Are you interested in using your design skills to publish digital content?

This 22-part course will start you off with the very basics and walk you through to creating advanced interactivity and publishing apps.

The lessons will show you how to build your content in InDesign and export with in5.

No coding required!

The entire course is available online, or you can sign up to have the lessons emailed to you one at a time.

Check out the course >>

This is a guest post by Sandee Cohen, adapted from Digital Publishing with Adobe InDesign CC by Sandee Cohen and Diane Burns. This article highlights the methods for adding interactivity to an InDesign document.

Types of interactive elements that can be added to InDesign documents

1. Links: Hyperlinks, Cross-references, Table of Contents
2. Bookmarks
3. Audio/video files
4. Multi-state objects
5. Buttons
6. Forms
7. Animations
8. Page transitions
9. Overlays

Each has its own particular uses, and some of the features may overlap. Before you start work, you need to decide which type of interactive element is right for your job or you could be stuck with an effect that can’t be exported for your finished project.

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InDesign has many strengths as an interactive layout tool.

One of its limitations, however, is that it doesn’t let you set a target attribute when creating a hyperlink. The target attribute lets you control how a hyperlink is open.

In this article, I’m going to take you on a deep dive of a new features that we’ve added in in5 version 2.6: Advanced Hyperlink Targeting.

Not only can you use this feature to control links in your web-based HTML, it also gives you a high degree of control in Web Apps, Baker Framework apps, and PhoneGap apps.

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Image credit: wikipedia.org

Faster Exporting

Yes, you read that headline right. Up to 100x faster exporting from InDesign to HTML! There’s nothing extra for you to do, just run the latest version of in5 and you’ll find it’s much faster.

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By default, in5 will export all pages in your InDesign document into a single HTML file. But there are a couple of reasons why you might want an HTML file generated for each page in the InDesign document:

1. Each page will have it’s own URL (so you can easily link to a page)
2. Loading only one page at time decreases load time in the browser, especially for long documents

The ability to export a document as multiple HTML files actually already exists within in5, though we haven’t done a great job of advertising it.

Both the Baker Framework (HPUB) and the Liquid State Publishing System Output options will export one HTML file per page.

Both outputs can be used directly on the web, though the Liquid State Publishing System option will probably be slightly better because the index.html file redirects to the first page (whereas in Baker the index file contains the page thumbnails).

One thing that is lost when switching to a multi-file format is the animated transition between pages. If you want to keep that transition, but also be able to link to individual pages, check out this solution on the Answer Exchange.