Chicago InDesign User Group

Meeting Notes Archive

November 15, 2006

Hosted by Digital Bootcamp, Chicago, thanks to Mike Carruth, Commander in Chief.

Topic: Interactive InDesign &Acrobat 8 Professional
Presenters:

Jim Maivald, Owner of Desktop Design, a graphic design and training company, Chicago, http://www.desktopdesign.cc/
Tom Petrillo, with “special guest,” fellow Adobe Solutions Engineer, Adam Pratt

Jim Maivald, our group leader, opened the meeting with a presentation showing a side of InDesign that many users have never explored or used, and possibly never even knew about—the interactive side of InDesign. Did you know that right inside your favorite program you can make text links (hyperlinks), rollovers, insert movies and animations, and more? And why would you want to do that? So you can spice up that PDF you export and share with others. It’s well known that when the content is interactive, it’s much more memorable, your message is communicated more effectively. But note that these features are only interactive in the PDF and not directly in InDesign.

Jim started with hyperlinks. These can go to another page in the same document, to specific text on a page that you’ve designated as a “text anchor,” or to a web page (which your default browser would open and display). As Jim demonstrated using several techniques, the easiest way to begin creating these interactive elements is using InDesign’s context menu, providing you commands that are relevant to whatever you have selected. (Remember that, while the easiest way to get the context menu is to right-click, you can always Control-click as well.)

To make a hyperlink, highlight the text that will provide the link, and then choose Interactive > New Hyperlink from the context menu. (Ed. note: you can also create one by clicking the New Hyperlink button at the bottom of the Hyperlinks palette. To see that palette, choose Window > Interactive > Hyperlinks.) The New Hyperlink dialog box displays to give you a range of options—starting with the name field. InDesign inserts your highlighted words right into this field. Choose the Destination Type of hyperlink, and depending on your choice, additional options are offered. Choosing URL, for instance, lets you enter a specific web address. Regardless of Type, you can choose Appearance attributes, whether the link is visible or not, its color, width, line style, and how it will look when the link is selected.

Next: navigation and rollovers. Jim showed four graphic arrows on the page, icons for first page, previous page, next page and last. While you can grab InDesign’s button tool, you might just bring up the context menu with a graphic selected and choose Interactive > Convert To Button, and then get the context menu again, and choose Interactive > Button Options, which opens the Button Options dialog. Name your button, set visibility in the General tab, and then switch over to the Behaviors tab to set the conditional actions that will occur when the mouse interacts with the button. For example, on “mouse up,” clicking the button can take you to another page, to a URL, play a sound, and so forth. Be sure to click the Add button below before you click OK. Rollovers happen when a button graphic is swapped out for another temporary graphic to show the user that the button is interactive and to entice you to click. Tom P. said that making a rollover in InDesign might be one of the hardest things to do!

You can add movies and Flash animation using QuickTime files v6 or later, AVI, MPEG and SWF (Flash) and for sound: WAV, AIF and AU. Jim placed a movie file on the page then with a fast right-click, went right into Movie Options. One of the key choices in the dialog is whether to embed the movie file or have it be externally linked. But if you want to embed the movie, making your file size larger, you’ll have to export to an Acrobat 6 (PDF 1.5) version file, or later. Then, Jim turned to another page with stacked circles and set up buttons to control their visibility. That was a bit tricky! And last, the “disjointed rollover,” an industry term that refers to a rollover that displays its swapped graphic elsewhere on the page, while the main graphic stays visible. Jim’s example used buttons with European city names—when you click the city name, the matching city photo displays opposite. A cool trick using Button Options’ Behaviors to show or hide buttons on the page, where the city buttons and the city photos are all named “buttons.”

Finally, Jim exported the InDesign file to PDF (File > Export) where the interactive options are right on the default General panel of the Export Adobe PDF dialog box, after you click Save. Click to include: Bookmarks, Hyperlinks, and Interactive Elements. Then sit back, relax and watch the show, click the links, and follow the action!

Tom Petrillo, our Adobe god, showed us some of the bells and whistles in the new Acrobat 8 Professional. Mac users, note that Acrobat 8 is safe for Universal Binary with your latest Macs. Good going, Adobe! The letter C figures prominently in the new Acrobat—for the five main Capabilities: Create, Combine, Collaborate, Collect, and Control. And after a few slides, Tom jumped right in, showing us the welcome screen with a very clean design containing lots of useful buttons. In the Create button, or using File > Open, you can create a PDF document right in Acrobat. Select an InDesign file (only if you have it installed on your machine) and Acrobat’s preferences and presets will control how that InDesign file is converted to PDF. Likewise, you can create PDF files in Acrobat starting with files from MS Office, Outlook, IE, Lotus Notes, and others. Some options are platform-specific.

Then explore the Combine button. You can Add File or Add a Folder and in a single document, you can combine pages from various PDFs into a smaller file, even if the page sizes or orientations vary. You can also assemble multiple PDF files into one package, similar to a Stuffit file and make that package or PDF secure with password-protections. Depending on the type of PDF files you are creating, you can print the current doc, selected docs or all docs. Help with locating documents can be found in File > Organizer commands that open to a kind of Bridge utility that shows all your PDF documents with metadata.

Collaborate. With the new Send PDF for Shared Review feature, we now have a much improved and easier to use set of tools to help team members collaborate. You can easily access your Address Book and on Windows, other resources like Outlook and Lotus Notes to pull in data without digging. And the big whiz-bang is the Start Meeting button to allow real-time live conferencing with as many as 15 users. This service is available for about $40/month, which is a steal, when compared to the costs of buying Adobe’s Breeze application, which is the Cadillac of meeting software. To create a conference making use of this Acrobat resource, all you need is the free Flash player, version 6 or later. The interface contains a large display or demo area used by the main speaker, while smaller “pods,” little windows, are available on the sides, for writing notes or asking a question.

Collect data using forms. Forms have always been difficult to set up. Now Adobe has made a huge breakthrough for the user. Tom showed a form design done in InDesign. It had many fields, name, address, and more. But not until he clicked Form Field Recognition did the form become interactively functional. Just one step, now that caused a noticeable murmur in the room! Adam Pratt, who has been popping up with a word or two throughout the evening added: “OCR for forms!!” Great characterization. Then if you want to customize the results, go to Form > Edit. And right from Acrobat, you can email the form to one or hundreds of people, using the Distribute Form dialog box and making it real easy for users to fill it out, using Adobe Reader 8.0 and returning it back to you. In Windows, you can collect data into a spreadsheet. The data is collected by opening each form and creating a data set, which can be exported in a CSV file for import into a spreadsheet or database.

Control. We didn’t quite get to this, but no one was terribly sorry because the meeting ended with lots of great prizes for pizza eaters!

—The Chicago InDesign User Group meeting notes have been prepared by Eda Warren, Adobe Certified Training Provider and Adobe Certified Expert on InDesign CS2, http://www.go-training.com/.

Thanks to Jim Maivald and Tom Petrillo for help with these notes.

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