How to create an Adobe InDesign Interactive PDF

hello welcome to my tutorial on interactive PDFs today I'm going to take you through how to build an interactive PDF through Adobe InDesign and then we'll take it through over into Adobe Acrobat and make some finishing touches and showing you how to edit that pre-made form so first thing is when you're creating an interactive PDF you want to design your material first before you start putting in the interactive elements so I've created my creative brief here and I put out all of the the the text the icons the design all the boxes everything that I'm going to need first so I want to make sure that everything is in order and is in place and I've used margins and guides to make sure everything is aligned properly and the spacing is consistent as well I've also set up custom styles for my headings and my body and my secondary headings as well so to keep that consistent - so now we're going to transform the workspace into an interactive PDF workspace so we can change that and switch back and forth to different workspaces in the top corner here so I'm gonna choose interactive for PDF and I've already have it so I'm just gonna reset that you can also find it under the window menu workspace and interactive for PDF so within here I have all the tools I'm going to need to build out my interactive PDF and I'm gonna start with opening up my buttons and forms so the first one I need is I want to make sure that this area I'm going to have someone be able to type in their company name primary contact and so forth so what we need to do and I'm going to sort of turn back calling my my my guides here is I'm going to use my rectangle frame tool so you pull out the rectangle frame tool and you create a frame where you want the input field to go so I've created that there and now from here you're going to convert it into an interactive element right now just a frame so there's two ways in which we can do that the first way I'm going to show you is through the window the buttons and forms window so where it says type I'm going to click on the drop down and I'm going to come down to text field this is where I want them to allow to enter in the text now it's really important that we name all of our text fields or all of our interactive elements in the document and so here I'll just put in company now below we have some PDF options so if you don't see that you might have a little button to select and see more so I want to make sure it's printable because when we print it out if it's not selected then it would be hidden in the printing I want to do a required field so that when we submit you can't submit that windless that's required and I want to make sure it is scrollable just in case we have a very long company name it can still fit in there and I can just use my arrows back and forth to scroll through that this is just a horizontal scrolling this is not a vertical scrolling so in here I'm going to choose my font choice now make sure you choose a font that is readily available or more likely available to whoever is going to be opening this and choose a size that is appropriate so a size between 8 points to around 10 or 11 depending on the type size your type that you're using and nothing beyond 12 when you're using anything on 12 for body copy or any input copy it's almost too large and it tends to take up too much space if we're gonna need some extra space in here so I have that here now I've also gone ahead and done the other fields for phone and email and website now I've left the date area blank and that is because we can actually we can't put in an input date field unless we want to just put a basic text field I can just write the data in myself but if we want to have the ability to select a date from like let's say a drop-down calendar we can do that but it would have to be once we're finished with this and we can do that in Acrobat so moving below we have the project objective so I've created a just a regular rectangle box and I've put on here a stroke so the stroke is a one point with a 10% black so just something very light I don't need large blocks of colored boxes but so just a 10% black now I'm going to show you a little different way that we can add an interactive element element so we're going to convert this into an interactive element so what I'll do is I'll right click interactive and say convert to text field so it's the exact same way as if we were to come up here but there are instances where we're going to want to use this which I'm going to show you for the check boxes so in a text field I'm gonna say objective and my PDF options are going to be scrollable yes but I want it to be multi-line so when I click on multi-line now the scrolling is gonna be vertical and not horizontal so if I have multiple lines that'll be in a paragraph in here it won't scroll outside of the the box it might scroll just a little bit under again I'm going to change my font size and now I have three more text boxes here so I can do this you know over and over and over but the other thing that we can do very easily is we can just either duplicate it duplicate this box copy and paste and then just change the dimensions of that or what we can also do is we can select multiple boxes at the same time and do them all together so I'll demonstrate that just below here where it has brand attributes and core values I'll select both of those rectangles and I will set it to a text field I'll it adjust so make it multi-line now the only thing we would need to adjust is just the name so I'll want to add that now here we have some check boxes so what I've done is I've gone ahead and already pre-designed my check boxes right click and I will come down to my interactive and I'll convert that object to a check box I'll come up here and I'm going to change the name to visual identity and now you see the normal and off States well what happened was it a InDesign put in a default check box for me so to remove that I just need to double click in there and then just delete that default so now I have a normal state and the off state is duplicated so we need to adjust that off state and I don't want to have the check mark in there in my off state so while this is highlighted I'm gonna come over and double click and then I'll just delete that item so now I have on and off now what I've gone ahead and I've already built out the second option so these are the same thing as what I've just built here so what I would like for these is all to be on the off default so when you open