One of my assignments from my internship is taking a booklet and making it ready to be interactive on a website. I’ve made pdf’s for print and for web but I definitely didn’t know how to make a pdf that was originally print and make it interactive for online. Turns out it is a lot easier than you would think it is!

InDesign has a workspace that is called “Interactive for PDF” and it’s exactly what you would want it for. You are able to take certain text and link it to other parts. For example, the booklet I worked on had a table of contents. I was able to link the article to the actual page it was linked to. You open up the Hyperlink panel and then select the text. Click the new link button and options open for you. Pages, websites, emails, and files can all be linked. The style can be changed from a preset, kept the same, or a new character style can be created or used.

You can also add effects to the page transitions. There are Powerpoint style effects such as slide up or dissolve. The fun one is the page turner but it can be kind of tricky. Page turns can only be saved and viewed as a SWF file, which stands for Shockwave Flash file. It’s very cool but if you are trying to save it as a normal Interactive PDF and it;s not showing – that can start to get pretty frustrating. Luckily, I kept at it and used Adobe to help me out.

This is part of what I was hoping for in my internship and what I was nervous about. I was nervous about using a part of a software that I didn’t know but excited to try to figure it out by myself. Classes can only teach so much and it’s nice to know that I can learn as I am going in a work setting. And while it doesn’t have much to do with “designing” something, I’m still creating and changing one thing to another. I enjoy improving on something when you think it might be done.