From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Adding hyperlinks - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Adding hyperlinks

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- Many people think of InDesign as a print tool, but InDesign is a tool for laying out pages, and those could be either print pages or interactive onscreen pages. The three main interactive formats that InDesign supports are PDF, EPUB, and Publish Online. Each one of these support different types of interactivity, like EPUB and Publish Online both support animation, but not form fields. And you can make a PDF with interactive form fields right in InDesign, but PDF doesn't currently support animation. But there's one thing all these formats support really well, and that's hyperlinks. Let's see how InDesign lets you set up hyperlinks in your documents. Many people think of InDesign as a print tool, but InDesign is a tool for laying out pages, and those could be either print pages or interactive onscreen pages. The three main interactive formats that InDesign supports are PDF, EPUB, and Publish Online. Each one of these support different types of interactivity, like EPUB and Publish Online both support animation, but not form fields. And you can make a PDF with interactive form fields right in InDesign, but PDF doesn't currently support animation. But there is one thing all these formats support really well, and that's hyperlinks. Let's see how InDesign lets you set up hyperlinks in your documents. When anyone clicks this logo over here, I'd like it to take them to a website. Now, when you're making a hyperlink, you can either select text with a Type tool or an object with a Selection tool. In this case, I want the whole graphic, this whole area to be a link, so I'll select the frame. Now, we need the Hyperlinks panel, and we could find that by going to the Window menu and looking inside the Interactive sub-menu, but there's actually a better way. Instead, I'm going to change the workspace. We've been using the Advanced workspace for most of this course, but now that we're making interactive documents, let's choose Interactive for PDF. When we do that, we get a bunch of interactive panels in the dock, including the Hyperlinks panel here. Now, you can see that this document already has one hyperlink in it already, but now to make our new hyperlink, all you need to do is type a web address in this URL field at the top of the panel. Or when you make a hyperlink in a document, InDesign usually remembers it, it shows up here in this popup menu, so I can just choose that. That's it, I'm done, this whole frame is now a hyperlink, and you can see it listed in the panel. Now, let's switch to the Type tool and select some texts inside this text frame down here. Let's make those a hyperlink. And this time, instead of typing a web address in the URL field, I'm going to click the New Hyperlink button at the bottom of the Hyperlinks panel. Up comes the New Hyperlink dialogue box, and the first thing we want to look at is the Link To popup menu. Instead of making this a web link, let's change this to, say, a page link. So, we're going to jump to a page, let's say page 6. You can choose that from the menu or just type it into the field. Now, we'll click OK. So, we have a second hyperlink, the problem is that InDesign changed the color of the text to blue. That looks terrible, why did it do that? Well, whenever you apply a hyperlink to text as opposed to a frame, InDesign applies a character style to the text. Fortunately, you can easily edit that style in the Character Styles panel, I talked about how to do that in the chapter on styles, or you could edit the hyperlink itself. You can see that over here in the Hyperlinks panel, when we made that link, it showed up in this list. If I double click on it, it opens the Edit Hyperlink dialogue box. So, now in the Appearance section, I can change the character style. I could even choose None if I don't want it to have any effect. In this case, I'm going to use a different style that I created called Link Style. That looks much better. I also want to point out a couple more things about the Hyperlinks panel. See these icons in the right column? The green dot means this is a URL, and InDesign has checked the web and the link is working properly. The icon down here tells me this is a page link, and if I click on it, it'll actually take me to that page. There we are on page six. Now, the number to the left of that is the source, that is where the actual hyperlink is in my document. If I click on that, it takes me right back to the place that I made the hyperlink, nice. Now, as I said, when you export to interactive PDF, EPUB, or Publish Online, all of these hyperlinks will work great. In fact, that's where we're going in the next movies, exploring how to export interactive PDFs and upload your files to Publish Online.

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