From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

Adding hyperlinks - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2021 Essential Training

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Adding hyperlinks

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- Many people think of InDesign as a print tool, but InDesign is a tool for laying out pages. And those could be either print pages or interactive onscreen pages. The three main interactive formats that InDesign supports, are PDF, EPUB and Publish Online. And each one of these support different types of interactivity. Like EPUB and Publish Online support animation, but not form fields. And you can make a PDF with interactive form fields, right in InDesign, but PDF doesn't currently support animation. But there's one thing that all of these formats support very well. And that's hyperlinks. Let's see how InDesign lets you set up hyperlinks in your documents. When anybody clicks on this logo, I'd like it to take them to a website. Now, when you're making a hyperlink, you can either select text with a type tool or an object with a selection tool. In this case, I want the whole graphic. This whole area to be a link. So I'm selecting the frame. Now we need the hyperlinks panel and we could find that by going to the window menu, coming down to interactive and then choosing hyperlinks. But there's actually a better way. So instead, what I'm going to do, is change my workspace in this pop-up menu in the upper right corner. We've been using the advanced workspace for most of this course. But now that we're making interactive documents, let's choose interactive for PDF. When we do that, we get a bunch of different interactive panels over here in the duck, including the hyperlinks panel down here, you can see that this document has one hyperlink in it already. But now to make a new hyperlink, all you need to do is type a web address in this field at the top, or whenever you make a hyperlink in a document, InDesign remembers it and it shows up in this little pop-up menu. So in this case, I'll just click on one. That's it I'm done. That whole frame is now a hyperlink and you can see it listed in the panel. Now let's switch to the type tool. And I'm going to select some texts down here in this text frame. Now let's make a new hyperlink. This time, instead of typing a web address in the URL field, let's click on the add hyperlink button at the bottom of the panel. That brings up the new hyperlink dialog box. And we have all kinds of options for our hyperlink here. For example, let's look inside the link to pop-up menu. This time, instead of making a link to a URL, we're going to make one to a page. Let's say page four. I'll just choose that out of this pop-up menu here. Now click Okay. And you can see the hyperlink is inside the text frame. I'll click out here so we can see it. The problem is that InDesign changed the color of the text and put this big underline under it. That looks terrible. Why did it do that? Well, whenever you apply a hyperlink to text, as opposed to a frame, InDesign applies a character style to the text. Fortunately, you can easily edit the style in the character styles panel, or you can just turn it off by double clicking the hyperlink here in the hyperlinks panel. See? when we made the hyperlink, it applied this character style called hyperlink to the text. So now you could change this to some other characters style if you want, or you could choose none. When you click okay, you'll see that the text changed back to the way it used to look. It's still a hyperlink though. I also wanted to point out a couple of things about the hyperlinks panel. First, let's take a look at the hyperlink we just created. See that icon in the right column? That icon, tells me that this is a page link. And if I click on it, it'll actually take me to that page. There I am on page four, the number to the left or that is the source. That is where the actual hyperlink is in my document. And if I click on that, it'll take me right back to the hyperlink. It even selects it on the page. Remember, it doesn't matter whether you select text or an object to make your hyperlink. They both work. In that first hyperlink we created, up here in the hyperlinks panel. You'll see a green dot. Green means the URL is currently active InDesign is going out across the web to check if that URL works. And it does. So it makes it green. If it were red, it would mean the link was broken or you might be offline. And as I said, when you export to interactive PDF, EPUB or Publish Online, all of these hyperlinks will work great. There's actually a lot more you can do with hyperlinks in InDesign. And if you find yourself wanting to learn more about this subject, consider watching my title here in the online training library called "InDesign, interactive PDFs."

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