Chapter 13. Interactive Documents
A hundred years ago, when David was a young pup, he turned in a school essay he had typed using an amazing new device called a personal computer and printed on that technological marvel, the dot-matrix printer. His teacher was so impressed that she wrote her copious corrections on a separate page, so as not to spoil the appearance of David’s “professionally published” work. Today, a school report printed on a color laser or inkjet printer is de rigueur, and teachers may question a student’s work ethic if they don’t have a corresponding Web site and public relations team.
Communication has come a long way, and while print is far from dead, you can bet that the future of publishing isn’t solely a matter of throwing more ink at paper. Today’s communicators have to be adept at creating both print and interactive documents—files that include buttons, sounds, animation, page transitions, and movies. Fortunately, InDesign offers a number of features for the “rich media” producer. Many of these tools don’t produce any visible effect on your InDesign pages, but change the behavior of the PDF or Flash SWF files that you export.
Interactive Only After Export
The key thing to understand about InDesign’s interactive features is that they work only when you export the file to a format that can support them, such as PDF, SWF, FLA, or XHTML. And, different formats support different features.
Acrobat PDF. Interactive PDF files can include buttons, movies and sounds, hyperlinks, bookmarks, and page transitions. When you export an interactive document to PDF, select the Adobe PDF (Interactive) option, which uses the Acrobat 8/9 (PDF 1.7) version. If you select the Adobe PDF (Print) option, your document won’t include any interactive elements.
Note that you should use Acrobat Reader or Acrobat Pro to view interactive PDF files—while other PDF readers (such as Preview in Mac OS X) can open them, most of the media features won’t work.
We cover how to export PDF files in “Exporting interactive PDFs” later in this chapter.
XHTML and ePub. InDesign has very limited support for XHTML and ePub documents. However, hyperlinks that you create in InDesign are exported properly. We cover how to export XHTML and .epub documents from InDesign in Chapter 7, “Importing and Exporting.”
SWF. InDesign can export one or more pages from your document directly to the SWF (Shockwave Flash) format. Exporting to SWF is great for interactive presentations and simple SWF files for the web, but if you need to create small web banners or more advanced SWF files, export using the FLA format. We’ll discuss SWF export in more detail later in this chapter.
FLA. InDesign’s SWF export is cool for simple projects, but limited. If you know ActionScript, or you’re working with a Flash developer, you’re going to want to export your InDesign document in the FLA format. (In InDesign CS4, the equivalent format was XFL.) FLA is a format that can be opened in Flash CS5 Professional. When you export to FLA, page transitions, buttons, and animation remain in effect. Hyperlinks are broken in FLA files. Movies and sound clips are also broken; only the posters are included. However, supported media files appear in a resources folder saved in the same location as the exported FLA file so that the Flash developer can reconnect the media.
Hyperlinks
What is an interactive page without links? Links help your readers explore your file, jumping between pages, to other documents, or even to Web sites. You can also add links to files that your readers can download, and you can add links for sending email.
A hyperlink is essentially a button—it’s a “hot” area that performs some action when you click it. There are two big differences between a hyperlink and a button: First, you can apply a hyperlink directly to a range of text—though behind the scenes, InDesign is still more or less drawing a button around that text. Second, you can save a hyperlink destination and use it more than once.
To make a hyperlink, you’ll need to open the Hyperlinks panel from the Interactive submenu under the Window menu. The Hyperlinks panel also includes the Cross-References panel; we discuss cross-references in Chapter 3, “Text.”
Named versus Unnamed Hyperlinks
When you make a hyperlink, you need to decide whether it should be a hyperlink that can be used multiple times (which InDesign calls a “Shared Hyperlink Destination”), or a one-off link. Because these are similar in concept to named and unnamed color swatches, we tend to call these named and unnamed hyperlinks.
Named hyperlinks are actually easier to make, but they can slow you down if you’re going to make dozens (or hundreds) of them, because each one you add takes a position on the Hyperlink panel’s URL pop-up menu. Searching through 100 URLs is a hassle. Therefore, although we tend to eschew unnamed color swatches, we actually use unnamed hyperlinks most of the time.
On the other hand, if you are going to use a hyperlink several times in a document, it’s great to make it named. That way, if you need to edit the link, you can change it once and it gets updated everywhere in the file.
Fast Hyperlinks
The fastest way to make a hyperlink is to select some text (with the Type tool) or a frame (with the Selection tool) and type a Web address into the URL field at the top of the Hyperlinks panel (see Figure 13-1). After you press Return/Enter, you’ll see the link appear in the list in the middle of the Hyperlinks panel.
Figure 13-1 New Named Hyperlink
Unfortunately, this method has several significant drawbacks: First, this always creates a named hyperlink; there is no choice here. Second, InDesign usually places a big, ugly black rectangle around the text or object. Third, you can only make links to URLs (no page links, and other goodies we’ll explain in a minute). Finally, if you selected a frame, the link appears in the panel as something generic, like “Hyperlink.” If you selected some text, the text itself appears in the list, often causing confusion.
Converting URLs to Hyperlinks
You can search your document for URLs such as www.adobe.com, http://indesignsecrets.com, and [email protected], and convert them to hyperlinks. If you want to apply a character style to the hyperlinks, create a character style with the appropriate attributes, such as blue and underlined, before you do the conversion. For some reason, the InDesign team didn’t add a New Character Style option to the pop-up menu in the dialog box.
Choose Hyperlinks & Cross-References from the Type menu, and then choose Convert URLs to Hyperlinks (see Figure 13-2). Select whether you want to convert the URLs in the document, story, or current selection. If you decide you want to convert URLs only in the selection, you can select text while the dialog box is still open.
Select a character style if you want visual indicators for the URL hyperlinks. Click Find to locate the first URL, and then click Convert or Convert All. These options are similar to the Change and Change All options in the Find/Change dialog box. InDesign creates named hyperlinks.
If you change your mind after the conversion, keep in mind that Undo undoes only one change, even if you choose Convert All. So press Ctrl/Command+Z for as many URLs as you converted.
Editing Hyperlinks
If you want to make a named hyperlink, using the URL field works fine. But immediately after making the link you should edit it. First, you can rename any link in the Hyperlinks panel by clicking on it and choosing Rename Hyperlink from the panel menu. If you do this a lot, make yourself a custom keyboard shortcut.
Then, double-click on the link in the Hyperlinks panel to open the Edit Hyperlink dialog box. You have several options.
