Puerto Rico InDesign User Group Home Meeting Summary Archive Discussion Forum

Meeting Summary

Cross-publishing with Interactive PDFs
Thu, Jan 31st, 2008 at 6:30 PM
Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe
Event Details

On January 31st, over 40 people gathered for a truly eventful and enlightening evening.

The meeting began with opening remarks from Luis Santos, member of the IDUG Organizing Committee, explaining membership benefits as well as our upcoming 2008 schedule.

The main feature was Interactive PDFs with InDesign CS2/3. José M. Ramos, Adobe Certified Expert InDesign CS2, kicked off the presentation demoing various interactive online magazines. Among these were the Perfect Vision, and Jelly Fish.

He emphasized the importance of planning ahead and constructing the InDesign document with interactivity in mind. Among the topics explained during the presentation were the following:

Bookmarks
Bookmarks allow the user to quickly find important topics within the document. Every PDF document with more than a few pages should have bookmarks.

InDesign makes it a breeze to create these virtual place holders. To fully control them, you must access the Bookmarks panel from the Window Menu > Interactive. Once created, they can effortlessly be reordered and even nested within each other.

Hyperlinks
Hyperlinks are a must in interactive PDFs. All the tools you need to make these can be found in the Hyperlinks panel under the Window Menu > Interactive. The important issue here is to understand the difference between a hyperlink SOURCE and a hyperlink DESTINATION. The source being what ever holds the hyperlink while the destination represents the link itself.

Buttons
One of the cool things about buttons is that you can not only use them as triggers to launch certain actions, but you can also use them to hide elements in your PDF document and have them reveal themselves at specific instances. This technique was used to show how to build an image gallery inside the PDF. The trick here is to convert each image to a button and set each one to "hidden". The next step would be to create buttons that reveal the images when prompted simply by setting the action of each button to "show/hide".

Movies/Audio
No interactive PDF is complete without movies and sound. A Shockwave Flash file was added and set to trigger on page turn. Hence, playing automatically when a user entered the page where the video was placed.

Finally, some javascript was added within Acrobat Pro 8 to create a very cool drop down menu.

The meeting ended with the customary raffle where various IDUG members won very cool prices. Among these were books and the Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 software. Our thanks to Adobe, Peachpit and O'Reilly for making this happen.

Many thanks also to our Organizing Commitee members:

• Luis D. Santos who ran the show and was very cool and collected even thru the technical difficulties.
  
• Jorge R. Valenzuela, our DV Guy. He made a wonderful animation to break the ice at the beginning of our meeting. Look out Pixar! You can see it here.
  (Link to animation uploaded through IDUG File Exchange)
• Catalina García for running the raffle and working hard backstage.
  
• David Martínez who took all the photos and is responsable for making us look good.
  

We also want to thank our other volunteers,

• Beatriz Rodríguez for bringing the very expensive soda;)
  
• Jinery Candelario for setting up and maintaining our facebook account. She's our "all things social" expert.

Thank you

Many thanks to the Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Puerto Rico y el Caribe for supplying us with their Facilities for the meeting.

Upcoming Industry Events

Gráfica del Caribe 2008

• Date: March 14th and 15th
• Venue: Centro de Convenciones de Puerto Rico, San Juan

The largest graphic arts conference and expo in the Caribbean is coming to San Juan. Stay tuned for details.

Click here to visit their website.

Comments from attendees

"The presentation was excellent and exciting. The venue was also very comfortable."


"The presentation was very good. I didn't know you could do all of that interactivity with InDesign."

Next Meeting

Special IDUG Event at, Grafica del Caribe 2008

• Venue: Centro de Convenciones de Puerto Rico
• Date: March 15, 2008

Are you ready for print?
With all the time you've spent designing your job, you want to make sure it will print as you expect! You probably know that your monitor is "just a serving suggestion" when it comes to representing the final printed job. But it's helpful to know where the hidden pitfalls are in your favorite Adobe software.

At our upcoming meeting, we will have the pleasure of welcoming Noha Edell of Adobe NY as our featured speaker. Noha will be showing us "how it is done," and how we can reduce our agony and frustrations, not to mention the hot tips and tricks she'll be sharing.

Noha will cover:


• Best practices for constructing InDesign files with transparency
  
• What flattening really does, and how to control it
  
• Using InDesign's forensic tools to prevent problems
  
• Preparing your files for a print service provider
  
• How to export pages with transparency to Adobe PDF
  
• How to use Adobe Acrobat 8.0 to find and fix problems

Photos From This Meeting
Photos are available from this user group meeting.
See the photos