InDesign to SimpleHTML – Easily Repurpose Content with Uncluttered Markup

Simple HTML From InDesign header image

SimpleHTML is a new tool for InDesign that exports bare naked HTML from a Text Frame or Story.

There’s no <head> or <body> tag, no classes, no <div> wrappers, no clutter—just the HTML that you need to paste into a blog post (or email) editor.

How to Create an Animated Web Banner with InDesign & in5

The banner above this text was made with Adobe InDesign.

Yes, InDesign. The page layout tool.

InDesign Hidden Gems

While InDesign is known for print layout, it also has extensive interactive capabilities, including:

  • An Easy-to-use Animation Panel
  • A Timing Panel to create sequenced animation
  • The ability to create different Object States that change with interaction
  • Interactive actions for Buttons and Form Elements

Just because InDesign was originally conceived as a page layout tool, doesn’t mean you have to create things that look like books.

In this article, I’ll show you how use InDesign’s interactive features and the in5 HTML5 export to create a web banner.

Note that you can also use these techniques to create an animated GIF.

Link from one document to another with InDesign and in5

image for linked documents

Creating hyperlinks from one InDesign page to another or to an outside site is one thing…but what if you’ve exported multiple documents from InDesign and want to connect them together? Is it possible?

Yes! It’s easy to connect multiple documents that you’ve exported to HTML using in5.

The key is using relative URLS, meaning that their paths are related to each other.