How to Create an Interactive PDF Ebook with Clickable Tabs

recently i decided to update an ebook i created in 2020 called brand gram it's basically an ebook all about branding your instagram now obviously instagram is a constantly evolving thing and i thought it'd be a good idea to update it but not just update the information i decided i was going to make this ebook so much more fun and exciting and interactive and make it a bit more of an experience as i was working on my digital shop recently i was doing some research and started to stumble upon the world of digital planners now i already knew about digital planners and already had done a little bit of learning and mucking around trying to make sense of what they are and how they work and how you create them but i wasn't that interested in them and so i hadn't really dived deep into how they were actually created or how they actually worked properly this time around as i started digging around i started to really get it a bit more and it started to click a bit more about what people were doing and i started to think about well how can we take some of these elements of you know this interactivity with these digital planners being able to click on tabs and add little notes and things like that how can i apply that to an ebook so that ebook isn't just this plain boring pdf document that people end up just putting on a file on the computer you know reading once or twice and then sort of forgetting about it because you know it's a lot to read but making it something that they can put on their ipad or you know if they want to still put it on their desktop but have it so much more interactive and a bit more of an experience so it feels almost like having something that's a real book where they can flick through different pages they can click on tabs to get to different sections they can add notes put in pictures and it's a bit more like a journal and so it helps the learning process more because it's not just reading a heap of information but you're interacting with it and you know working at how you can apply what you're learning to your own brand more easily as i was working on it i started posting a few behind the scenes on my instagram stories and i had quite a few people going that's really cool what you're doing there i'd love to know how you did that suddenly there was all this interest in what i was doing and i assumed a lot of people already were aware of the digital planning world and had seen stuff like this before and it wasn't that exciting but i realized that you know maybe a lot of people don't know so much about this or they never thought about how you could actually apply that to an e-book and how you could make e-books a lot more exciting and interactive so in this video i want to share with you how you can actually create some of the things i've been creating and make your own ebooks more interactive and more exciting and i know that not everyone has adobe software so i'm going to show you how you can do it in canva in keynote and also in adobe indesign so then you can figure out how to do it in whatever software suits you and what you're going to feel most comfortable with yes [Music] so [Music] so [Music] i'm tabitha emma and i'm a brand design educator and in today's video we're going to look at how to make your pdfs and ebooks more interactive and exciting for the end user so let's dive in and get creating all right so let's have a look at how we did this in indesign first so the first thing you want to do is put in a box obviously you want to make sure you've set up your document correctly make sure it's the size you want a4 or letter depending on what you want to create now with our box we want to go to object corner options and then you see there's a little blue dot next showing you which corner you're picking so you can choose the type of corner you want so here i'm going to make a rounded corner and then you increase the size of it and so then you're creating the tab shape basically now obviously you can get really creative create whatever kind of tab shape you want i'm just showing you a real basic one to get you started to see how this all works so the next thing we want to do is add drop shadows so we want to go to effects drop shadow and then we want to change it i put it down to 25 i find that works best for me but whatever you want it to look like and then set the angle so that the shadow is going downward because that's what we want it to look like so that the shadow the tabs sort of shadow over each other so make sure that you angle it in a way that you know it makes it sit so that shadows down the bottom rather than up the top and then you know just change the transparency and size and get it just looking exactly how you want it to look okay now we have our first tab we want to put that tab down the very bottom then we're going to copy and paste and make the rest of our tabs making sure that they are all sitting the same amount apart from one another so carefully place them and do them in a way so you can see a little bit of the rounded edge as well you don't want it covering it up so it looks like a square now it to make sure that it fills from the top to the bottom once you've put them all in place and you've got enough tabs all you have to do is select them all and then pull it up to the top of the page and that way they all fit within your page now what we're going to do is add the cover so we add another square again now you can you know put in an image if you've got an image for your cover whatever you want to add i'll just demonstrate here by adding in a texture just to show you what you can do so