Link To and Destination. You can tell InDesign what to link to by choosing one of the six options in the Link To pop-up menu. The first three let you make unnamed or named links; the last is for shared, named links. If you have already made a named link with the URL field, you can convert the link to a local link, but the original named link you made still remains in the URL list—we’ll explain how to remove it later in the chapter.
• URL. To target a URL, choose URL from the Link To pop-up menu and type the address into the Destination URL field. A URL is typically a place on the Internet, like an HTTP or FTP site. Note, however, that Acrobat or Flash just passes this URL to the default Web browser to deal with.
(By the way, if you open a SWF with a hyperlink in it on your local hard drive, the Flash plug-in will likely throw up an alert saying that there’s a potential security risk. However, you can avoid the alert by clicking Settings, then telling the Flash settings to always trust your local computer. If you place the SWF on the Web, you shouldn’t see the alert.)
• File. If you want your hyperlink to open another PDF or file on your disk or on the server, you can choose File from the Link To pop-up menu. Unfortunately, Acrobat and Flash also hand these links to your Web browser to open, which is kind of crazy. If the browser knows what to do with it, it’ll display it; if not, the file will likely be downloaded. To jump from one PDF to another, it’s usually better to use a button, which we discuss in a later section.
• Email. If you want your link to send you an email, you could make a URL link that begins with mailto://, but it’s easier to set the Link To pop-up menu to Email, then fill in the Address and Subject Line fields. When the viewer clicks on this kind of link, Acrobat launches your default Web browser and creates a new, addressed email message.
• Page. To link to another page within your document (but not to specific text or an object on the page), choose Page from the Link To pop-up menu. Enter the page number you want to link to in the Page field and which magnification you want to use to view that page from the Zoom Setting pop-up menu. Most of the zoom settings (such as Fit Width in Window) are pretty self-explanatory; the only two that we find confusing are Inherit Zoom and Fixed. Inherit Zoom leaves the viewer’s magnification setting alone. Fixed is supposed to remember the zoom setting in InDesign when you created the hyperlink destination, but it only seems to produce the same effect as Inherit Zoom. The Zoom Settings are ignored in SWF files.
You can also choose a different file from the Document pop-up menu (if you have another InDesign document open). This sounds good, but it doesn’t really work—you’re asking Flash or Acrobat to open your other InDesign file, which it cannot do.
• Text Anchor. If there is some text you want to target, you should choose a Text Anchor from the Link To pop-up menu. We discuss how to make a text anchor later in this chapter.
• Shared Destination. If you want your hyperlink to point to a link you have already created as a named link, choose Shared Destination, then choose the link from the Name pop-up menu.
Character Style. If your hyperlink is on selected text, you can tell InDesign to apply a character style to it. For example, you might want to give the text a light blue underline to indicate to the reader that this is “clickable.” Very helpful. What you can not do is make a character style that automatically applies a hyperlink. We hope to see that in a future version of InDesign.
Appearance. Remember that a hyperlink is technically a button in the PDF. The Appearance section lets you control how that object appears in the PDF file. If you want it to be invisible, set the Type pop-up menu to Invisible Rectangle. If you do this, you should be sure to apply some character style to the text; otherwise, the only way anyone will know that the link is there is that the cursor will change when it moves over it.
The other Appearance options are pretty dorky. Maybe someday InDesign will offer cooler hyperlink options, such as making the text highlight when you hover over it and then glow or burst into flame when you click it. Until then, only buttons provide interesting link effects (see “Buttons,” later in this chapter).
By the way, if you import a Word document that has lots of words surrounded by rectangles, they’re probably hyperlinks. You can make all those rectangles disappear quickly by selecting all the hyperlinks in the Hyperlinks panel (click on the first and then Shift-click on the last), choosing Hyperlink Options from the panel menu, and then changing the Type pop-up menu in the Appearance section from Visible Rectangle to Invisible Rectangle.
Making a New Unnamed Hyperlink
If you want to bypass making a named hyperlink entirely, select the text or frame and click the Create New Hyperlink button in the Hyperlinks panel (or choose New Hyperlink from the panel menu). This opens the New Hyperlink dialog box, which offers all the same features that we discussed in the last section.
Making a New Hyperlink Destination
InDesign also lets you make a named hyperlink without actually applying it to any text or objects. Of course, these links won’t do anything, but it might be helpful if you have a list of known destinations you’ll be targeting multiple times as you lay out your file. To do this, select New Hyperlink Destination from the Hyperlinks panel menu (see Figure 13-3). You can choose from among three types of hyperlink destinations: Page, Text Anchor, and URL.
• Page. After you choose Page from the Type pop-up menu, you can choose which page and zoom setting to use. Now give your Page hyperlink destination a name. Or, better yet, turn on the Name with Page Number check box, which names it automatically. This name is what you’ll later use to apply this hyperlink destination to the text or object on your page.
• URL. The URL hyperlink destination lets you enter two values: The Web site or mailto address you want to target, and a name for this destination. Again, you’ll be using this name later when you create the hyperlink.
• Text Anchor. The Text Anchor option lets you create an anchor to a specific piece of text in your document. Once you have created a text anchor, you can target it when making a hyperlink (which we talked about earlier). To do this, first place the cursor in the destination text (or select one or more characters of the text), or else this option will be grayed out. Then, in the New Hyperlink Destination dialog box, simply give the anchor a name. This is identical to how most HTML authoring programs create text anchors, too.
Figure 13-3 Creating a New Hyperlink Destination
Editing Hyperlink Destinations
Unfortunately, while the URL pop-up menu in the Hyperlnks panel gives you a list of all the named hyperlink destinations you’ve built in a document, it won’t let you edit them or delete them. To do that, choose, Hyperlink Destination Options from the Hyperlinks panel menu—this displays the Hyperlink Destination Options dialog box. From here, you can view and select the existing hyperlink destinations using the Destination pop-up menu. To edit a hyperlink destination, select it from the pop-up and click the Edit button. To delete a named hyperlink, select it and click the Delete button.
Hyperlinks from URLs in the Text
If you’ve already typed a URL in a text frame and now you want to make that URL a hyperlink, use the Text tool to select the URL and choose New Hyperlink from URL from the Hyperlinks panel menu. This is a two-for-one: InDesign first makes a URL destination (giving it the same name as the URL itself), and then applies that destination to the selected text or object, also using the URL as the hyperlink source name that appears in the panel. Cool, huh?
