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Designing for web, interactive, and beyond

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Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Setting up the workspace
  3. Preparing the document for on-screen viewing
  4. Making the document interactive
  5. Exporting to PDF
  6. Adding more interactivity
  7. Adding multimedia
  8. Setting document properties

Setting document properties

Now to complete the document, you’ll add a title and other metadata, and set up the initial document view.

Adding metadata

  1. Choose File > Properties and click the Description tab.
  2. Enter a title and keywords to make it easier for people to find the document on the web.
  3. Optionally, fill in the Author and Subject text boxes.
  4. Click the Initial View tab. If you would like your users to see the bookmarks, select Bookmarks Panel And Page from the Navigation Tab pop-up menu.

    Note: The Bookmarks panel won’t be visible when the document is viewed in Full Screen mode.

  5. Choose Single Page from the Page pop-up menu, choose Default from the Magnification pop-up menu, and enter 1 in the Open To Page text box.
  6. Choose Document Title from the Show pop-up menu to display the title, rather than the file name, in the title bar of the document window.
  7. Optionally, select Open In Full Screen Mode. In Full Screen mode, the pages of the document will fill the entire screen, and the Acrobat menu bar, toolbar, and window controls will be hidden.

    Note: You must set your PDF to open in Full Screen mode for your viewers to see the page transitions when they move from page to page. To toggle in and out of Full Screen mode, click Ctrl+L (Windows) or Command+L (Mac OS). Alternatively, click the Escape key to exit Full Screen mode.

  8. Save the document, close it, and then reopen it to see the result of your work. Acrobat will alert you that it is trying to open the document in Full Screen mode. Dismiss the alert and explore the document.

Congratulations! The interactive PDF is complete with navigation, hyperlinks, and video, and is ready to be posted on the web.

Where to go from here

You are now familiar with a number of the InDesign interactivity features, along with a few of its really excellent productivity tools. You’ve learned how to create buttons, hyperlinks, bookmarks, and page transitions. You’ve also learned to use custom workspaces, Object Styles, and to use the Find/Change command and the Links and Preflight panels. You learned about PDF export settings, and then in Acrobat, you learned how to incorporate video into a document, add metadata, and set an initial view.

If you’re inspired to delve even more deeply into the interactivity features in InDesign, you might want to check out its movie and sound import capabilities. You could also take a look at the Export To SWF and the Export To Adobe Flash CS4 Pro (XFL) options to learn how you can use InDesign to generate Flash content.

If you’re interested in using video in your PDF files, incorporating it in Flash, or using it on the web, you definitely want to look into the tutorial on Flash video conversion using Adobe Media Encoder CS4. Media Encoder is a great tool and it’s easy to use to get great quality Flash video.

Extras

To encourage you to get started making interactive PDF files, the sample files you downloaded include an InDesign template (interactive_template.indt) with all the settings you’ll need to make a web-ready document. Many default InDesign settings use CMYK swatches and these have been converted to RGB in the attached template. Check out the details to see where the CMYK swatches were hiding, and to review the nuances of interactive document set up. Then, just dive right in!

Interactive template settings

  1. The document page size has been set to 1024 x 768 with landscape orientation (File > Document Setup).

    Note: Ideally you want your document page size to be the size of your final output. InDesign provides a selection of web-oriented page-size presets. A pretty safe starting point is 1024 x 768, which you can then adjust as needed. Remember to allow for browser chrome or elements in an application interface if you don’t intend your document to be viewed in full-screen mode.

  2. Document margins have been set to zero (Layout > Margins and Columns).

    Note: You may choose to zero out the page margins since screen-based documents are viewed from edge to edge without concern for printable area.

  3. Ruler units have been set to points to equate to pixel measurement. Right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Mac OS) the horizontal and vertical rulers to access units of measure.
  4. A preflight profile customized for use with interactive documents has been embedded.
  5. The Swatches panel contains RGB rather than CMYK colors, including swatches for RGB Black and RGB White.
  6. The default style definitions have been converted to RGB color.
  7. Paragraph Styles: The Basic Paragraph style color has been set to RGB Black.
  8. Object Styles: The Basic Graphics Frame style stroke color has been set to RGB Black. The default Effects swatches have been set to RGB (black or white).
  9. Table Styles: Basic Table style default colors for fill, stroke and gap have been set to RGB Black and RGB White.
  10. The transparency blend space has been set to Document RGB (Edit > Transparency Blend Space).
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