Adding web content

You can add content from web sites to the pages of your folios with the web content overlay. This way you can display web content without the need for a separate browser. Let's see how! With CS6, there are two ways to create a web content overlay. With the first way, we start with the frame. The frame creates the viewing area in which the web content will appear. If I use an empty frame or a text frame, there won't any poster which is the static image that appears in the folio before the web content. If I use a frame containing a placed graphic or just a fill color, those will be the poster.

So here I have a placed photo of the Roux web site and I want it so when the user taps this it's replaced with the actual Roux web site in this area. I'll select the placed photo and in my Folio Overlays panel, I can see I've entered the URL for the Roux Academy right here, and I have some options; I can set it to Auto Play, so the page will load immediately as soon as this page is viewed, or I can leave this off and force the user to tap to view the web content. If I select Auto Play, I can also set the Delay, so it doesn't appear immediately when the page loads. I'll deselect that for now, so I want the person to have to tap to see the web page here.

I can also select options like Transparent Background. If I select this option and the web page I'm viewing has a transparent background, then I can see through the overlay to what's beneath it in my layout, otherwise I'll see the web content background. I can choose to Allow User Interaction or not, and no user interaction really means no interaction. The user can't click links in the page, they can't even scroll it. They can only view the content. And finally, I can set the web content to scale to fit the container I drew or to remain its original size. If I don't scale the web content and its larger than the frame I'm displaying it in, the web content will appear cropped and the user will be able to scroll to see everything.

So I'll leave this set on Scale Content to Fit. Now I also want a Google Map to appear over here in my design, and for that, I can take advantage of a new feature in CS6, where I can simply paste HTML code into my layout and have the web content overlay automatically created. So I'll switch over to my web browser, and here have the Roux Academy web site. I'm going to scroll down and I have the actual address here. I'll copy that. I'll switch over to Google Maps and paste it in, and press Return or Enter. And what I want to do is to get the code to paste into InDesign.

So I'll click on the link, and right here, Paste HTML to embed in web site, I'll just click once to select that and copy it. I'll go back to InDesign and paste. And InDesign goes ahead and creates a little frame for me, and when it's done, I can see that web content. Now this is just a static picture, and in fact, I can scale it down if I want to. So I'll Command+Shift+Drag or Ctrl+ Shift+Drag on the PC to make that frame smaller and fit in this area. And if I look in the web content overlay, I have some of the same options; I can Auto Play, I can choose the Transparent Background, I'll Allow User Interaction and I'll Scale the Content to Fit. Now let's preview.

Here are the posters, I can click on one, and now here's the actual Roux Academy web site where I can click and view the content. I can click Done, go back to my layout and I can click the Google Map, and scroll around it, and use its controls. And there's one more thing I want to show you back in InDesign and that's that you can take advantage of editing the HTML code when you place it directly into InDesign. I'll just right-click on the Google Map and I'll select Edit HTML, and here's that code that I copied and pasted from the Google Maps web site, and if I wanted to tweak any of that code, I could do so right here.

Adding web content to your folios can be a great way to enhance the overall experience by bringing dynamic content right onto the page, and you have control over when that content appears, how big it is, and whether users can interact with it.