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.
The Mobile Article Explorer lets your reader’s see the pixel-perfect layout as well as a simple text version of the article that is easy to scroll through.
Check out the video below that features a beautiful layout from Experience Life magazine.
The Mobile Article Explorer widget is available to those with Pro plans (or higher).
It’s just one of the ways that in5 will make your layouts even more reader-friendly.
It’s well-known that Adobe InDesign is a powerful layout tool.
It’s slightly less well-known that InDesign is loaded with interactive capabilities (buttons, object states, animation, audio, video, etc).
These interactive capabilities were partially supported by interactive PDFs…until mobile devices came around.
These devices used all different kinds of PDF reader applications, and none supported the Flash-based interactivity inside the PDFs.
Now even the desktop version of Adobe Reader doesn’t automatically come with the Flash Player installed.
So how can a designer make use of all the interactive tools?
HTML can support the interactivity that PDF does not, and it can be viewed on mobile devices.
InDesign has a “technology preview” called Publish Online that publishes a document as HTML onto Adobe’s servers.
This is an amazingly fast way to get your document online and viewable.
However, the content is only hosted on Adobe servers and cannot be saved, moved, or modified.
What if I want to customize my output? Or host it on my own site? Or make it viewable to search engines? Or create an app?
If you want the files to be your own and to host them on your own servers, etc…you’re in luck, but you’ll need to use a tool other than Publish Online.
Keith Gilbert’s free script
Keith Gilbert discovered a hidden scripting object that let him make use of InDesign’s Publish Online export (essentially the same as the Fixed-Layout ePub export) and save the files locally.
The script is awesome and free, but limited in certain ways (e.g., you have to take some extra steps to create working page navigation, but Keith created a script to help with that as well).
in5 is fully-featured, supports all of InDesign’s interactivity, and lets you add new kinds of interactivity.
It’s easy to customize, built to host on your own site, has easy search engine optimization features, and the output can easily be converted into a mobile app.