here i've just added a paper texture and now i'm just making sure it fills that space so now we have our front cover so next thing we want to do is add the drop shadow again so we want to go back to adding effect drop shadow and this time we want to make sure the drop shadow goes to the right so you want to angle it so it's going right over to the right like that so i put it over here like this and then again putting the opacity down changing the settings so that i've got shadow looking just the way i like it alright so now we have our tabs and our cover so the next thing i'm doing here is labeling the tab so putting the text on them basically getting it all set up and then i'm going to show you how you can copy this onto each page really easily you want to go to p so what you want to do is go to pages and go to where it says a parent so this is the parent page as in every page will look like how you set up these pages so if i put this design these tabs and the cover basically the paper on every single page then it means i'm not having to copy paste every single time every time i create a new page it's already set up with that design and they all look the same so if you want your inside to look different from the cover you may want to set up these parent pages differently from your cover page but it's going to make it real easy to create lots and lots of pages with the same thing so i'll quickly add some text on the page this will make it easy for us to see which page is which as we go through the design so the next thing i want to show you is how to create the tab on the actual page so when you click on a tab and go to that particular tabs page you want that tab to look like it's at the front rather than behind the paper so what you can do is copy and paste the tab and you want to remove the drop shadow because we're just going to allow it to use the drop shadow behind in the original tab we don't want double drop shadow so get rid of the drop shadow and just use the just the shape now you can change the color if you want so if you want it to stand out a lot when someone clicks on that tab it's up to you but basically you just want to be putting that tab in the front and removing the drop shadow and of course we want to make sure we put the text back on top as well it's all about making it look like somebody clicked on that tab went to that page and now they're on that tab so i'll do this for two pages to demonstrate how this works for you so once you're happy with it you want to save it as a pdf now you open that pdf in adobe acrobat then on acrobat we can go to edit pdf now here you've got the option to add links so you want to go to add link make sure you cover that whole tab then we go to go to a page view now all you do is scroll to that page or you can put the page number at the top here then you press set link now when someone clicks that it takes them to that page so we do this for all the tabs so basically we just take it to that page set link now if you also want to make it interactive in terms of letting people fill in with text or check boxes what you need to do is click on prepare form now it may prompt you to save the pdf just simply save over it that's fine now what you want to do is go to the area maybe you had a text box or something you click on this one here that has a little t inside with the type and you just place in a text box and then this will allow people to put text in you can also have here check boxes so if you've got a list and you want people to be able to checkbox them you can put a little checkbox in like that so to test it out we press close and now we can test out how this actually works so as you can see you can click on the tab it takes you to that page if you want to duplicate these links on every page so we're not having to put them in for every single page all you have to do is select them then do control c or command c depending on which computer you're using and command b so you're just copying and pasting on every single page and then you're not having to create the links every single page so that's a real quick way of making sure you cover every page so as we test it here too as you can see with the box if you had a nice graphic of a box behind it it's going to look like someone can just fill that box in and it's really awesome they can add their own text the checks box they can just tick it so it makes it really interactive all right let's look at how we can do this in canva because i know not everyone has adobe software now with canva it's a little bit tricky if you don't have an image of a tab so i'll show you first how to do it without an image of a tab then i'll show you some recommendations about what i reckon would be a better way to do it so what you need to do is go to frames and you need to look for a frame where it's got this really rounded corner box so i'm using this one i found there is another one where the round edges are only small but it doesn't really work as well you really want that big rounded edge so i've filled that frame then with a paper texture so it looks like paper now you can't use the drop shadow effect on canva on something like this it's going to only work on the image not on the frame so what you can do is go to elements look up shadow and you can put a shadow element in so you can just place it really carefully into position to create that shadow make sure you put the next tab on top so you can see where that shadow sits and then you can muck around move the shadow around to make it look right you can also change the transparency of the shadow too if it looks a bit too harsh like this i feel like that looked a