on their jessica presentation. So if you congrats all of your images or photographs and put into a pdf, you're ninety nine percent of the way they're doing. A presentation is three or four klicks away and takes about a minute total to do them.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Acrobat Forms.pdf
Acrobat Shortcuts.pdf
Interactive PDFs.pdf
Creating PDFs Cheat Sheet.pdf
Day 1 Course Files.zip

Ratings and Reviews

a Creativelive Student
 

Great class. Was working on a project which included building a company folder that will be spread digitally. Also built some forms along the way. The teachings from Mr. Hoppe helped me a lot. A big thank you to the Creativelive team.

Student Work

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