Adding Interactivity to PDF Files

One of the most exciting aspects of working with PDF files is that they can include interactivity. You can create buttons that trigger actions, bookmarks that act as an electronic table of contents, hyperlinks that jump to a different page or to a web link, and you can include multimedia content such as movies, Flash animations, or sounds and sound effects. You can create these elements in InDesign, export your PDF file, and open it in Acrobat or Adobe Reader to activate the interactivity. You can also create notes in Photoshop that you can view and edit in Acrobat, or view and edit again when you return to Photoshop. Acrobat also has various tools for working with interactive elements.

Interactivity in InDesign

Of the Creative Suite applications, InDesign gives you the most ways to add interactivity to your PDF documents.

Interactive Elements

Here are interactive elements you can add in InDesign and export with a PDF file:

• Bookmarks. Add a navigational element that will be visible in the Acrobat or Reader Bookmark pane. Use bookmarks to create a table of contents structure for a PDF document. (Or create these automatically using InDesign's Table of Contents feature.)

• Hyperlinks. Add a hotspot area to text or graphics that link to another part of the document, to another document, or to a web site. (You can also create hyperlinks using the InDesign Table of Contents or Indexing features.)

• Buttons. Add a hotspot area that can call out a variety of behaviors, including playing movies and sounds.

Example: Adding Bookmarks

We only have space to provide a simple example of creating interactivity in InDesign. For more information, we recommend you pick up Sandee Cohen's InDesign CS2 Visual QuickStart Guide from Peachpit Press.

Start by creating bookmarks, with the Bookmarks palette (choose Window > Interactive > Bookmarks), that point to a page. To do this, make a page visible by double-clicking its icon in the Pages palette. Make sure that no existing bookmark is active (click the blank space at the bottom of the palette) and no text or graphic is selected. Option/Alt-click the New Bookmark icon at the bottom of the palette. This creates a new page bookmark. Repeat for other pages in your document (Figure 14-28, left).

Figure 14-28. Use the InDesign Bookmarks palette to create bookmarks for each document page (left). With a page bookmark active, select text and choose New Bookmark to create a bookmark for that text object (right).

To make a text bookmark, highlight a page bookmark in the Bookmarks palette. Then use the Text tool to select text on that page you'd like to make into a bookmark. Option/Alt-click the New Bookmark icon to create a text bookmark nested beneath the page bookmark (Figure 14-28, right). In our example, we repeated this process to add several text bookmarks.

Before exporting the InDesign files with interactive elements to PDF, in the General panel of the Export Adobe PDF dialog box (Figure 14-2, top left), check Bookmarks, Hyperlinks, and Interactive Elements to make sure that they're included in the PDF document. (If you create a PostScript file and then process it through Distiller to create a PDF, all interactive elements will be stripped out.)

Open the resulting PDF file in Acrobat or Adobe Reader to view the bookmarks on the Bookmark pane (Figure 14-29). Click them to jump to the appropriate page element.

Figure 14-29. Export a PDF file from InDesign to Acrobat or Reader to view and click the bookmarks links on the Bookmark pane and jump to a reference.

Interactivity in Photoshop

In Photoshop, you can create two kinds of commenting sticky notes and audio annotations that you can then view and edit in Acrobat or view in Adobe Reader. You can also subsequently reopen the file in Photoshop with the commenting intact.

To create a sticky note, choose the Notes tool. In the Options bar, you can specify author, size, and note color. Click the tool anywhere in the image canvas to create a note. Click inside the note and type to create the comment. You can also create an audio annotation with the Audio Annotation tool. These notes allow you to record your own comments or add sounds to a file. (They were most likely added to Photoshop for those designers who can't type comments.)

To export the notes in a PDF file, choose File > Save As, and select Photoshop PDF format. Choose Preserve Photoshop Editing Capabilities to be able to reopen the PDF file with any additional comments in Photoshop. By default, the annotations are exported with the PDF file. You can open them in Acrobat and Reader.

Interactivity in Acrobat 7.0 Professional

Acrobat 7.0 Professional gives you many tools, panes, and controls for working with interactive elements. Use Acrobat Help (Help > Complete Acrobat 7.0 Help) to read about these features:

• Bookmarks. Use the Bookmarks pane commands to create or modify bookmarks.

• Articles. Use the Articles panel to create articles that allow you to navigate through columns of text.

• Links. Use the Link tool to create and modify links that can trigger a variety of actions, or to navigate between PDF pages and documents or to web sites.

• Page Properties. Use the Pages pane to set actions that occur when opening or leaving a PDF page.

• Buttons. Create or modify buttons that trigger a variety of behaviors.

• Movies and Sounds. Import sound and video files with the Movie and Sound tools on the Advanced Editing toolbar, and control their play.

• Forms. Use the tools on the Forms toolbar to create forms that can be filled in, submitted, or printed.