Yes, you can write geospatial pdfs to do this

There is an FME webinar that may be a useful starting point

how-to-share-spatial-data-with-anyone-anywhere-as-pdf

Yes it is possible. You can use the PDF2D-Writer, but i dont know if you could set different layers on/off while creating.

There is a layer visibility on open parameter that you can set to control what is displayed initially

This is not exactly what I want. I need to read a couple shapefiles into a PDF, where I can turn on and off their visility, as you would do in an ArcMap/QGIS workspace.

You can do this with a geospatial pdf

@darius

To create individual pdf layers for every input shapefiles, use AttributeCreator for every input shapefile and add the "fme_feature_type" attribute assigning a name for every layer as you want it to appear in a pdf.

Then make sure to use @Value(fme_feature_type) as a name of the output pdf in the pdf writer.

Hope that helps.

Magda