Jun. 24, 2009
Learn how to convert an object to a button and take advantage of InDesign’s sample buttons…
Buttons allow you to create real control over how a person will interact with your dynamic PDF/SWF. You can create buttons that will to go to particular page, take a client to your website, send you an email, open a file or even open a movie. In this post I’m going to show you how to create a button.
You can create a button from any text frame, graphic frame or object within InDesign. To create buttons it’s best to work from the Buttons panel. This can be found in the Window menu “Window > Interactive > Buttons”. When you’re ready to create a button, simply select the object with the Selection tool and click on the “Convert to Button” icon (see image below) at the lower right of the buttons panel.
Once your object has been converted to a button, you will see a button icon appear within the lower right of the object. This is a visual indicator only, it won’t print. If you cant see this little button icon within your new button, it may be for a few reasons; 1. You may need to zoom in on the object a little, 2. You may be in preview mode. If so, hit “W” to exit/enter preview mode, 3. You may have “Hide frame edges” on - to turn this off go to the view menu and choose “Show Frame Edges”.
Once you have converted an object to a button you can convert it back to a normal object by selecting it with the Selection tool and clicking where the “Convert to Button” icon was. It is now a “Convert Button to a Object” icon.
Rather than creating your own buttons InDesign, CS4 has some sample buttons built right into the application. You can access these sample buttons directly from the flyout menu of the Buttons panel (see image below), or you could change to the Interactive workspace. The sample buttons will be docked on the right of your screen. The sample buttons panel won’t be found within the Window > Interactive menu, don’t get caught out.
To add one of these sample buttons to your layout, first select it and then drag it directly to your layout. One advantage of using these sample buttons is that they are already interactive with actions applied. We’ll be looking at adding interactivity to buttons in the next post.
For more information on this topic via Adobe help click here.
[Click play to watch video tutorial, will commence once downloaded in full]
One Response to “Creating buttons”
great, but How do i get the next post with rollovers and things?
By richard on Aug 5, 2009