However, note that Acrobat 8 will now automatically create clickable links from anything that looks like a URL, so you may not need to convert these to InDesign hyperlinks yourself.
Deleting and Resetting Hyperlinks
We’ve already mentioned that you can delete a hyperlink destination, but what about the hyperlink on the page? If you delete the source itself (the text or object marked as a hyperlink), the hyperlink disappears. You can also select the hyperlink in the Hyperlinks panel and click the panel’s Delete button. This leaves the text or page object alone, but it no longer has a hyperlink attached to it.
If you need to delete two or more hyperlinks, you can select discontiguous items by Command/Ctrl-clicking on them individually. Or—to select them all—select the first and then Shift-click on the last in the list. Then click Delete.
What if you applied a hyperlink to the wrong text or object? No problem—select the correct text or object, select the hyperlink name in the Hyperlinks panel, and then choose Reset Hyperlink from the Hyperlinks panel menu. The link is moved from the old source to the selected source.
Navigating Hyperlinks
Once you have a bunch of hyperlink sources in your document, you need some way to navigate through them. If you set the Appearance of the hyperlinks to Visible, you can view them by choosing Show Hyperlinks from the Extras submenu on the View menu.
If you can’t find the source of a hyperlink, select the link in the Hyperlinks panel and click the Go to Source button (or choose Go to Source in the panel menu).
Alternatively, you can select a hyperlink name in the panel and click the Go to Destination button (or choose Go to Destination from the panel menu) to invoke the hyperlink itself. This means you can use hyperlinks to navigate around your document (or documents) even if you never plan on exporting the files as PDF or SWF at all!
Don’t forget that you can put hyperlinks on a master page so that they’ll show up on all the document pages based on that master.
Updating Hyperlinks
If you’ve used named hyperlink destinations from another document and those hyperlink destinations later change (perhaps a URL changes, for instance), then you’ll need to update your hyperlink source. To do that, select the hyperlink source in the Hyperlinks panel and choose Update Hyperlink from the panel menu. If the other document isn’t currently open, you’ll need to hold down the Option/Alt key when choosing Update Hyperlink.
Exporting Hyperlinks
As we noted earlier, hyperlinks are only “live” in your exported PDF or SWF files (with the exception of the Go to Hyperlink Destination button in the Hyperlinks panel). However, your hyperlinks will only be included in the PDF or SWF if you turn on the Hyperlinks checkbox in the PDF Export or SWF Export dialog box.
Bookmarks
Any PDF file longer than a few pages should have bookmarks, which appear in the Bookmarks tab on the left side of the screen in Acrobat. Bookmarks make it easy for the viewer to find a particular section of the document. In InDesign, bookmarks appear in (surprise) the Bookmarks panel, shown in Figure 13-4 (choose Bookmarks from the Interactive submenu in the Window menu).
Whenever you build a table of contents in a document, you can automatically add those entries to the Bookmarks panel by turning on the Create PDF Bookmarks check box in the Table of Contents dialog box (see Chapter 8, “Long Documents”). You can also add a bookmark anywhere in your document by selecting an object or placing the text cursor in some text and then clicking the New Bookmark button in the Bookmarks panel. You can name the bookmark anything you want.
As with the hyperlinks in the Hyperlinks panel, you can use the bookmarks to navigate around your InDesign document, even without exporting as PDF. To jump to a bookmark, double-click the bookmark name in the Bookmarks panel.
As with hyperlinks, you can build bookmarks all day long, but they won’t show up in your PDF files unless you turn on the Bookmarks checkbox in the Export PDF Options dialog box.
What if you want bookmarks generated from a table of contents to appear in the Bookmarks panel, but you don’t want the actual TOC? In InDesign CS3, you can simply place the table of contents on the pasteboard or on a hidden layer, and the bookmarks still show up in the PDF. That trick doesn’t work in later versions. Instead, generate the TOC on the pasteboard, and make sure that an edge of the TOC text frame overlaps a page.
Sorting and Editing Bookmarks
You can move a bookmark by dragging it up or down in the list. Note that, as you drag, InDesign displays a black bar indicating where the bookmark will land when you let go of the mouse button. If you drag the bookmark on top of another bookmark, the bookmark becomes a sub-bookmark (or a second-level bookmark or a nested bookmark, or whatever). To “unnest” the bookmark, drag it out again.
If you add one or more custom bookmarks to a document and then update your table of contents, the custom bookmarks will appear at the bottom of the list again. Oops! One way to fix this is to select Sort Bookmarks from the panel menu—this sorts the list of bookmarks chronologically by page, and alphabetically for multiple bookmarks within each page.
To rename a bookmark, select it and move the cursor slightly, or wait for a second. InDesign should highlight the bookmark name so you can edit it. If that doesn’t work, select it and choose Rename Bookmark from the panel menu.
Buttons
Buttons are only useful in interactive PDF or SWF files, but they can do all kinds of things—jump to another page, play a movie, sound or animation, or hide or show another button.
You can make any selected frame or line into a button (except for frames that contain movies or sounds)—just choose Convert to Button from the Interactive submenu, under the Object menu or in the Context menu. Or, click the Convert Object to a Button button in the Buttons panel (which you can find in the Interactive submenu, under the Window menu). You can also turn a button back into an object by selecting Convert from Button.
An object turned into a button acts like any other object—you can even print it. But the object comes to life when you turn on the Include All option in the Export to Interactive PDF dialog box or the Export SWF dialog box.
The Way of Buttons
It’s important to remember that buttons are containers, like a special kind of frame. When you turn an object into a button, InDesign actually puts that object inside a button “frame.” This means you can select that nested frame (with the Direct Selection tool or by clicking the Select Content button in the Control panel), move it around, delete it, replace it with something else, and so on.
Behavioral Modification
To make a button actually do something—react when the user clicks it—you have to change the button’s behavior in the Buttons panel (see Figure 13-5).
1. Enter a descriptive name for the button (at the top of the Buttons panel).
2. Choose a trigger from the Event pop-up menu: On Release (that’s when the user lets go of the mouse button), On Click (when the mouse button is down), On Roll Over (when the cursor is above the button), On Roll Off (when the cursor leaves the button), On Focus (when the button is selected—either by a click or by a press of the Tab key), or On Blur (when a click or press of the Tab key moves the focus to another field).