up the PDF they are not checked and we can manually check them so next up we have combo boxes so I've already gone ahead and done a combo box using the same process as we did for the text field we create a rectangle frame place it in the area that we want it and we will come over to our type and I'll select combo box now this is going to be a drop-down menu so this will when we click on it will show different selection items for us what where we put those items are in the bottom here so our list items so I've listed different age ranges or you can come in and delete or ad and then we can also move them around so if I were to just select it hold it down grab it pull it up and then deselect it will lift and change I've done that now for the gender and the income level and education the difference between a combo box and a list box a list box will not be a drop-down so it'll just show everything there where you would just select so I'm going to convert my education to a list box so that you'll be able to see what the difference is so I'll put here high school in college and I'll rename that now it'd be area in which you're gonna see this is really really tiny so I need to stretch that open so that I can see multiple list items here let's go and change the font I'm going to make it a little smaller so that I can see more okay okay now moving along we are going to set in a client signature and we are going to add functionality onto the print button so to add a client signature I can again come to the rectangle frame set the area I want this the signature and change the type to signature field and that would be all we need there now for the print button the print button I'm going to select both of these because I want both of them to be a print button on their together so I'm going to group those and I'm going to come up to type and I'm gonna say button so this is going to be a button and I'm gonna say it name this print now we have a normal state we have a rollover if we wish and the rollover what I can do is I can double click in there and maybe I'll change my print color so I got normal and rollover now what we want to happen we want to add an action so the action that we're going to do here is going to be print form and that will just bypass the the menu window we can just open up the print dialog settings now the other type of action we can add on is a web URL which I have on the first page some icons so these icons I want to link to a web site so we have Instagram here so I just select my icon go to type add button and I'm going to name this my Instagram actions are going to go to a URL and we add our URL here and we can do the same thing for this if you wanted that to be linking to your website or another external site so now let's go and export this and see how it looks so I'm going to go under file and export now really important to know that the format needs to be Adobe PDF interactive do not select Adobe PDF print because none of those interactivities will come up so we want to make sure it's interactive and safe now we have another dialog window here and we're going to keep all of the default settings and just ensure that you are including forms and media if we do not include that if we just say appearance you're not going to have any interaction in there so we do want to include that and we'll say okay so now we are in Adobe Acrobat and this is a completely editable document so I can click in here and I can start typing I can press tab to go over to another section my project objective and I can start adding in some information you can see that it's a multi-line we have here this hover so if I were to click on that it's going to take me to Instagram and we have our check boxes so my visual identity my brand collateral and my digital assets so I can either deselect or select the ones that I want to have now if you only wanted to have one of these select it at a time and if you wanted to select one and then the others would turn off then we are going to be using a radio button and not a checkbox so I will demonstrate the difference of that whereas I will select all of these buttons and I will come to radio button so the radio button is this is the on-state I'll have it off and off and if I wanted the on-state to be different in that circle I can same thing double click inside and adjust that however I'd like now if I go to export and select one of these options if I go to the next one that one will turn off so you can only have one selection at a time so that it's a difference between a checkbox and a radio button now in the second page we have our drop downs so here is the combo box which has a variety of options in here and we have our list box so this is what the list box looks like you'll just see a few and then you can scroll through them so I can pick up any of these so you can either choose a combo or a list and at the very bottom we have our client signature where if you were to click here it's going to prompt you to sign this this field and I'm just going to cancel and then we have our print so here I'm hovering over the print you can see that it's changing color and I click and it will open up my print dialog box now the date function but that's one thing we wanted to add in here in order for our clients to add in the date so what I'm going to do is scan now I'm going to use prepare form so the prepare form element is going to give us some added features so if I click prepare form if you can't find it there you're going to go under view tools prepare form so I want to add a date in here so I'll come up to my date field I'll click here I'll come down to date I'll add a rectangle and I'm going to stretch it to the same length as my line and now just double click to open up your properties so we have some format and the appearance I definitely want to change the the font to be matching with the rest and the format of my date I can change so you can see the example current format this is how it will look so if you wanted to change it in habit maybe written out you can do it that way or you can have a long way and close so now if I click in the date area there'll be a little drop down for me to select the calendar and that is it that concludes our interactive PDF

Channel: Ashlea Spitz

Views: 74,589

Keywords: Adobe InDesign, indesign tutorials, interactive pdfs, how to design a form, acrobat, interactive, pdf design, graphic design, tutorials, design, indesign, illustrator, photoshop

Id: U5oK-InOpno

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 04 2020