Tutorial Description

After reading the February issue of Adobe’s online magazine which made good use of the interactive features of a PDF, I decided to create my own interactive PDF. What’s so interactive about an interactive PDF? Well, for one thing you can hide and show content on a page based on the user clicking a button. You can also use buttons to jump to specific pages. I put the latter of these features to use by creating a PDF with a table-of-contents that is displayed on each page. The requested page will appear when the user clicks on the page number. Hovering the mouse over the page numbers displays a brief description of the page. I also created buttons on a single page that will cycle through different images on that page. The following tutorial describes the process I used when creating my interactive PDF.

Create a table-of-contents

Open an InDesign document that you want to add interactivity to, or create a new multi-page InDesign document. To create the table-of-contents first create a new layer on the master page. Then, on that layer create the graphics and/or text to be used for the buttons. If you have multiple items such as a graphic box and a text box for a single button, group the text and graphics for each table-of-contents entry that will become a button. To the side of these buttons create a text box containing some brief information about the page that the button will link to. These text boxes will be pop-up boxes that will display when the mouse is over the button, and hide once the mouse moves off the button.

Create graphic shapes, or import images to be used as arrows which can be used to go to the next/previous pages. These aren’t that necessary because there are already buttons in Acrobat that do this. You can though, assign these next/previous buttons a view such as fit width or fit page, which gives them some use.

View screenshot

Creating the Buttons

Select each object you have just created (table on contents items, arrows, and pop-up descriptions) and one at a time do: right-click → interactive → convert to button. Resize the bounding box of the buttons to fit over the contents of the button. Now start with the pop-ups and do: right-click → interactive → button options. In the “General” tab give each button a unique name and change the “visibility in pdf” to hidden.

Once the pop-ups are done, move on to the table-of-contents items. Again do: right-click → interactive → button options and give each button a unique name under the general tab. Lastly, give names to your arrow objects.

View screenshot

Adding Events and Behaviors

Starting with the button for page one, start adding events by: right-click → interactive → button options. Select “Mouse Up” from the event list, and “Go to Anchor” from the behavior list. From the list of anchors select the page to link to such as “Page 1 [Fixed]” and the zoom, if you want the page to appear in a specific view such as fit visible. Click “Add”. This has added the event to jump to the specified page when the button is clicked. Now add the event to make the pop-up description appear. Select “Mouse Enter” as the event and choose show/Hide fields for the behavior. Each button you have created so far will appear in a list of possible fields to show or hide. Click on the square to the left of the pop-up description for the button you are working on (the button for page one) to show the eye icon. Click add.

To make the pop-up disappear when you move your mouse away from the button, add another event. This time choose the event “Mouse Exit” and then the show/hide fields behavior. Click on the square next to the pop-up description two times so that you see an icon of eye with a red-line through it. Click add, then click OK. Add these same three events with behaviors (mouse up, mouse enter, mouse exit) for all remaining page buttons.

For the arrows, go to button options, add a “Mouse Up” event with either the behavior “Go To Previous Page” or “Go To Next Page”. Set what ever zoom you want associated with these buttons. That's it for table-of-contents. But, what about something interactive on a single page?

Creating an interactive element on a single page

The same method can be use change items on a single page by selecting the text/graphic object and converting it to a button. Then you can add whatever events/behaviors you want to it or create other buttons that control that object. In interactivePDF.pdf file on this page I use buttons to cycle through a group of images that have been overlaid on top of each other.

Exporting the PDF

To create the PDF, go to File → export PDF. Choose where you want to save the file and an export options dialog box will appear. I’m using the Adobe preset “Smallest file size” since I’m posting this online. The only changes I’ll need to make to this preset is checking off the items in the list below. These items can be found on the general page in the include section.

1. bookmarks
2. hyperlinks
3. non-printing objects
4. interactive elements

Click export and you’re done.

View a sample Interactive PDF(2.82MB)

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