3. Select one of the actions you want to associate with the Event from the Actions pop-up menu.
• Go To Destination. If you used the Hyperlinks panel to make a text anchor in this or another document, use this action to jump to that point. If the document that contains the anchor isn’t open, you can click Browse to select it.
• Go To First/Last/Next/Previous Page. Use any of these actions to jump to the first, last, next, or previous page. For example, you might assign these as navigation buttons, and put them on a master page of a document. Buttons work well on master pages because they appear on every document page tagged with that master.
• Go To URL. Like a URL hyperlink, the Go To URL action hands off the URL you specify to the default Web browser. This can be any URL, including http://, file://, or mailto:.
• Show/Hide Buttons. Buttons are a kind of “field” (in PDF parlance). While Acrobat has several different kinds of fields (such as text entry fields, check box fields, and so on), InDesign currently supports only button fields. Whenever you want objects to appear or disappear on your page, make them into buttons. Even if those buttons have no behavior of their own, they can still be controlled (made visible or hidden) using the Show/Hide Buttons action. When you select Show/Hide Buttons, the panel lists all the fields (buttons) in your document (not just the fields on the current page). You can click once in the box to the left of the field name to make the button visible (you’ll see a little eyeball), or click again to make the button hidden (InDesign draws a red line through the eyeball). Click a third time to make it neutral (this action won’t affect the button at all).
• Sound. After you import a sound file into your document, you can Play, Pause, Stop, or Resume it with this action. In exported SWF files, you can stop all sounds.
• Video. If you placed a movie file (see “Audio and Video,” later), you can control it using the Video action. After selecting Video, select a movie, and then specify what you want to do to it: Play, Pause, Stop, Resume, or Play from Navigation Point. Use the Media panel to set navigation points.
• Animation. If you animated an object (see “Animation,” later), you can control it using the Animation action. After selecting Animation, select the animation name, and then specify what you want it to do: Play, Stop, Pause, Resume, Reverse, and Stop All. Turn on the Reverse on Roll Off check box if you want, say, an animated object that flies onto the page to fly back off the page when you mouse off the button.
• Go To Page. Go To Page (which jumps directly the page number you specify), works only when exported in a SWF file. If you want to jump to a particular page in a PDF file, you need to use Go To Anchor.
• Go To State. If you created a multi-state object (see “Multi-State Objects,” later), you can jump to a specific state. For example, use the Go To Previous State and Go To Next State actions in navigation buttons that let users click through images in a slide show.
• Go to Previous View. This action returns to the last page the viewer displayed. If you jump from page 5 to page 20, Go to Previous View would jump back to page 5.
• Go to Next View. This action only works if someone has already invoked a “Previous page” action; it’s like the Forward feature in a Web browser.
• Open File. Use this action to open another file. You need to specify the file using an absolute file path; it’s much simpler to click the Browse button to let InDesign figure out the path for you.
• View Zoom. A button can control the current view settings in Acrobat. After selecting the View Zoom behavior, choose from among the many options in the Zoom pop-up menu, including Zoom In, Zoom Out, Fit in Window, Rotate Clockwise, and Single Page.
Figure 13-5 Adding Behaviors to a Button
After creating an action, you can select another Event/Action combination and add it to the button. This means one button click can do a bunch of things at once: go to another page, show a hidden object on that page, and immediately start playing a movie. To remove an action, select it and click the Delete Action button.
Tab Order
When you open a PDF in Acrobat and press the Tab key, the focus jumps to the first field on the page; press Tab again, and it skips to the next field. If the field is a button, you can press Return/Enter to “click” the button. But who specifies the order of the buttons? You do. As long as you have more than one button on a page, you can choose Set Tab Order from the Interactive submenu (under the Object menu). To reorder a field in the list, select it and click the Move Up or Move Down buttons—or better, just drag it into the correct position.
Rollovers and States
Multimedia designers love rollovers. A rollover is an image on an interactive page (like a PDF or a SWF) that changes in some way when the user moves the cursor over it. The rollover may appear to change color or shape; or maybe it lights up to indicate that it’s a hotspot. When you move the cursor away, the image returns to its original form. InDesign supports both normal rollovers and two-state buttons (buttons that change when you click on them). It also lets you make “hot spot” rollovers—where you roll over or click a button and an image changes somewhere else on the page.
We use the term “image,” but rollovers can involve text or lines as easily as images; it’s up to you. However, if you are using images, you need to create the graphics for each state of the rollover: the original image on the page (the “off” state), and the image you see when the cursor is over the image (the “on” state).
Remember that buttons are just containers, typically with objects nested in them—a text frame, a graphic frame, a line, or even a group of objects. The Buttons panel gives you a way to change the content of a button container depending on two events: the user moving the cursor over the button or clicking on it.
It’s easy to add and change states (see Figure 13-6):
1. Select the button and the Buttons panel. (You can open this panel if it’s not visible by double-clicking the button).
2. To add a Rollover state, click the [Rollover] tile in the State Appearance section of the Buttons panel. If you want to add a state for when the mouse is clicked, click the [Click] tile. If you later decide you don’t want a state, select it and click the Delete button at the bottom of the panel.
If the thumbnails in the panel aren’t big enough, make them larger by choosing Panel Options from the panel menu.
3. Click the state you want to alter, and then, on the document page, make a change to the content of the button. Let’s say you have a button with a picture in it. You can click on the Rollover state, and replace the picture with a different one (just the way you normally would; with the File > Place command). Or, you could make the edge of the button turn red.
Each state actually contains a different object and the Buttons panel gives you a way to make each one visible—one at a time—almost like the Conditional Text panel. So you can add a drop shadow to the object inside the Rollover state and when you switch back to the Normal state, the drop shadow disappears.
4. Test the states using the Preview panel.
Hot Spots
Making a rollover that affects objects elsewhere on the page involves creating a set of actions: Convert all of the relevant objects to buttons and then use the On Roll Over and On Roll Off events to make those objects Visible or Hidden at the appropriate time(s). You could, for example, have one button that, when rolled over, makes two other buttons visible.
Why have an invisible button? Don’t think of buttons as just something you click; if you want a picture to appear when you click a button, you make two buttons: a visible one that you click and a hidden one that appears when you click the other button.
