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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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

This article will walk you through the process of creating a digital magazine: from the layout in Adobe InDesign to sharing your content on the web or through a mobile app.

It will show you how to use the options within the in5 (InDesign to HTML5) export tool to create your ideal digital magazine layout.

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Five years ago I had an idea.

I wanted to help my fellow designers publish digitally without relying on coders, and without being beholden to restrictive publishing pipelines.

I launched the project on Kickstarter and 238 people backed the initial version of InDesign to HTML5 (in5).

Thanks to the continued interest and support of many customers, in5 has grown through many updates and has helped designers build better digital publications year after year.

Today I’m announcing another quantum leap forward in what in5 can help designers create—without coding and—using the freedom of an open format.

The new capabilities are almost too numerous to list in a single post, so what follows is a high-level summary of what you can do with in5 version 3.1.

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