How To Create 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 look at how to create an Interactive PDF in Adobe InDesign. This one, we're going to create just some basic interactivity. We're going to create a little link that links to a website and links to an email address. Then we're going to show you how to produce and export an Interactive PDF. Let's give it a test. Click on the little icon, it opens up a website, very exciting. Lots of pictures of me, look at this, I'm there everywhere. Let's go and do that now in InDesign.

So we're going to export an Interactive PDF. First we're going to add a bit of interactivity, just some simple stuff just to make sure, or we can test it works. So what I'm going to do is add a little hyperlink. When it clicks, it goes to a website and then another one, when it's clicked, it goes to an email. So I'm going to add it to my Master page, so I'm going to double click on our A-Master. So I'm in my Master page, I know I am because down the bottom left here it says A-Master. I'm going to bring in two icons that I'm going to use as the triggers. You could highlight text, I could just write my email address, "@maynooth". Select that and do it, but I want to do it with two little icons. So let's do that, let's go to 'File', 'Place', and if we go to our 'Exercise Files', and in Interactive, so '04 Interactive', there's two icons that I want, 'icon-email' and 'icon-website'. I'm going to use my cool little Gridify trick. I have two little guys here, they kind of match the same size, I'm going to scale them down. If you haven't done the Gridify video, go and do that one otherwise just scale him down manually.

I want website to be first, then email to be second. I'm going to put them in the bottom right here, and a lot smaller. You could do the exact same thing with maybe Twitter and Facebook icons, so that when they click, they jump out to those things. I'm doing another Master page just so that, watch this, when I double click page 1, page 2, page 3, they're on all of them. I still feel they're too big, so I'm going to make it a bit small. Holding 'Command' and 'Shift' while I'm scaling them down. And it's 'Control Shift' on a PC while you're scaling, will do it proportionately. So what we need to do is have one of them selected, and let's go to 'Type', which is kind of weird, and go to 'Hyperlinks & Cross-References', and go to 'New Hyperlink'. And in here, I'm going to say, when this is clicked, I want the link to go to email. And the email address, I'm going to put in, let's say '[email protected]'. So whatever your email address is.

You can add a subject line, it will just pre-fill it out for the user. I'm going to put in like 'Catalog Enquiry', something like that. And that's it, click 'OK'. Let's do it for the website address as well. So with this, it's going to go to my website. It's hard to know what the icon is for a website. Sometimes it's just 'www-- pick the globe, anyway. So, same principle, let's go to 'Type' and let's go down to 'Hyperlinks', 'New Hyperlink', and instead of email, it's got an URL. That Maynooth URL I'm using for this course is fictional. It's a fake company I've made through this course. This is my actual site, so I'm going to use this one, bringyourownlaptop.com, or you can go to Google.com, just something you can test, that works. I'm going to click 'OK'.

So we've added a little bit of interactivity, we're going to add a lot more throughout the following videos, after this one, but let's get the basics done, so hyperlinks, emails, and now we need to produce a PDF that's interactive. So what we need to do now is go to 'File', and let's go to 'Export'. Just like we do for a normal PDF. What we need to do, by default it's set to 'Print', so 'Adobe PDF (Print)'. What I'd like to do is set it to 'Interactive', that's basically what we need to do. I'm going to save mine on to my 'Desktop', I'm going to put it in my 'Coursework'. I'll call mine 'Catalog', just for the moment, and I hit 'Save'. And in here, you can go through and play around with the defaults but basically it's ready to go. You can just click on 'Export'.

If you want to go into a little bit more details, probably the main thing you're going to go through is 'Compression'. At the moment, mine is set to '300' so it's going to make the files look really amazing. So you might decide that, actually I don't want it to be so high. And the main way to do this, is under 'Resolution'. 300 is print quality, it's probably not what I need when we're going out for an Interactive PDF. I pick like 144. Some people go to 72, it really depends on how big it is. You want to keep this as high as you can, but you want to compare that with how big the actual physical file size is. If you are at 300, and it's becoming like a 10MB PDF then it's not going to be easily emailable, and life becomes tough. So you might have to drop it down to 144 and if then it's still really big you might have to drop it down to something like 72. Have a little practice with the different resolutions. Just see what does it look like, versus how big it is. I'm going to keep mine at 300.