For example, let’s say you want an image of a dog to appear when you mouse over a text button. For the dog image, you convert it to a button, and you select the Hidden Until Triggered check box in the Buttons panel, This hides the dog image in the SWF or PDF file until it’s made visible. For the text button, you choose On Roll Over for Event and Show/Hide Buttons for Action, and set the dog image to become visible. To make the dog image disappear again, create an On Roll Off event that makes the dog image invisible when the mouse leaves the text button.
Tool Tips
What about creating a tooltip for a button in the PDF file? Choose PDF Options from the Buttons panel menu, and then type a description, such as “Turn to next page.” Whatever you type in the Description field appears as a tooltip when you mouse over the button.
You can also use the PDF Options dialog box to determine whether the button is printed. For example, you may want a “Submit” button to appear on the screen but not print when the PDF is printed. Turn off the Button Is Printable option.
Multi-State Objects
The purpose of the Object States panel is to let you create little slide shows within an interactive document. Here’s the way it works. You insert a bunch of images that act as slides in a slide deck. Then you arrange them on top of each other, select them, and use the Object States panel to convert them into a multi-state object, with each image becoming a state. Finally, you create navigation buttons for cycling through the images (see Figure 13-7).
Figure 13-7 Create a Multi-State Slide Show
There is no limit to the number of states that you can include in a multi-state object. Only one state is visible on the page at a time. For print and PDF output, only the active state appears in the final output. That means you can use multi-state objects as a way to create conditional images in your document. Just make sure you have the right state selected when you print or export.
To create a multi-state object, follow these steps:
1. Place or create the objects that will be part of the multi-state object. If you’re creating a slide show, you probably want the image frames to be the same size. By the way, a state does not have to be a single item—it can be a collection of items, such as an image and its caption.
2. To stack the images, select them, and click Align Horizontal Centers and Align Vertical Centers in the Control panel.
3. With the images still selected, click the New button in the Object States panel. (To open the Object States panel, choose Object States from the Interactive submenu on the Window menu.)
A dashed frame appears around the multi-state object.
4. Use the Buttons panel to create navigation buttons that trigger the Go To Next State and Go To Previous State actions when the mouse button is released.
5. Use the Preview panel to test the navigation buttons.
6. Export the document to SWF format. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t work in PDF.)
Edit States
Editing a multi-state object is fairly intuitive. If you resize or rotate the selected multi-state object, all the states are transformed as well.
One tricky issue is figuring out the difference between adding a slide to a slideshow and adding an object to a state. For either task, select both the object and multi-state object. Click the Add Objects to Visible State button to add an object to the selected state. Click the New button to add a whole new state to the multi-state object.
To paste objects into an existing state, cut or copy one or more objects, select the multi-state object, click the state in the Object States panel, and choose Paste Into State from the panel menu.
To duplicate a state, select a state to base the new state on, and choose New State from the panel menu.
To convert a single state in a multi-state object back to a set of independent objects, select the state in the Object States panel and choose Release State To Object from the panel menu. To convert all states in the multi-state object to objects, choose Release All States To Objects.
To hide the multi-state object in the exported file until it’s triggered by a button, choose Hide Until Triggered from the panel menu.
To reset all multi-state objects in the document to the first state, choose Reset All Multi-State Objects To First State from the panel menu. When you select a state, the object remains in that state, even if you close and reopen the document. This option is a quick way to reset all the multi-state objects.
Audio and Video
Sometimes movies and sounds in PDF and SWF files do a better job of explaining things than plain ol’ quiet, static print. For instance, watching a movie about how to change the oil in your car might help more than trying to figure it out from ten pages of printed diagrams and explanations.
For movies, you should place FLV, F4V, SWF, or any video file with H.264 encoding, such as MP4. For sounds, place MP3 files. These formats take advantage of the rich media support offered in Acrobat 9 or later and Flash Player 10 or later.
But what about AVI, MOV, and MPEG videos and WAV, AIF, and AU sound files? They should play just fine in interactive PDF files, but they don’t work in exported SWF files. Use the Adobe Media Encoder application to convert video file formats to FLV or F4V. Adobe Media Encoder doesn’t convert audio files, but you can use a program like Apple iTunes to do that.
Importing Sounds and Movies
You import a sound or a movie file in the same way that you import text and graphics—use the Place feature or drag the file from a Finder/Explorer window (see Figure 13-8). To place the file on a page, click the place icon to create a frame that is the size of the original file. If you drag the place icon (to specify the size of the frame), then immediately choose Fit Frame to Content to scale the frame. Placed movies and sounds are automatically embedded.
By the way, when you import a sound or a movie, make sure you don’t put any other text or graphics on top of it. Acrobat isn’t smart enough to play rich media behind other objects (see “Movie Limitations,” late in this chapter).
Linking to Web Videos
Instead of placing a movie, you can link to a movie on a Web site (via a URL). Linking to an online movie is useful if the movie will change after you export the PDF file, or if the movie is large and you don’t want to transport it along with (or inside of) your PDF or SWF file.
Draw a rectangle of any size—you’ll resize it later—and then select it and choose Video from URL from the Media panel menu. Specify the URL containing the a video file that Flash supports: FLV, F4V, or H.264-encoded MP4. You can use either the standard http:// URL or an rtmp:// URL, which is Adobe’s proprietary protocol developed specifically for streaming video over the Web. Click OK. If the movie is valid, InDesign finds the movie on the Web and gets its dimensions (you need a live Internet connection for this to work, obviously).
After you click OK, use the Fitting features to make sure the frame is the same size as the movie. You can scale the movie, but don’t try to clip or mask it. There doesn’t appear to be any way to link to a streaming audio file; just video.
Movie Options
When you select a movie object, the Media panel displays options for that movie (see Figure 13-8). To open the Media panel, choose Interactive from the Window menu, and then choose Media.
• Play on Page Load. When you turn on this check box, the movie begins playing as soon as the page it’s on is displayed.
• Loop. When you turn on this check box, the movie plays in a continuous loop in the SWF file.
• Poster options. A poster is a still image associated with a movie or sound—basically what you see on the InDesign page and in the PDF file (before you activate the movie). If you choose From Current Frame, InDesign grabs the first frame of the movie. If you don’t want the first frame, drag the slider to “scrub” the movie until you see the frame you want to use. Then click the icon to the right of the Poster pop-up menu to use that frame as the poster. If you’re creating a document that will be used for both print and onscreen web, then you should probably select Choose Image—this lets you pick a high-resolution image (like a PSD or a TIFF file) to stand in for the movie, both as a poster and when you print.