bit dark so you can turn the transparency down and it looks a bit nicer like that so you can see that it's got the shadow so you want to group that shadow and tab and then duplicate it for all the tabs that you need again making sure that you space them out the same so that they all look nice i know it's hard to character exactly how big it's going to be so first just duplicate them all then again just like in indesign you select them all and then pull them all together so that they go from top to bottom of the page all right so now let's put the cover on top so you want to find another paper texture so i'm just using something that's square to make sure that i can actually add the drop shadow this time because i'm not using a frame i'm able to add drop shadow so i've just used a square texture then i've gone to shadows drop and then clicked it again to change the settings and fiddle around with the settings to get the drop shadow look that i want for it now on the next page all you have to do is press duplicate to duplicate that page so on the next page i've just added a little heart shape and i'm putting a heart on the tab here just to show you how we're linking that now if you don't have acrobat and you want to be able to add the links within canva this is what you need to do simply click on the tab then you will see up here a link symbol then you link it to that page you select the page you want it to go to press go to page and it will take you to that page so this is how you do it in canva for linking if you're not going to be doing it in acrobat so as you could see making tabs in canva was a little bit trickier so to make it easier and to get a really nice tab look something you can do is look up some basically some png tab graphics so i found this one i quite like so if you just look up digital planner tabs make sure you're looking for png files and something like this where it's got the drop shadow on its really nice shape if you just put them in that's going to save you so much more time when it comes to creating these tabs and be a lot easier than trying to do it manually and trying to put on those shadows all the time so once you've finished with it on camera just save it as a pd yet and as you can see here we're not using acrobat i'm just showing how you can use it on anything see it clicks it's using it in the browser not accurate and it's still clicking through all right now let's have a look at how you do this in keynote so first of all you want to make sure that you set up your page to be the size you want so obviously if you use one of the defaults you're going to get just a regular slide size but we want to make sure that it's a custom size now to make your tabs you want to go up to shapes and get the rounded box and you want to move it so that it's a rectangle and so it makes that nice tab shape that you want now we can go over into format and you can change the color or you can fill it with a texture or whatever you want to do what however you want to make it so give it the color that you want and then you'll see over here shadow so we then want to add drop shadow so again play around with it so that you get the shadow that you want now put the tab in position and copy and paste to make all your tabs then you want to get a box shape and this is going to be your cover so we put that on the top and again fill it with whatever color you want make it look how you want it to look and again add a drop shadow now once you're happy with the page you're able to duplicate the pages so they all look the same to do this simply go to the slide right click and duplicate i'm just going to add some little icons and things here just so we can see which pages which show it makes sense when i'm linking them so you can see how it works now creating that tab that goes in front so what you need to do is just click on that tab and press bring to front now unlike indesign you can't really change it so that it looks straight on one side and rounded on the other so just play around with the shadow i find is the best thing to do to get it to look the way you want so it looks like it's sitting on top now just like canva you could download some png tab images you could find something that you really like purchase and use those if you don't want to use the shapes now to link your pages within keynote what you need to do is click on that tab and then right click and you'll see something that says add link and slide now here we want to click on slide and choose the slide that you want it to go to then press go to slide and it will now link to that slide now all you have to do is export it to a pdf once you're finished and you'll now have a pdf with tabs that click along to each page so i hope this gets you thinking about how to make your pdfs whether it's ebooks or workbooks whatever you're creating that's in pdf format a lot more interactive fun and exciting so it's more of an experience for the end user and of course let me know if you have any questions if there's anything you're unsure about want a bit more help with let me know in the comments below and if you'd like to learn more about branding graphic design and creativity then be sure to subscribe to this channel and i'll see you next time

Channel: tabitha emma

Views: 17,356

Keywords: How to Create an Interactive PDF Ebook with Clickable Tabs, create an interactive pdf, create an interactive ebook, ebook design, create an ebook, create clickable tabs, clickable tabs pdf, interactive pdf tutorial, interactive pdf canva, clickable pdf canva

Id: tjtwoNlcPuI

Length: 16min 9sec (969 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 15 2022