Add interactivity to your InDesign documents

Reproduced from "Sams Teach Yourself Adobe CS 2 All in One" by Mordy Golding

With Adobe® InDesign® CS2, you can add many of the same interactivity features you will find in Adobe Acrobat®, such as hyperlinks, bookmarks, buttons, and embedded sound and movie files. These features let a viewer of a PDF version of your document click on things to jump to new locations or otherwise interact with the document. (Obviously, if you are not going to be creating a PDF version of your document, you won’t be using any of these features.)

This tutorial focuses on the two most common interactivity features, hyperlinks and bookmarks. Although you can add other types of interactivity in InDesign, it is much easier to open the PDF file in Acrobat and add the features there (especially because interactivity features cannot be previewed in InDesign anyway).

Movies

You can place movie and Flash files right into your InDesign layout as you would static images, like Adobe Photoshop® files. Simply choose File > Place and navigate to a movie file. After you place a movie in your document, you can double-click on it to specify options such as poster frames, when you want the movie to play, and whether the movie will play just once or will loop repeatedly.

Specify the options for a placed movie file in the Movie Options dialog box.

Hyperlinks

A hyperlink is a section of text that, when clicked, sends the viewer to a new location. This location can be either a page in another document or a URL that points to a web page or a file. All hyperlinks have two parts: source and destination. The source is the text that sends the viewer to a new location, and the destination is the location itself.

To create a hyperlink to a web page, do the following:

1. Select the text you want to use as the source.

2. Choose Windows > Interactive > Hyperlinks.

3. Click the Create New Hyperlink button at the bottom of the Hyperlinks palette.

4. In the New Hyperlink dialog box, select URL from the Type pop-up menu.

5. Enter the full URL in the URL field.

6. Click the OK button.

   

   Specifying a URL as the type of hyperlink.

You can set the appearance of the link here as well, but you won’t be able to see what it looks like until you export the file to PDF, and none of the options really creates an acceptable appearance. I recommend instead that you choose the Invisible Rectangle option and format the text yourself in a way that lets the viewer know that it is a clickable item (such as blue underlined text).

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are a feature of Acrobat that let you create a navigational structure for viewers that they can use to quickly move between pages or entire sections of a document. Unlike hyperlinks, bookmarks don’t appear within the document itself; they appear as a separate pane within the PDF document window.

Basically, there are two types of bookmarks: page and text. Page bookmarks take you to a specific page, whereas text bookmarks take you to a specific block of text. Creating bookmarks can be done just as easily in InDesign as in Acrobat.

To create a bookmark, follow these steps:

1. Choose Window > Interactive > Bookmark.

2. Either navigate to the page that you want the bookmark to point to (for a page bookmark) or select a block of text (for a text bookmark).

3. Click the New Bookmark button at the bottom of the Bookmarks palette.

4. Rename the bookmark, if necessary.

Saving, printing, and prepress

To save your InDesign file, choose File > Save. It’s that easy. If you want to save your file to be compatible with InDesign CS, you can save it in the InDesign Exchange format (INX).

Exporting files

InDesign files can be exported to a few different file types. In some cases, such as PDF, the result matches (at least visually) exactly what was in the original document. However, in all cases, the native InDesign information is lost, meaning that InDesign functionality tied to the document such as layers and object definitions is gone when the file is exported. For that reason, be sure to always save a copy of the original InDesign file in addition to the exported version.

Exporting to PDF

To export to PDF directly from InDesign, choose File > Export, and then choose Adobe PDF. You can choose from many different options, including compression and security settings. You can also choose to create a PDF file that conforms to the PDF/X standard.

Because there are so many different ways to create PDF files these days, and because there’s really no control over what a PDF can or cannot contain, leaders in the print community created a standard called PDF/422X as a subset of the PDF spec that is tailored for CMYK and spot-color printing workflows. For example, a PDF/X-1a file has all transparency flattened, has no RGB content, and has all fonts embedded in the file.

Reproduced from "Sams Teach Yourself Adobe CS 2 All in One" by Mordy Golding © 2006 Sams Publishing. Used with the permission of Pearson Education. To buy this book, please visit www.samspublishing.com.

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