You can use any size poster you want, but posters are always cropped to the size of the movie itself. It’s best to make sure that the poster and the movie have the same dimensions.
• Controller. This option determines which controller buttons appear while the movie is playing. If the movie file is a Flash Video (FLV or F4V) file or an H.264-encoded file, you can choose from a number of controller skins that vary in style, but they all do essentially the same thing—let users play, pause, and stop the video and control volume. The controller is hidden. If you want the controller to appear when the user mouses over the movie, turn on Show Controller on Rollover.
If you’ve placed an AVI, MPEG, or other legacy file, you can display a basic controller that appears in the PDF file. Note that SWF files you place may have their own controller skins applied.
Use the Preview panel to see what the selected controller looks like.
• Navigation Points. Navigation points are useful if you want to play the movie from a different starting point. To create a navigation point, advance the video to a specific frame, and then click the plus sign icon. For example, in a training video, you could set navigation points at the beginning of each section. Create separate buttons that start the movie at each navigation point. (When you create a button that triggers a video action, select Play from Navigation Point, and then specify the point.)
• PDF Options. Choose PDF Options from the Media panel menu. The Description you type appears as a tool tip when you mouse over the movie in Acrobat (but only if the movie has a poster). If you want the movie to play in a floating window rather than on the page itself, turn on Floating Window, and specify the size and position of the window.
Sound Options
Use the Media panel to set sound options for the selected sound object, usually an MP3 file (see Figure 13-9).
• Play on Page Load. When you turn on this check box, Acrobat begins playing the sound as soon as the page it’s on is displayed.
• Stop on Page Turn. Stop playing the sound when someone turns to a different page. This option isn’t available if the audio file is a non-MP3 file.
• Loop. Play the sound file continuously. This option isn’t available if the audio file is a non-MP3 file.
• Poster. You only need to give a sound a poster image when you want the viewer to be able to click on it to play the sound. If you have set up another button to play the sound, you can leave the Poster pop-up menu set to None. If you do want to use a poster image, choose Standard (which gives you a silly little speaker icon image) or Choose Image to select an image from a standard file dialog box.
Figure 13-9 Sound Options in Media Panel
To change the default Standard image, save an image in the JPEG format to a file named StandardSoundPoster.jpg, and put it inside the Images folder in the Presets folder inside your InDesign folder.
Media Limitations
Some aspects of exported movies and sounds are still a bit clunky. For example, there’s usually a pause before and after a movie plays, making it hard to have seamless loops of movies. (A pain when you want to have a soundtrack looping in the background.)
Here are a few other limitations Acrobat and Flash Player have, and how they affect making interactive documents using InDesign:
• You can scale a movie on your page and it does appear scaled when you play it. However, you cannot crop a movie, even though you can crop the movie’s poster image on your InDesign page—the movie will scale itself to fit inside the cropped area.
• Similarly, you can’t clip movies into nonrectangular shapes. Acrobat and Flash Player can’t deal with nonrectangular movies, so they’ll appear as full-frame rectangles in the PDF or SWF file.
• As exciting as it might feel to rotate or shear movies and sounds, all that goes away in the final exported document. Oh well.
• You can use the Hyperlinks panel to apply a hyperlink to a movie or sound frame (or to a button), but, unfortunately, they’re not active in the exported document.
• While it might appear that you can apply transparency effects to movies and buttons, these effects will not appear in the exported file. Drop shadows, however, work (because drop shadows are images behind the movie).
Animation
The Animation feature gives you the feeling that you can be a Flash developer without knowing a thing about scripting. In a matter of seconds, you can make an object appear to fly in from off the page, spin around, or fade into view.
Animation works only in an exported SWF file, not in a PDF file. But there’s a workaround to animate a PDF, which we’ll get to later.
Let’s quickly define our terms. In InDesign, animation consists of the animated object and, in some cases, a motion path, which is the path along which the object travels (see Figure 13-10). The circle end of the motion path is where the animation begins; the arrow end is where the animation ends. Of course, some animations, such as Fade In and Shrink, don’t move along a path.
Motion Presets
InDesign includes motion presets that make it easy to animate an object quickly. For example, you can draw a red ball, select it, and choose the Bounce and Smoosh motion preset in the Animation panel, and . . . that’s all there is to it. When you export the document to SWF, turning to that page makes the red ball drop, appear to flatten out as it hits bottom, and rise.
Animation Panel
The Animation panel has plenty of options to sort through, but don’t be intimidated. Most of the options are easy to figure out.
• Preset. Choose the motion preset you want to apply. You can then modify the settings, and you can use the Pen tool and Direct Selection tool to edit the motion path. If you want to reuse these settings, save the motion preset. You can use saved presets in other documents and even in Flash Pro.
• Event(s). Use the Event(s) option to determine what triggers the animation in the SWF file, such as clicking the animated object or mousing over it. You can trigger the animation using more than one event. In fact, be aware that turning on one event doesn’t turn off another. For example, if you choose On Self Click (which starts the animation when you click the object), On Page Load remains selected.
If you choose On Roll Over, you can create a cool effect by selecting Reverse on Roll Off. In other words, if the animated object flies in from the left when the object is moused over, the object flies back where it came from when the mouse is moved off the object.
• Speed. Do you want the animation speed to be a steady rate? Choose None. Do you want it to start slowly and speed up? Choose Ease In. The object moves faster where points on the motion path are closer together.
• Animate. The Animate pop-up menu options help you print the animated object properly.
For example, suppose you want an object to fly in from off the page, but you want the object to appear on the page for printing. If you choose To Current Appearance from the Animate pop-up menu, the object’s properties are used as the ending point of the animation. That way, the object appears on the page at the start, and can be printed. This option is especially useful in slide shows.
But what if you want to print an animated object that flies in from off the page and then blurs? If you choose To Current Appearance, the printed object is blurry. Instead, choose To Current Location from the Animate pop-up menu. This option uses the current object’s properties (not blurry) as the starting point of the animation and the object’s position as the ending point.
• Opacity. Choose None if you want the animated object to remain solid. Choose Fade In if you want the object to gradually become visible or Fade Out to gradually become invisible.
• Visibility Select Hide Until Animated or Hide After Animating to make an object invisible before or after playback.
Custom Animation
Create a custom animation by selecting an object and a path and clicking the Convert to Motion Path button in the Animation panel (see Figure 13-11). Then change the settings in the Animation panel. If you selected two closed paths, such as two rectangles, the path on top becomes the motion path. You can’t convert more than two selected objects.