There's nothing much else you need to do in here. I'm going to click on 'Export'. I've got some Overset Text, all that means is that when I'm working on my text boxes here there's actually more text than the text boxes. Just wanting to say, "Hey, you've got text you can't see on the page." Because it's just demo, I'm not worried about that, but if this was a proper print document I might have text that's not visible on the page, and that will be bad. I'm going to click 'OK' though, because I'm not worried. Now depending on your computer, most computers will open up Acrobat Pro by default. If you don't, you might have to go to your 'Finder' or your 'Windows' if you're on a PC, find the file where you've kept it. We called ours 'Catalog.pdf', just double click it there. And once it's opened up in Acrobat or Acrobat Reader, down the bottom here are our two little icons that appear on all the pages. Hopefully you can click on them, click on the first one. It kind of comes up with a warning, mine didn't come up with a warning because I've disabled it. Yours is probably going to say "Hey, this PDF is trying to launch a website." And you click 'OK'.

You can see here, it's jumped into Chrome, and it has opened up bringyourownlaptop.com, and lots of pictures of me, just what you needed. Let’s look at the other one, so email, so when I click on this, it's going to open up your default email clients. And in this case I'm on Mac, so it's MacMail. You can see, it's added the email and it's added the subject line, and now I can type it in. So it's just a way of kind of helping people email you. So before we move on I'm going to do a little bit of production video where I just kind of add some graphics and stuff, just to help this tutorial work when we do Page Transitions, and just to make the document look a little nicer. So you can skip on, you're not going to learn anything too new here. Just kind of a work flow I guess, me doing stuff.

So what I would like to do is add a new page in front of page 1. Easiest way is just to click the little 'New Page' icon and just drag it back and front. So it's at the page no. 1. Basically I just want to import some logos and text, and get working. So I'm going to go to 'File', 'Place'. From '04 Interactive' we're going to bring in 'image1-floating'. I'll click and drag it from one side to the other, and it should match up. I'm also going to grab the Rectangle tool. I'm going to drag in another box. So I'm going to maybe have no-- actually click off in the background. Then grab the Rectangle tool and say, actually I want you to have 'No Stroke'. And I'll have a 'Black' Fill. And I want to draw out a box that covers the entire thing. I'll lower the opacity, just so I can put some text. Basically just doing it so I can put text over the top of it.

So again, click in the background, nothing selected, and we're going to go to 'File', 'Place' again, just bring in the Logo. It's just in the group folder of the 'Exercise Files'. Here's all of these guys, I'm going to bring in 'Option4'. Click out and drag it in the corner here. And I'll put in some text, Type tool. Now with the Type tool, it's always better to draw on the side here and then bring it in, otherwise if I click in here, you can see, my Black box that I used to kind of tint the background is being turned into a text box, and it's a bit of a pain, so undo, grab the Type tool, draw it out here, and I'm going to write in here, 'Collection 2019'.

Now when I'm working-- so this is-- I'm just going to quickly pick a font. Make something light. Not sure if I could see light, and I'll pick-- you are going to be the bold, it's fine, it's going to be the yellow. Now instead of going through and picking font sizes, the Type tool font sizes, often what I do is, select it with the Black Arrow, use our shortcut that we learnt earlier, it's 'Command-Option-C'. That just fits the text box around it. Or 'Control-Option-C' on a Mac. And then I just scale it up, like I scale graphics, hold 'Control' and 'Shift' till it scale proportionately, and I do that to adjust my font sizes because I'm not sure what size I need it to be, I'm just kind of looking at it. Tongue out, eye browing, and going "Hey, I'm at that sort of size." 'W' key, see it in preview. Do some lining up.

All right, so that is it, let's get into the next video where we look at Transitions.

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