Managing content in multistate objects

As with any other project, you'll likely to encounter changes along the way. Those changes will probably require that you add, remove or change content in a multi-state object. Let's take a look. I'm going to open up a file that I have in the Chapter 11 Exercise Files, in a folder called slideshow-manage, and just click Open. And I've converted my courses file into a multi-state object, and I'll just open up the Object State panel so you can see that.

And I can just tab through the states here. And I've got some content I need to add in here. Now, we're missing a picture, and I've got one that I want to place. So, I'm just going to use the Cmd+d shortcut, Ctrl+d of course on Windows, and we'll select Student in the Links folder for this exercise. And I'm going to place this, and it's really kind of big, and I don't want any objects in a multi-state object to bleed off the side of a page.

They can bleed into any adjacent articles in your folio, and we don't want that, so I need to make sure this is no wider than 1024. So I'll just come up here and change the size of the frame, and now I can just grab this and drag it into position, and let me get the Object States panel out of the way. Now you can see this is still a little bit big, but that's going to be alright. I'm going to take this. Alright, and I'm going to leave this where it is, I'm going to just drag around the sides here so that I can get the image and the multi-state object selected, and I'm going to go to Layers panel so I can see what's going on here, and I'm just going to open this up, and I've got the image.

I don't have the multi-state object yet, so I'm going to hold the Shift key down using the Layers panel, and I'm going to click on that on the multi-state object as well. So now I've got the image, I've got the multi-state object and I can get the Layers panel out of the way here, and I can open up the Object States Panel. Now from here I'm going to have a couple of choices, so I'm going to pull this out so you can see. On the bottom here with the buttons, I can either add that object to the visible state which is what I want to do, but I could also turn that image into its own state.

Now I don't want to do that, alright? Even though this says convert selection to multi-state object, when you have a multi-state object selected along with any objects by clicking on that you will actually just add those states to the current multi-state object. So I want this to go into the visible state. Now I'm going to just click that. Alright, now my image is part of this multi-state object, and you can even see that in the thumbnail, and I'm going to make that just a little bigger for you.

In the Panel Options, if you want to really be able to see what's going on, you can have your choices of the size of the thumbnails, and that does make things just a little bit easier. So I'm going to leave that there, and now I can get it out of the way. I've got this image and it's kind of large, but I've got the multi-state object selected, and I need to get the image. So, I can double click in here and now I have got the image selected, but I need to get that a little bit smaller, so I am just going to come down here now, and I can drag this up.

And now that I can see what I am doing, I am going to bring this down to about here, and let's see what else we can do. We can just sort of get this image into place, and again, I know that a lot of people don't like that content grabber, but when you're working with embedded objects into multi-state objects and scrolling frames, it really does come in quite handy. So I kind of like the way that is, and let's do something else here.

I've got the image selected and I'm going to get this out of the way here, and I'm going to open up the Folio Overlays panel and I'm going to pull this out and I'm going to scroll down to Pan and Zoom. I'm going to turn that on and I'm just going to leave that for right now, but let's remember that I did that. Now I've got a text frame here and I think that has to go in the last state. So lets do the same thing here, only we're going to do it a little bit differently.

I am going to drag this into position. And this time, I'm just going to pull this up and cut it to the clipboard, with the Cmd+X command, and now I'll select the multi-state object, and at the bottom of the panel, you can see that this button is now changed to paste copied objects into selected state. So that's what I want to do, and that's what I'm going to do. So there that is, and that's exactly what I wanted and so when we go through these states, we're good.

Now just one more thing, because I need to be able to navigate through these, I'm going to take these two arrows here and convert them to buttons with the Buttons and Forms panel, and I'll just come and convert them. And I'm going to do this real quick, because I've already shown you how to do this. I'm not going to bother with the appearance, I'm just going to change this to Go to Previous State, and we'll have this one Go to Next State, and I'm in pretty good shape here.

So I'm going to take a look at this now. Let me get this out of the way, and this out of the way, and let's open up the Folio Overlays panel, and we're going to turn off Auto-play, turn off Tap to Play. The only thing I'm going to leave on is the crossfade, because I've got buttons to control this now. And, I'm just going to select Preview > Preview on Desktop. Okay, so, we've got our slideshow, and before I start navigating through there, remember I turned this into a pan and zoom? Let's just tap on this, and I can now move this image around and see what's going on.

So, the reason I did that was because I wanted to show you, that you're not limited to just static content in a multi-state object. You can also put interactive content in there so, feel free to experiment, but now I can see that if I tap my buttons I can just go straight through here, and I apologize for the pixely look here but this is scaled down to fit the screen, and that's about it. So, while working with object states, as you can see, may be just a little bit tricky.

Taking advantage of some of the tips I've just given you, can help remove some of those complications.