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There are several ways to make PDFs interactive when building them in InDesign. The easiest and probably most widely used way is to make hyperlinks that jump to pages within the current document, to pages in another document or to web pages. InDesign hyperlinks can be confusing, frustrating and even intimidating if youre just trying to figure things out intuitively, so lets take a close look at how to create hyperlinks in InDesign and export them into interactive PDFs.
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Tutorial Details
Program: InDesign CS3 (should also work similarly in CS2, CS4+) Difficulty: Basix Estimated Completion Time: 1 hour
Introduction to Hyperlinks
Most of the confusion in using hyperlinks comes from the names hyperlink and hyperlink destination. These two things are
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different and we need to be sure were talking about the same things or this will be very confusing.
A hyperlink is the actual link on the text in your document. The InDesign Help files call this a source. A hyperlink destination is where that text link is going.
It sounds simple put this way, but get to working with them and youll probably find yourself a bit turned around! InDesign CS3 has three types of hyperlinks (with corresponding hyperlink destinations): page, text anchor and URL. There are two other categories of hyperlinks, unnamed and named. The unnamed hyperlink is probably the one you will use most often, so well start with that one. A named hyperlink should be used for links that occur multiple times.
URL
For a web destination. In the URL field, type the URL. It must have http:// in front of it and be sure there are no extra spaces before or after it.
Text Anchor
To use a Text Anchor, you need to have already created a Hyperlink Destination (see below), so well talk about this one in a bit.
Page
This is to send the text link to a specific page in the document. You can also set the Zoom with this type of hyperlink.
Step 3 Editing a Hyperlink Destination from the Hyperlink Destination Options Dialog
If you need to edit a named hyperlink destination youve already created, go to the Hyperlinks panel flyout menu and select Hyperlink Destination Options in the middle of the menu.
Select the hyperlink destination you want to edit and click the Edit button (why you have to click an extra button to edit it I dont know!). The Hyperlink Destination Options dialog is also where you can see all of the named Hyperlink Destinations in your document and delete Hyperlink Destinations.
Step 3 Alternative Editing a Hyperlink Destination from the Hyperlink Options Dialog
You can also edit the hyperlink destination from the Hyperlink Options dialog (double-click on an existing hyperlink in the Hyperlinks panel) or New Hyperlink dialog (the one you get when you click the New Hyperlink icon on the Hyperlinks panel). Remember, though, editing the destination will change it for all the text links that have this named destination!
When exporting your interactive PDF you must check the Hyperlinks box on the General tab, under the Include section.
If you create many interactive PDFs, you can make a preset for exporting them so you dont always have to remember to check the Hyperlinks box. Go to File > Adobe PDF Presets > Define. Click on New and name it something appropriate like Interactive PDF. For the settings, at the very least, be sure to check the box for Hyperlinks to be exported. It might also be a good idea to go to the Compression tab and set your maximum image resolutions, probably to nothing more than 150 ppi because it will likely only be read
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on screen.
Hyperlinks on Objects
Above we only put hyperlinks on text, but you can put Page or URL hyperlinks on objects, too! How can this be useful? You could set up a kind of image map (like you can in HTML) where different parts of the image go to different pages or URLs or you could make an entire text frame a link.
Conclusion
Now that you understand how to create hyperlinks in InDesign, have fun applying these techniques to your in your next Interactive PDF project!