Create a PDF ebook from Adobe InDesign

- [Instructor] We saw how you can export a Word document to PDF format and fancy it up a bit with linked TOC and bookmarks but if you really want to do a beautiful job of laying out a book that's going to be exported to PDF, then you need to use a professional layout program like Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress or even the free Apple Pages will give you a lot more control over what you can do with a document and then all of those programs can export to PDF.

Going to show you just a really quick overview of how that's done with Adobe InDesign and then we'll also take a peek at pages. I'm jumping over to InDesign. This is how you would normally start with an empty facing pages document but here, I thought you'd like to see the final result and we've seen this layout in earlier videos. We're looking at it in Preview mode but if I switch to normal editing mode, you can see all the non-printing frames and so on and link graphics but do you see how it's using fancy type face and separate captions? We have images that have this cool little effect in the corners, we have a really cool chapter start font and so on.

Let's do that here in the book starter document. This document is not completely empty, it has a cover and it has the title page and a place holder for the table of contents and then the book contents starts right here in this text frame. In InDesign, as in QuarkXPress, everything goes into a frame or a box. So, we click inside this box. I'm double clicking to switch to the type tool and then you go to File, Place, you don't copy and paste, you File, Place, which is importing into the InDesign document and I always check Options here and make sure that Show Import Options is selected because I want to show you tht you have lots of choices about what happens with the formatting in the word document.

Essentially, do you want to keep all the styles and formatting or do you want to remove them because you're going to be applying your own styles but make sure to preserve local overrides and those are things like the italics inside the paragraphs or if there are any bold or superscript and that's typically what you want to do. I'll click OK and if you are missing fonts, it asks you do you want to sync and I'll say go ahead and sync. I'm not sure by Calibri Italic isn't available but we'll go ahead and click Close and now the entire text file is loaded, they say, in my cursor.

I'm going to hover over this frame and instead of just clicking to place or import the file, I'll hold down the shift key which changes the icon a little bit and that just says it's going to flow in the entire Word file, adding pages as necessary. And it did that and because I said don't include styles, you'll see we have some strange looking text frames and so on, but that's not to worry. I'm going to come back up to the top and then what the designer usually does is they'll do something like select all the text, I've just pressed command or control A, and choose the paragraph style that they've already created that should be applied to the majority of the text.

And, in this case, that's body text, so I'll go down to the body text and choose Body and then we have chapter headlines, so I'll find the chapter headlines right here and we go through the entire document and do that and place pictures and so on until we have a work of art like this thing and then from here you can export to PDF by going to File, either choosing one of the built-in Adobe PDF presets, High Quality Print is always a good suggestion or just choose Export and choose PDF for Print from here and we're going to save it out to the Desktop, click Save, and then you have lots of choices for what happens with your PDF.

Now, all of this information is covered in a lot of detail in a couple courses in the online training library. First, I have an entire course about using Word and InDesign together, so, if that's your bugaboo that you're not quite sure about how to bring in a Word file and format it and you're running into problems, this is the course that you'll want to watch. Or if you're not that familiar at all with InDesign and you'd like to step it up a notch with your PDF ebooks then I highly recommend David Blatner's course on InDesign Essential Training which he has available for basically every version of InDesign since it began here in the online training library.

Okay, so back here, then we're just going to go ahead and export the thing to PDF. Click Export and it exports the entire document and then it opens up, choose fit in window with command 0 and there it is now. Now, I might want to do additional editing here. For example, if we come over here, it didn't automatically make bookmarks, now there's ways for InDesign to automatically add bookmarks, that's really not the preview of this video but, essentially, that's the steps is that you bring the Word file into a layout in InDesign, you apply styles, you do other things, and then you export it to PDF.

Now, in Apples Pages, you don't really import a Word file. Instead, you open a Word file. So, you could start with a blank document and copy and paste but, remember, that's usually bad because you lose a lot of the formatting. Instead, just go to File, Open, and navigate to where your Word document is and then click Open. And it looks beautiful. So, it's just saying, well, the font Calibri isn't here, so it's substituting different font and let's see if we can make this window larger and then you can apply formatting by clicking right in here, you see that it brought in the same name styles from the Word file.

In Word it was called Body first, that's what it's called here. In Word this is called heading, that's what it's called here. And if we click right in front of encouraging variety and choose Insert, we can inset a table of contents for the document just like we could in Word. And here on the right it's saying what do you want included, which styles from this Word document should be in here? Maybe there's a heading too in there, so I'll turn that on as well and it's thinking about it and pulling them up here and then it'll appear here shortly. You can insert page breaks, you can bring in images, do all sorts of things, and then yay, it's all done.

From here, go to File, Export To, PDF. So, if you have a page layout program installed or if you're on a Macintosh, you can download Apple Pages which is free now. You can do a lot more with your book manuscripts before you export them to PDF.