InDesign: ePub and Exporting

Name: InDesign: ePub and Exporting
Author: Patti Scully-Lane

Complete your page design journey with this Advanced InDesign course.

Preview the first lesson free — get full access to all 10 lessons.

Course: On-Demand

In this lesson, you are going to learn about the Liquid Layout feature in Adobe InDesign. In the early days of page layout, we were primarily creating documents for one output. But these days when we create a document, sometimes it's not only going to be seen vertically on a tablet, but it could also be seen horizontally on a tablet. With InDesign, we have the ability to create what are called Liquid Layouts. Those are layouts that allow us to very easily change from a portrait layout to a landscape layout with just a few tweaks to our document. I have the Liquid Layout document open from the lesson files folder in the Chapter Five folder. I'm going to change my workspace from the advanced workspace to that of digital publishing. When we do that, it will open up our Liquid Layout panel. With the Liquid Layout, what we have to do with our selection tool selected, we're gonna click on this Hiking Monthly logo at the top of our page one. When we look at the Liquid Layout panel, up at the top, it asks us which liquid page rule we are going to use. It can be controlled by the master, off scale, recenter, object-based or guide-based. Now, depending upon what it is you are doing with your layout, how you are changing it, one of these will be the best option for you. If you are taking a document and just making it larger or smaller, then the scale option would probably be the best for you, especially if you are keeping things relatively close to the original proportions. But because we are going to take and create a horizontal version of this document, we're going to choose the object-based layout rule and that one gives us a little bit more control. But there are a few steps that we have to take in order to make this work. So with that Hiking Monthly logo selected at the top, we're going to choose the auto fit for our content. What that means is that as we change the size and the layout, it's going to look at the size of our frame and auto fit our content into that frame. We're also going to resize the height and width of our object, and we're gonna pin it to the top-left corner of our document. Now, we're gonna go through the other three objects. On this page, the In This Issue, you'll notice that the auto fit option is grayed out because In This Issue is text, but we are going to not resize this, but we are going to pin it just to the left side of our page. With our Assateague Island text frame, we are gonna resize the height and the width of this, and we're gonna pin it to the left. Now with our photograph here, we're gonna auto fit, resize the width and the height, and we're gonna pin it to the bottom right. If we go down to our bottom left and switch over to our page two of our document, we're going to do some liquid rules for this page, but we're gonna leave our page three as it is. So you're gonna see the difference between what happens when you use a liquid page rule and when you do not. So with our Assateague Wildlife selected, we're going to choose object-based for our rule. We're gonna leave the resize as it is, but we are gonna pin this to the top left. We're gonna select our turtle image. We're gonna auto fit that. We are gonna resize the width and height on this and pin it to the left, our information here, under our photograph. We're gonna pin this to the left and our text frame, we're gonna pin that to the bottom right. So all of this sets us up to now create a new layout. We're gonna go to the layout menu and create an alternate layout. When we do, it's going to name our layout. So we have letter H for letter horizontal. That's what we're going to be creating. You could name it anything you want to, and it's from our source page. So it's basically saying that our source pages are letter V, vertical. You can choose a different size if you want to in here and a different orientation, but these are the default. So we're gonna leave those as they are. Now down here in the options, it asks us which liquid page rule we would like to use. So it's going to preserve the existing. So the changes that we made to the liquid page rule are going to stay, but this is a great place to go. If you're going to use something such as the scale rule, you don't have to go to each page individually. You can just do it all in here if you want to. As far as our other options are concerned by default, InDesign is going to link our stories. So that means if we make a change to the original, that change will be updated in our alternate layout, it's gonna copy the textiles to new style groups. So that means if we want to make our letter horizontal layout, look a little bit different from our letter vertical layout. We have a whole group of styles that we can change. And it's also going to do a smart text reflow. So wherever it is, we have threaded text frames. InDesign is gonna take a look at how those pages are laid out and decide how to reflow that text. So we're gonna click Okay.

Advanced Provider : Patti Scully-Lane 10 Lessons · 1h 11m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese

Course Description

In these lessons, you will learn how to output your interactive files properly utilizing the liquid layout feature and object export options. You will also export ePub reflowable and fix layouts as well as interactive PDFs for presentations and reports.

What You'll Learn

Output interactive files properly using the liquid layout feature and object export options
Export ePub reflowable and fixed layouts from InDesign
Create interactive PDFs for presentations and reports
Add video and audio to your pages
Prepare your videos for presentations
Apply object export options to control how content is exported

Key Takeaways

The course covers outputting interactive files using the liquid layout feature and object export options.
Learners export ePub reflowable and fixed layouts as well as interactive PDFs for presentations and reports.
The lessons include adding video and audio to pages and preparing videos for presentations.
Coverage spans liquid layout, object export options, fixed-width ePub, flowable ePub, PDF presentations, and interactive PDFs across the lesson sequence.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does this InDesign course cover?

It covers outputting interactive files using the liquid layout feature and object export options, exporting ePub reflowable and fixed layouts, and creating interactive PDFs for presentations and reports. It also covers adding video and audio to pages and preparing videos for presentations.

What export formats will I learn to produce?

You will learn to export as a fixed-width ePub, a flowable ePub, a PDF presentation, and an interactive PDF, as covered across the lessons.

Does the course cover adding multimedia to pages?

Yes. The learning objectives include adding video and audio to your pages and preparing your videos for presentations.

What skills are associated with this course?

Associated skills include Adobe InDesign, Adobe Authorware, Document Production, PDF Editors, PDF Writer, and Adobe InDesign Certification.

How is the course structured?

The course is organized into lessons covering Liquid Layout (Parts 1-2), Object Export Options (Parts 1-2), Exporting as a Fixed Width ePub (Parts 1-2), Exporting as a Flowable ePub, Exporting as a PDF Presentation, and Exporting as an Interactive PDF (Parts 1-2).