In this two-part tutorial, Tom Green shows InDesign CS5 users how to use the interactive features. In these videos, Tom creates an interactive presentation and exports it to Flash to create a swf that can be displayed on a tablet.
Author: tom green
Tom is a professor of Interactive Multimedia through the Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning's School of Media Studies. Like all faculty in the program, Tom believes his students deserve to be taught by instructors who are regarded as experts in their field and whose knowledge of their subject is current with industry best practice.
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Flash files generated from InDesign are horribly bloated. Where it might be quick and easy to do in InDesign compared to Flash (for some people), you get a very large flash file.
If you are thinking of doing something like this for your website consider the bandwidth the final file will take.
And InDesign has a bunch of sample buttons already there in a Library, when you go to Window>Workspace>Interactive, there’s a sample buttons panel(library) there.
You can also create your own button graphics in InDesign, that are vector, and export great for flash and for print. If you create a button you like then go ahead and drag it into the library.
If you are looking to make this work in both print and web, then you are better off NOT creating buttons in Fireworks, and they really aren’t buttons when imported, they are just graphics. It would be best to use Illustrator to create the buttons so that you can export to Flash or for print if you wish. And you can re-purpose those graphics for print jobs too. It’s very limited to use Fireworks to create the graphics in this case. And I wouldn’t recommend that work-flow to anyone.
The sample buttons provided in InDesign are fully editable, and if you got Window>Effects you can see how they are made up of inner shadows, gradients etc. Use the Direct Select Tool (white arrow) to select elements of the sample buttons.
Nice idea … too bad Flash is near DEAD.
Plays on tablets ?? Too bad it won’t play on the most exciting tablet out there … you know … the one that is outselling all the others combined … the iPad !!
I love the idea of interactivity, and I definitely love InDesign, but Flash is a no-go for me.
This article is interesting http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/06/07/adobe.promises.live.flash.to.html5.ads/
Apparently they can convert the flash content to html5 on the fly?
Great tutorial…love seeing rural Ontario again too.
I am wondering about a few things….for the slideshow is there a way to add transitions (crossfades etc)?
And for the slideshow buttons…anyway of making the fwd button hide when at the last page and the back button hides when on the first page?
And I have done some simple animation testing of a ball going across a page…now let’s say if it’s on a spread and you only want to view the ball on the right side…do you know of any way to mask the object? What I mean is, the ball starts on what should be ‘offstage’ left (not visible) but in this case offstage is actually the left page show it shows up. Hope this question makes sense….great job!