From the course: InDesign Secrets
320 Combining Animated GIFs with InDesign Animations - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
320 Combining Animated GIFs with InDesign Animations
- [Instructor] You know that InDesign can make interactive documents with buttons and animations, right? But a lot of the animations are very basic, just like fly in, or fly out. So a lot of people have been trying to figure out how to extend the animations to do more things, like have a bird flying with wings moving up and down, stuff like that. It was Mikaela de Stefano who first showed me how to pull off this trick. And it involves importing an animated gif. For example, I'll simply go to the File menu, choose Place, and then grab this gif. This is a gif file that I downloaded from the free giphy.com site. So, my apologies and much appreciation to whomever created it. I'll click Open, and now, I can simply click, and it places that graphic on my page. Now, you know that animated gifs can be used on the web, of course. But it turns out, that you can import them into InDesign, then when you export a fixed-layout EPUB file, or you use Publish Online, the animated gif works, because those are based on HTML web technologies. Now, this will not work in a PDF at this time, which is a real bummer. But, I hope that Adobe adds that capability in the future. Anyway, here's what you do. After you place the graphic, the animation will not play on the InDesign page, but it will play inside a panel. Here's what you do. You go to the Window menu, choose Interactive, and then choose EPUB Interactivity Preview. You're probably going to want to make this panel bigger, so it's easier to use, but right there, you can see that the animated gif is working inside the panel. Okay, I'll click the stop button to stop that for a moment, and now, I'm going to tell InDesign to animate that gif. I'll do that by going back to the Window menu, back to Interactive, and then choosing Animation. From the Preset popup menu, I'm going to choose Fly in from Left. And I'll say that this should take about six seconds. Now, I want him to walk right off the screen, so I'm going to position him where I want him to end off, over here on the paceboard, and then down here at the bottom of the animation panel, I want to make sure that the Animate popup menu is set to To Current Location. If you don't see these settings, you may have to open up your Properties section. Now, I don't want him to fade in or out, so I'm going to come down here to Opacity, and change this to None. And also, I don't want him to speed up or down, I just want him to walk at a constant rate, so up here in the Speed popup menu, I'm going to change this to None. Okay, but there is a problem here. You can see this light-green motion path here, and it's not long enough. I want him to start from off-screen on the left, so I'm going to click once on that motion path to select it, then I'll place my cursor over the left edge, and you see how the cursor changes? Now I can drag this all the way off to the paceboard on the left side. That indicates that he should walk from the left side to the right side of the page. I'll click off here to deselect, and now let's try it out, back inside the EPUB Interactivity Preview panel. I'll click the play button, and let's see if it works. There he goes! He's walking right across the page. So, that's awesome! Now, as I said, this will work when you export a fixed-layout EPUB file, or if you use Publish Online, or if you use some other HTML export tool. Here, let's try it. I'm going to go to the File menu, and I'm going to choose Publish Online. I'll give this a different title, cause Untitled 2 doesn't do it for me. I'll call it animation test, and now, I simply click Publish. InDesign takes my InDesign file, uploads it to the web, and converts it into HTML for me. When it's done, all I need to do is click View Document. InDesign launches my web browser, and shows me that file, which is currently on their server. And there you go. The guy walks right across the page. Perfect! Now, of course, there's a lot more that you can do with animations and interactive documents. My friend Diane Burns has a couple of great titles on these subjects here on the online training library. You should check them out.
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.
Contents
-
-
161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
-
162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
-
163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
-
164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
-
165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
-
-
-
089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
-
090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
-
091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
-
092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
-
093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
-
094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
-
-
-
051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
-
052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
-
053 Understanding component information6m 39s
-
054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
-
055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
-
056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
-
-
-
037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
-
038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
-
039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
-
040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
-
041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
-
042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
-