Adobe InDesign has long had methods for publishing presentations—directly from InDesign using the Presentation Mode or via PDF using Full Screen Mode—but these methods never reached the level of sophistication and control found in Powerpoint and Keynote presentations.

That’s because those methods didn’t support many of InDesign’s powerful interactive features like Animation and Multi-State Objects. They simply produced static slideshows with no controllable transitions between slides.

In the past, I’ve modified my in5 output from InDesign so that I could present slides using HTML and include interactivity in my presentations.

When I noticed that my favorite conference—Creative Pro Week—now includes an entire day on presentations (dubbed the Click conference) it got my wheels turning about adding explicit presentation capabilities to in5.

Presentation expert, Mark Heaps, is heading up that section of the conference and also presenting an InDesign session on presentations.

I reached out to Mark and asked him what it would take to make InDesign an awesome presentation tool. You can see the results of our discussions below.

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It sounds like I’m exaggerating doesn’t it?

I’m not.

Almost none of the interactivity in an interactive PDF actually works, even in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader.

What doesn’t work in a PDF

Here’s a list of things that you can create with InDesign that don’t work in a PDF:

• Animation
• Video*
• Animated GIFs
• Multi-State Objects
• Embedded HTML content (like YouTube videos)
• Button actions related to several of the above items
• Scrollable Frames
• Custom page transitions (like flipbook pages)

*Video was supported previously in Acrobat and Adobe Reader, but it was dependent on the Flash Player (which no longer comes bundled with the Adobe apps).

The introduction of smartphones and tablets—almost none of which now support Flash—and a slew of new PDF readers, essentially guarantee that interactive PDF features will not work when your clients view your PDFs.

To see the breakdown of an interactive PDF in action, and to get a sneak peek at the solutions that I describe below, you can watch the following video.

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Inside the latest issue of InDesign Magazine, Keith Gilbert’s review of in5 includes the clearest introduction to using in5 (InDesign to HTML5) and presents the most likely use cases of the product.

If you have any interest in digital publishing or interactivity from InDesign, Keith’s review is a must read.

Keith talks about the new features in latest version, what you can do with the HTML output, compares in5 to the other available options (like EPUB and Publish Online), and highlights some really great customer examples.

The issue is also full of other helpful InDesign topics, like hidden color tools and best practices for numbering pages.

You can buy the issue for $7.95, or get a whole year’s subscription and unlimited back issues for $59.

I’m not affiliated with the magazine. I’m just a fan and an active subscriber.

Creator, Matthew Goodman (who previously made the FunLab Nature Sounds apps), has made another cool project with in5.

This time, he’s created a digital magazine called Visual Thinker and it is a beautiful layout.

Check it out in the video below.

Want to create your own awesome project?

Try in5 for free

When I initially conceived of in5 (InDesign to HTML5), I imagined that designers would be laying out pages specifically for digital projects.

With the Page Formats available inside of in5—a Slider, document-like scrolling pages, liquid layout pages that fill the window— focusing on exporting items within page boundaries made sense.

However, there have always been designers who want to export digital documents from InDesign files which were originally designed for print, with little or no modification.

The previous approach

InDesign presented a bit of a challenge for in5 when spread elements spanned across multiple pages because each layout element has to “belong” to a single page (so it would appear on one page of the spread, but not the other).

For the reasons described above, wrestling with InDesign to get page elements to belong to two pages was not a high priority, so I created a half-measure (though I didn’t realize it was only a half measure at the time).

The Allow Page Items to Span Across Pages within Spreads option in the Advanced section of the in5 export dialog attempted to solve this by copying objects and shrinking their frames so that the copy only resided on the secondary page.

This worked for a rectangle, but only created a distorted copy of a triangle (let alone what it did to a textframe).

Significantly improved rendering of spreads for your digital magazine

With the introduction of the Flipbook with Page Peel format to in5 v3.1—which now supports two-page spreads—there was even more demand to export “print” spreads with spread items that span across two pages.

So, despite the status of 3.1.10 as a “minor” update, it includes a major rewrite of the Allow Page Items to Span Across Pages within Spreads option. You’ll find that the your documents which are designed with two-page spreads export significantly better with the latest version of in5.

The current version of in5 even synchronizes the On Page Load animation of the elements that span pages, so they’ll animate together as if they’re one element, even though they’re on separate pages.

Try the latest version of in5