Figure 13-11 Draw a Motion Path
When you convert selected objects to a motion path, the path start moves to the center of the object. This means the path may flip to the opposite site of the object, depending on the path direction. If you don’t like the direction, undo the animation and choose Reverse Path from the Paths submenu on the Object menu. Then try again.
Edit Motion Paths
Edit the motion path the same way you edit other paths. Use the Direct Selection tool to select the path and move points. Use the Pen tool to add and remove points.
The points on the path determine the speed of the object; the object moves faster where points are further apart. To slow down the object at a certain point of the path, add more points in that area.
Button Launch
Buttons and animation play nicely together. In the Buttons panel, you can create buttons that play, pause, stop, and reverse an animated object. See “Buttons” earlier in this chapter.
Complex Animation
What if you want to animate the same object multiple times? For example, let’s say you want a headline to fly in from off the page, spin around, and fly off the other side of the page. Although you can apply only one animation to an object, you can copy and paste the object, and then use the Paste in Place command to make sure the object appears in the same place.
Think of it like a relay race. In this example, the first animated object uses the Fly in from Left preset with Hide After Animating selected. The next copied object uses the Rotate preset with both Hide Before Animating and Hide After Animating selected. The last copied object uses the Fly out Right preset with Hide Before Animating selected. It’s a little clumsy, but there’s always Flash Pro...
The Timing Panel
By default, animated objects play in the order in which they were added. Use the Timing panel to change the order, play animation effects at the same time, or delay animation (see Figure 13-12).
Turn to the spread containing multiple animated objects and display the Timing panel (choose Timing from the Interactive submenu on the Window menu).
The Timing panel shows the animations on the current spread based on page events. If you have one set of animations that occur when the page is turned to and another set of animations that occur when the page is clicked, you can change the timing of each event. To do this, choose Page Load or Page Click from the Event menu. Page Load and Page Click appear only if at least one item on the page uses that event.
Drag items up and down in the list to change their order. The items at the top of the list are animated first.
To play multiple animated objects at the same time, select the items in the list and click the Play Together button to link the items. If you change your mind and decide you don’t want one or more of the linked items to play together, select them and click the Play Separately button.
To play a group of items a specific number of times or to play them in a loop, select the items and then specify the number of times the animations play, or select Loop.
You can change which event triggers the animation either in the Timing panel or the Animation panel. In the Timing panel, select the item and choose Reassign To On Page Load or Reassign To On Page Click from the panel menu.
Animation in PDFs
Animated objects are not included when you export a document to interactive PDF. However, if you want your InDesign animation to appear in the exported PDF, there is a fairly simple workaround.
To get animation in a PDF file, you can select an animated object in InDesign, export the selection to SWF format, and then place the SWF file in the InDesign document. Depending on your circumstances, you may want to use different layers for the original animation and the placed SWF file, or you may want to move the original animation to the pasteboard. When you export to PDF, the SWF file can be played in the exported PDF.
Reuse Motion Presets
The motion presets you see in the Animation panel are the same ones that appear in Flash Professional CS5. In fact, when you create a custom motion preset in InDesign, you can save it as an XML file and import it into Flash Pro for use there, or you can send it to your InDesign pals.
To save an animation, select the animated object, and choose Save from the Animation panel menu. Type the name and click OK.
If you want to make the saved preset available on another computer, in Flash Pro, or to someone else, save the preset as an XML file. Choose Manage Presets from the Animation panel menu (see Figure 13-13). Select a preset and click Save As. Specify the name and location of the motion preset, and click Save. When you do this, the motion path is saved, along with the Duration, Speed, Scale, Rotate, and Opacity settings.
To import motion presets that have been exported from either InDesign or Flash Professional as XML files, click Load in the Manage Presets dialog box, and then double-click the XML file you want to import.
Page Transitions
Normally, if you switch from one page to another in your interactive document, the transition is (more or less) instantaneous—like flipping from one channel to the next. But you have the option to spice up your multi-page PDF and SWF files by adding more interesting transitions. You can find the Page Transitions panel in the Interactive submenu under the Window menu (see Figure 13-14).
Figure 13-14 Page Transitions panel
The Page Transitions panel gives you two ways to choose a type of transition: You can pick from the Transition pop-up menu, or you can choose Choose from the panel menu. Both do the same thing, but the latter displays a dialog box that shows you all the transitions at the same time. In either case, you can get a preview of the transition by placing your cursor over the displayed graphic. The transition is applied to the current page.
Most transitions also let you specify one or two parameters, such as which way a wipe wipes or how fast a dissolve dissolves. You can control those in the lower half of the panel.
If you want every page to have the same transition, you can turn on the Apply to All Spreads checkbox in the Page Transitions dialog box, or click Apply to All Spreads at the bottom of the panel. You can override those transitions later on a page-by-page basis.
You can use the Preview panel to test transitions (make sure in Document Mode, not Spread Mode).
You can also choose Page Transitions for all the spreads in the Export to Interactive PDF or Export SWF dialog box. The Export SWF also has an Interactive Page Curl option, which lets people drag a corner to turn the page.
To view transitions of an exported PDF in Acrobat, make sure that you’re in Full Screen Mode. In the Export to Interactive PDF dialog box, you can select the Open in Full Screen Mode option. In Acrobat, choose Full Screen Mode from the View menu; press the Escape key to exit.
Previewing Interactive Documents
If you’ve worked with interactivity features in versions of InDesign before CS5, you’ll be especially happy about the Preview panel. It means you don’t have to export to PDF or SWF whenever you want to test your interactive objects. You can preview buttons, hyperlinks, media, page transitions, and animated objects from within InDesign (see Figure 13-15).
To display the Preview panel, choose Preview from the Interactive submenu on the Window menu. You can also click the Preview button in the lower left corner of the Animation, Timing, and Buttons panels.
In its default state, the Preview panel is too small. You’ll want to drag it out to enlarge it. In the lower right corner of the panel, click a button to determine whether you’re previewing the selection, spread, or document. If you’re previewing the document, you can click the Go To Previous Page and Go To Next Page arrows at the bottom of the panel to move to different pages.
You can change the settings to determine what displays in the Preview panel. Choose Edit Preview Settings from the panel menu. The options are the same as those in the SWF Export dialog box.
You can also preview the document in your default web browser by choosing Test in Browser.
