From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Creating an interactive PDF - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Creating an interactive PDF

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- [Narrator] This interactive document from the Exercise files folder is designed to be viewed on screen and it looks pretty cool, but we want to take it to the next level by adding some interactivity. First, let's add a button. Down here at the bottom of the page, I have some navigation buttons. Now of course, I want these buttons to be on all the pages of my document, so I put them on the parent page. Let's open the pages panel in the doc and then I'll double click on a parent. That takes me to the parent page. Here are the buttons down here at the bottom, so I'll click on the one on the right and let's zoom into 200% with a command or control two. So this should be a go to next page button. To make it a button, I need the buttons and forms panel. It's over here in the dock. Now, as I mentioned in the last movie, these interactive panels show up in the dock because we're using the interactive for PDF workspace. Now, this object is actually a group of two objects and we can turn it into a button by clicking on what I like to call the make button button down here at the bottom of the panel. You can convert any object or a group of objects into a button, and as soon as you do that, the panel springs to life and we can start adding actions to it. First, it's a good idea to name your button something recognizable. Like up here, I'll change this to next page, and now we're going to set this up so that it does something on a particular event. Inside the event Pop-Up menu here, we're going to choose on release or tap. That means when you either tap on a touchscreen or when you release the mouse button, on that event, do an action. And you can see a list of all the actions here inside the Actions popup menu, the one that looks like a little plus symbol. In this case, we want it to go to the next page, so we'll choose that from this menu. That's it. This is now an interactive button. Now it doesn't work inside InDesign, but it will work when we export the file. Of course, this panel is called the Buttons and Forms Panel, so where's the forms part? Well, as I mentioned in the last movie, PDF files support forms, and it's incredibly easy to make an interactive form field. Let's jump to the last page in my document by clicking on it inside the pages panel. Now, I'll fit the page in the window by pressing command or ctrl zero. You can see that we have a whole form here that needs some fields. Most of these I've added already, but we need a field here for the first name to make a form field, you just draw out any object. You can use any of the frame tools. In fact, I usually use a graphic frame, even for text fields. I'll simply draw one out on the page. Now you can turn this into a form field by opening the buttons and forms panel and changing the type pop-up menu up at the top. You could make this a checkbox or a list box, but in this case it's going to be a text field and we should give it a name. I'll type first name here, and there are a lot of other options in here, but I think we're good to go for now. Let's go ahead and export this PDF and see it in action. So I'll go up to the file menu and choose export. You'll notice down here in the format popup menu that there are two different options for making a PDF, interactive or print. Hyperlinks work in either print or interactive PDFs, but buttons and form fields, stuff like that, well, you'll need to use interactive. Then click save. And now there are a number of options in here, including the ability to set the view. For example, when we open this PDF, I'd like it to fit the entire page in the window. I also like to choose compression in the list on the left and increase the resolution to something a little more reasonable, like 150 PPI. That way images still look pretty good on high DPI screens or if people zoom in a little. Alright, for now, let's just click Export and InDesign will write this PDF to disk, and then it'll automatically open it up in Acrobat. Here we go. Now I should point out that some interactive features such as buttons may not work on tablets and mobile devices like the iPad. It just depends on what app you're using to view the PDF. But here, check it out. Now down here at the bottom part of the page, we can see the button we made. When I click it does just what we wanted. It jumps to the next page. Now let's click this hyperlink over here and you can see it jumps to the field. There's the form field. I can click in it and type my name. It works. As cool as all of this is, of only scratch the surface of all the amazing things you can do with interactive documents. Who said InDesign was just for print? Am I right?

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