How To Add Navigation To An Interactive PDF In Adobe InDesign CC

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Course contents
SECTION: 3
Creative Cloud APP 5:45
SECTION: 12
Workflow Speed Tips 20:41
SECTION: 17
Photoshop & Illustrator 13:32
SECTION: 22
Exporting & Printing Tricks 8:17

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Course info

74 lessons / 9 hours Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is Dan. I am an Adobe Certified Instructor and an Adobe Certified Expert for InDesign and I work as a professional graphic designer. This course is about advanced features, productivity & workflow speed tricks using Adobe InDesign. 

This course is not for people brand new to InDesign. It’s for people who already know and understand the fundamentals. 

If you are already happy adding text & images to InDesign documents then this course is for you. Even if you consider yourself a heavy user, I promise there will be things in here that will blow your InDesign mind. 

You’ll learn advanced font tricks using Typekit & Opentype fonts, font grouping & font pairing. Mastering colour features like the colour theme tool and colour modes as well as professional proofing for colours for print. We’ll set permanent defaults for fonts, colours & will learn how to turn hyphenation off for good, once and for all.  

What would an advanced InDesign course be without all the tactics to fully control paragraphs, auto expanding boxes, spanning & splitting columns. You’ll become a Styles master, using nested styles, grep styles, next styles & advanced object styles.  

We’ll make beautiful charts & graphs for your InDesign documents. You’ll learn the pros & cons of various digital distribution methods including Interactive PDF’s, EPUBs & the amazing Publish Online. 

You’ll become a master of long, text heavy documents, autoflowing, primary text frames & smart text reflow, cross referencing, indexes, text variables & the InDesign book feature. There is entire section dedicated to how to speed up your personal workflow & how to speed up InDesign and get it running super fast. 

We look at interactive forms & scripts. There is just so much we cover and I want to share everything here in the intro but I can’t. Have a look through the video list, there is an amazing amount we cover here in the course. 

If you’re one of those people using InDesign and you know there is probably a better way, a faster way to work then this is your course. 

Daniel Walter Scott

What are the requirements?

  • You will need a copy of Adobe InDesign 2018 or above. But you find that 95% of all the features in this course will work with earlier version of InDesign (e.g. CS6). A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • 70 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content. 
  • Create PDF Forms
  • Master Long Documents.
  • Advanced Fonts
  • Master Styles
  • Shortcut Sheet
  • Create Charts & Infographics
  • Create Interactive Documents
  • Workflow Tactics
  • Shortcuts & Speed Tips
  • Advanced Creative Cloud Features
  • Tips for working with Photoshop & Illustrator
  • Using Scripts 
  • Exporting, Prepress & Printing tricks 
  • You will get the finished files so you never fall behind. 
  • Downloadable exercise files & cheat sheet. 
  • Forum support from me and the rest of the BYOL crew. 
  • Techniques used by professional graphic designers. 
  • Professional workflows and shortcuts. 
  • A wealth of other resources and websites to help your accelerate your career. 

What is the target audience?

  • This course is for people who already know InDesign and want to take their skills and speed to the maximum level. 
  • This is an advanced InDesign course, so you’ll need basic InDesign skills to find this course useful. 
  • This course is perfect for anyone that already knows how to insert images & add text. 
  • If you a completely new to InDesign try my InDesign Essentials course before starting this one.
  • This course is perfect for anyone that has completed my InDesign Essentials course.

Course duration 7 hours 45 mins + your study.
Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files

Transcript

Hi there, in this video we're going to make our Navigation. Like this one in the side here, for an interactive PDF. When you click on 'Tables', jumps to the Tables page and then the Chairs page, and then the Shelves. You know how navigation works but you might not know how to create it in InDesign so let's go and learn how to do that now.

So to get the navigation to work I'm going to have the navigation on every page, so it's a good idea to put it on the Master page. So I'm going to go to my 'Pages' panel, I'm going to go to 'A-Master', double click it. And what I want to do is, if I put it in here now, it's going to be at the bottom of my layers, especially on page 1, where I've got that-- whereas this big image here, it's not going to appear on top, it's going to appear below. So on the A-Master, I'm going to go to my Layers panel, and we haven't got any other layers, but Layer 1. I'm going to rename Layer 1, this is going to be called 'Main Content'. That's where everything goes at the moment. I'm going to make a new layer. Double click it, I'm going to call this one 'Navigation'. That's the one I'm going to work on. You just need to make sure it's blue and highlighted. I can close it back in there.