Presentation Mode
Presentation Mode is like Preview Mode on steroids. All the panels, menus, and toolbars are hidden. Only the content appears. Does it preview interactive objects? Unfortunately, no. As its name implies, it’s especially useful for giving presentations. Presentation Mode can turn your document into a slide show—especially useful if you’re using Adobe Connect (choose Share My Screen from the File menu),
Press Shift-W to turn Presentation Mode on and off (if there’s a text cursor, pressing Shift-W just inserts a capital W). Or, choose Presentation Mode from the Screen Mode submenu on the View menu. Table 13-1 shows which shortcut keys work in Presentation Mode.
Table 13-1 Presentation Mode Shortcuts
You can’t edit the document in Presentation Mode. But with a dual screen monitor, you can have two windows open on the same document (choose New Window from the Arrange submenu on the Window menu), and put one of them into Presentation Mode.
Interactive PDF Export
There are now separate commands for creating print PDF files and interactive PDF files. You export an interactive PDF by selecting Export from the File menu and choosing Adobe PDF (Interactive) from the Format or Save as Type pop-up menu. InDesign displays the Export to Interactive PDF dialog box (see Figure 13-16).
Figure 13-16 Interactive PDF Export Options
Embed Page Thumbnails. Create a thumbnail preview for each page being exported. Thumbnails are displayed in file dialog boxes and in Bridge. Turn off this option if you want a smaller file size.
Create Acrobat Layers. Save each InDesign layer as an Acrobat layer within the PDF. The layers are fully navigable, which lets Acrobat readers generate multiple versions of the file from a single PDF.
Create Tagged PDF. During export, InDesign can tag text elements based on a subset of the Acrobat tags that InDesign supports. This includes recognition of paragraphs, basic text formatting, lists, and tables. If you want more control over the tags, use the Tags panel to apply tags before you export. See “XML” in Chapter 7, “Importing and Exporting.”
View and Layout. Determine the initial view settings and layout of the PDF when it’s opened.
Open In Full Screen Mode. Display the PDF in Acrobat or Reader without menus or panels. To advance the pages automatically in a presentation, select Flip Pages Every and specify the number of seconds between page turns.
Page Transitions. If you used the Page Transitions panel to specify transitions, choose the From Document option to use those settings, or override them by selecting one page transition for all pages.
Buttons And Media. Select Include All to allow movies, sounds, and buttons to be interactive in the exported PDF. Select Appearance Only to include the normal state of buttons and the video posters without interactivity.
Compression, JPEG Quality, and Resolution. To keep file size down, images are compressed. You can control the trade-off between quality and file size in these three pop-up menus.
SWF Export
We’ve been babbling on for the past 20 pages about creating interactive SWF files; it’s time we get down to actually making one. To export a document in the SWF format, choose Export from the File menu, and choose Flash Player (SWF) from the pop-up menu. After clicking Save, you’ll see the Export SWF dialog box (see Figure 13-17).
Figure 13-17 SWF Export Options
Note that when creating a document for SWF export (or for an interactive PDF), you get a better onscreen view of transparency and color effects if you first choose Document RGB from the Transparency Blend Space submenu, under the Edit menu.
Most of the features in this dialog box are self-explanatory: For example, you can choose a size (in pixels, or by a percentage of the current document size). Remember that one pixel equals one point. You can choose which pages to export, and if your document is set up for facing pages, you can choose whether or not to treat each spread as a single page.
We can never remember how to write the HTML for embedding a SWF file into a Web page. Fortunately, the Generate HTML checkbox does all that for us. And, if you turn that checkbox on, you can also turn on the View SWF after Exporting checkbox to open it (the HTML with the embedded SWF) in your default Web browser. There are several other features of this dialog box that require a tad more explanation.
Interactivity. Have you made buttons, hyperlinks, and page transitions in your document? If so, you need to turn on these checkboxes to make them live in the SWF. If you turn on the fourth checkbox, Include Interactive Page Curl, people viewing your SWF will be able to “turn the page” by dragging a corner (as in a book).
Rasterize Pages (Advanced tab). You can turn all vector objects (including text) into a bitmap by turning on the Rasterize Pages checkbox. That removes interactive elements and tends to make a large SWF file. It’s very rare you’d want to do this.
Flatten Transparency (Advanced tab). This option removes live transparency from the SWF and preserves the transparency appearance. But if you select this option, all interactivity is removed from the SWF file.
Text (Advanced tab). InDesign and Flash compose text differently, so if you choose Flash Classic Text in the Text pop-up menu, your text may appear different in the final SWF. Nevertheless, in most cases, this is the option you want, as it keeps file size down and makes the text visible to search engines. You can also choose to convert text to vector paths (outlines) or to bitmaps (pixels), which maintains the look and feel, but at significant cost.
Compression and Quality (Advanced tab). To keep file size down, bitmapped images are usually compressed using JPEG and complex vector curves are sometimes simplified in the SWF. You can control the quality of these algorithms in the final three pop-up menus.
FLA Export
As we said at the start of the chapter, if you really want cool SWF files, you’re going to need Adobe Flash CS5 Professional. But you can still use your InDesign layouts—just export them to the Flash format, FLA (which was called XFL in CS4). When you do this, you’ll see the Export Flash CS5 Professional (FLA) dialog box (see Figure 13-18).
Figure 13-18 FLA Export Options
Most of the features are the same as the options for creating SWF files. Flatten Transparency requires explanation, though. Flash does not share the same transparency engine with InDesign, so transparent objects may look very different after you open the FLA in Flash. If the look of the object is more important than your ability to animate it in Flash, you can turn on the Flatten Transparency checkbox.
Text conversion is similar to SWF export, but there is another option, Flash TLF Text, that maintains links between text frames. If this option is turned on, you can select Insert Dictionary Hyphenation Points to allow hyphenation.
Whoever edits the FLA file in Flash Pro will be happy that, unlike in CS4’s XFL output, buttons, page transitions, hyperlinks, and animation transfer to Flash Pro. Only the appearance of movies and sounds are passed on in the FLA file, but the media files are packaged in a resource folder, making it easy for the Flash developer to hook them back up.
Web Publishing
Someday, possibly today, you’re going to thank your lucky stars that InDesign can create rich media PDF and SWF files. Even if today most of us are still making money with print projects (or trying to, anyway), we still think that getting interactive files, complete with buttons and movies, is pretty dang cool.