About PDF Layers

Acrobat supports viewing, navigating, and printing layered content in PDFs created from applications such as InDesign, AutoCAD, and Visio.

You can control the display of layers using the default and initial state settings. For example, if your document contains a copyright notice, you can easily hide the layer containing that notice whenever the document is displayed on-screen while ensuring that the layer always prints.

You can rename and merge layers, change the properties of layers, and add actions to layers. You can also lock layers to prevent them from being hidden.

Acrobat does not allow you to author layers that change visibility according to the zoom level. However, you can highlight a portion of a layer that is especially important by creating a bookmark that magnifies or hides the layer using page actions. You can also add links that let users click a visible or invisible link to navigate to or zoom in on a layer.

To retain layers when you convert InDesign CS or later documents to PDF, make sure that Compatibility is set to Acrobat 6 (PDF 1.5) and that Create Acrobat Layers is selected in the Export PDF dialog box.

Source - Adobe