Creating a folio

After you've created your InDesign layout and added interactivity with folio overlays, the next step in the DPS project is to create the folio itself. In this movie, I want to create the folio for the Roux Academy that will include the course catalog and the reasons why it's great to study at Roux. A folio is what will appear as a whole publication or as an issue in the Library view of the Adobe Content Viewer or a multi-issue custom viewer. To create a folio you work in the Folio Builder panel which you can open by choosing Window > Folio Builder.

I have it open here and the first thing I'm going to do in the panel is to sign into my account. I'll go to the Panel menu and choose Sign In, or I can just click here. I'll enter my credentials and click Sign In. Now I can see from the filled in circle icon on the right that I'm signed in. You don't have to be signed into your account to create a folio, you can create a local folio on your machine and upload it later. So create a new folio, I'll click New and I'll name it Roux Academy.

The name of the folio does not have to be the same as the publication name that's shown in the Content Viewer. Next, pick a size that matches the dimensions of the device I'm publishing to. I'm going to publish this folio to the iPad, so I'll have the size be 1024x768, but I could pick from different screen sizes in the menu, or I could specify a specific Width and Height. I can also set the Orientation to be Portrait Only, Landscape Only or both. Next I have the option to create a local folio or to have it immediately uploaded.

For now, I'm going to create a local folio that I can upload later. Next I have to pick a default image format for the folio. In a folio there are two layers: the background image, and the overlays, which sit on top of the background image and contain all the interactivity. Everything in my InDesign documents that's not part of an overlay will be rendered as an image and this is where I choose the default format for those images. Individual articles can have different image format settings. Here I can choose Automatic to let InDesign determine whether it exports my pages as JPEGs, PNGs or PDF.

Any of the three choices can give me good image quality, but if I'm concerned about file size, there's a clear choice and that's PDF. It'll make smaller folios in terms of file size than either PNG or JPEG, and choosing PDF also lets users pinch to zoom in and out. However, PDF does have some limitations. First, only viewers in Apple's iOS support the PDF format. You can't preview PDF articles in the Desktop Viewer or in Android devices. You also can't use PDF for smooth scrolling articles.

If you import smooth scrolling articles into a PDF folio, those articles are converted to JPEG or PNG. However, PDF is still recommended format especially if you're targeting the iPad with retina display just because the big reduction in file size from a JPEG or a PNG folio. If I chose Automatic or JPEG I can also pick a JPEG Quality. Naturally as the quality the JPEG images increases so does the file size. In this case, I'm going to select PDF for my folio, which grays out the default JPEG choice, and click OK.

And when I click OK the Folio Builder panel switches so I'm looking at my new folio in the articles view, so Roux Academy > Articles. Now I have a Local Folio, and if I switch to the Folio View in the panel, I can see the disk icon which indicates this is a local folio, right there. I also need to set my Folio's properties which will include things that identify this folio in the Content Viewer library like a publication name and preview images of the cover. I need to supply those preview images because they aren't created automatically.

So before I go to set my properties I want to export images of the pages I'm going to use for those cover previews. If I look in my Pages panel I can see I have two versions of this layout; iPad Horizontal and iPad Vertical. I'll press Command+E or Ctrl+E to bring up the Export dialog box and I'll choose Format > PNG. I could also choose JPEG if I wanted to for the cover previews, and I'll export to the Desktop. I'll name the first one, RouxCatalog_ cover_H, and I'll select to export a range.

In the pop-up on the right, I can pick from my alternate layouts, so I'll pick my horizontal layout, and to just export the single first page of the layout I'll enter a :1. So the first page of the horizontal layout. I'll leave the rest of the options as they are and click Export. Then I'll repeat the process to create the cover preview for the vertical layout. Export, change the file name to RouxCatalog_cover_V, click Save, choose my vertical layout, :1 for the first page and click Export.

Now I can go back to the Folio Builder panel and from the Panel menu I'll choose Properties. I'll give this a Publication Name of Roux Catalog and I'll select the images I just exported for the cover previews. So I'll click on the folder, go to my Desktop and start with the vertical and repeat for the horizontal, and click OK. Now I have my folio created and set with the properties that I want, but at this point the folio is just an empty shell. It has no content yet.

The next step is to add that content in the form of articles.