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InDesign Tutorial: Add interactive buttons to PDFs

Wednesday 16 Sep 2009

Take your video-enabled PDFs to the next level by adding a wealth of user interactivity control in InDesign.

Question of the day!

Neil Bennett
Editor

Do you share your creations online?

Question of the day!

Do you share your creations online?

% of Digital Arts readers agree with you

Yes
TBC
No
TBC

What do you create and how do you share it?

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Follow the conversation at @TabletChat

paintings & illustrations, mostly, which i upload to flickr.RT @fragmentedm

I draw manga/anime characters. I also do graphic design and photography.RT @spialelo

Yes. I usually put them up on my #deviantart account for feedback on how to improve.RT @spialelo


In our previous tutorial on creating interactive documents in InDesign, we created a PDF that featured a video embedded in the file.

We set up an InDesign document and created a PDF from it so that when a user opened the PDF, the video played automatically. This month we’re going to take it a step further and create custom playback controls to give the user the opportunity to play and stop the video at will.

We’ll also look at the various actions you can assign to interactive buttons, the different button states available to you, and how to create buttons that appear to change entirely depending upon the status of the movie.

You can use any QuickTime movie clip and InDesign document you like for the tutorial. Once you’re aware of the interactive features InDesign offers, you can use the same technique to create custom in-document navigation, and even automatically place Acrobat into fullscreen mode. If you missed last month’s tutorial, you can find and follow it at digitalartsonline.co.uk/tutorials.


01. Open up the InDesign document you created for last month’s tutorial and navigate to the page that you inserted the video clip into. If you don’t have last month’s InDesign document, create a new one and import a QuickTime movie clip into a graphics frame using File > Place.

Tutorial continues...

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What is this?

Who: Illustrator and graphic designer Sam Hampton-Smith is based in Scotland. He’s a regular author of articles and tutorials for the graphic and web design press, an aspiring musician and lover of good food. He also loves everything related to typography.
Contact: hampton-smith.com, www.ohwrite.co.uk
Software: Adobe InDesign CS3 or higher, Adobe Illustrator CS3 or higher
Time to complete: 1 hour
On the CD or download: Files for this tutorial can be found on the cover CD or downloaded here