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Interactive PDFs in Adobe InDesign CS4

As we move away from the days when the printed version of a document was always seen as the definitive one, Adobe’s PDF format becomes more and more important. InDesign itself allows you to create PDF documents; you don’t need a separate copy of Acrobat for this purpose. In addition to creating the PDF, InDesign allows you to make it interactive, thus enhancing the user experience of anyone who browses it. To ensure that these various commands are included in the PDF, you must activate the “Interactive Elements” option in the Export PDF dialog box.

There are five main kinds of interactivity which InDesign allows you to add to your PDFs: bookmarks, links, buttons, video and transitions. When viewing a PDF file in Acrobat or Acrobat Reader, bookmarks are named links which can be displayed in a panel on the left of your screen; clicking a bookmark takes you to the page to which that particular bookmark relates. Links and buttons are clickable hotspots which instigate an action of some sort, such as opening a web URL. QuickTime video can also be added to any page of a PDF file and transitions are useful when you want to create PDFs that can be viewed as presentations.

Bookmarks are typically generated automatically in InDesign and are linked to the table of contents feature. The table of contents definition window contains an option for creating bookmarks. If this is activated, InDesign will automatically generate a bookmark corresponding to each item in the table of contents pointing to the appropriate page.

Links can also be generated from the table of contents. Each table of contents entry will automatically become a clickable link which will take the user to the corresponding page. In addition, InDesign has a button tool which allows you to create a button on any part of a page. Using the Button Options command, you can then specify what happens when the button is clicked. Thus, for example, you could create a button hotspot over your logo and specify that, when clicked, it will take the user to the home page of your company website.

Video is brought into InDesign using the Place command in the File menu. The only permitted format is QuickTime. Once the video clip has been positioned, you can right-click it and choose Movie Options. Here, you can specify when the movie plays, whether it is embedded in the PDF file or referenced externally and whether the QuickTime controller bar will be visible.

The Transitions panel is a new addition to InDesign CS4 and allows you to associate transitions with all pages or selected pages within the document. Simply highlight a series of pages and then choose the required transition. To apply the selected transition to all pages in a document, choose the option Apply To All Spreads.

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