Now what I'm going to do is make, kind of a ribbon navigation, like we saw. You can draw any which way you like, I'm going to do it-- I'm going to hit the 'W' key, so I'm not in preview. I'm going to grab the Rectangle tool, and I'll pick a Fill color of 'Maynooth'. I'm going to pickle through all of them, so I'll start with the 'Green'. I'm going to draw out a box, like this. And to get that little divot in, there's a couple of ways. I'm going to use the method where, where I use the Pen tool. There's one that says 'Add Anchor Point'. Click on that, so I've held down the Pen tool, grabbed 'Add Anchor Point', I'm going to hover somewhere in the middle, close-ish, so I've got another little Anchor Point.

Now to move that little point around I use the White Arrow. So the White Arrow, I'm going to click it once, click off, click it once again, you can see now, this one's red, and all the rest of them are white. So you might have to click off, click back on again just so that one is selected. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. I'm just going to click, hold, and drag it in. Great! I'm going to grab the Type tool. Draw out a box, and this one's going to be called 'Tables'. And I click 'White', 'Paper'. So we've built some sort of navigation, doesn't really matter what. Actually what I might do, just put my Text box in there, and make it centered, so back to the Type tool, make it centered because I'm going to adjust this for all the front navigation options. Centered might help.

So I've got these two, I've selected both of them. I'm going to copy them. Holding the 'Alt' and dragging. You can just copy and paste them. This one's going to be 'Chairs', that's why I did centered. So that will kind of just end up being centered. And I will do a third option, this one is going to be 'Shelves'. Exciting! Let's do the colors. You are going to be, and these guys are going to go on to the Nav. Nice. Pink. You, be the purple. For this to work properly as well, I need to group these two. So I've selected both of them, Black Arrow, I've gone 'Command G' or 'Object', 'Group'. 'Command G', or 'Control G' on a PC, just to group them together. Let's have a look at our pages now.

Because we're working on our Layers panel, remember, on this top layer, everything should be on top. So what I'm going to do is jump to 'Pages' panel, double click 'Page 1' There's my Title, close it in, it's in there? So in all the pages I got this navigation. Obviously you can add your navigation anywhere. Now what I want to do is go back to my A-Master, so I double click in here and let's add the Interactivity term. To do it we need to open up this 'Hyperlinks' panel. If you can't find it in there just go to 'Window', 'Interactive', and there's one in there called 'Hyperlinks'. And what I need to do is click on this guy, and in this hyperlink, I want to click on him. Now I want to say, I want you to go to Page. What page? I'm going to get it to go to, I can't remember. Tables, I think is the first page, well my first kind of text page, which is Page 2. Chairs is, I have no idea, I got to recheck, but you get the idea, right?

So, this one's Tables, then Chairs, then Shelves. Can do, Dan. All right. So, with you selected, let's open up 'Hyperlinks'. I'm going to say, you go to page 3, and you go to page 4. Awesome! And because it's on the Master page, hopefully it's going to update on all the pages. Now this little feature works both, for interactive PDFs and also works for Publish Online, and EPUB, which is really handy. So it's kind of those ones that you can do-- it's going to work on all the format you can think of. Let's preview it.

So make sure my vision is closed in my Acrobat. So I've closed it down, I'm going to 'File', 'Export'. We'll give it the same name, 'Catalog'. 'Interactive' is the big part, click 'Save', replace the old one. And in here-- I'm going to turn off 'Show Full Screen' because it's annoying. Let's click 'Export'. The one thing you need to do is make sure that-- this is 'Include All'. That's one thing that can get turned off occasionally, so just make sure it's on. Let's click 'Export'. 'Overset text', I'm okay with that. And now, hopefully, Chairs, Tables, Shelves. So navigation and hyperlinks work perfect in interactive PDFs. It doesn't have to be full screen, like our Page Transitions but it works in all the other formats as well, Publish Online, and EPUB.

So that's going to be it for Interactive PDF. There's not a lot you can do that is consistent across lots of readers. So that is the problem with Interactive PDF, just do basic stuff. One of the things we haven't done here is Forms. I know it's kind of interactive but it's got its own section in this video course, so go check that out. All right, on to the next video.

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