Adding hyperlinks

- [Narrator] Many people think of InDesign as a print tool, but InDesign is a tool for laying out pages and those could be print or interactive onscreen pages. The four main interactive formats that InDesign supports are Swift or Flash, and that as you probably know is pretty much on it's way out. And then there's the PDF format, and then EPUB and Publish Online. Each one of these support different types of interactivity. Like EPUB and Publish Online, support animation but not form fields.

And you could make a PDF with interactive form fields right in InDesign, but PDF doesn't currently support animation. But there is one thing that all these file formats support very well and that's hyperlinks. Let's see how InDesign lets you set up hyperlinks in your documents. In this document from the exercise files folder, I want to make this logo in the lower left corner a hyperlink. When anybody clicks on that logo, I'd like it to take them to a website. Now that graphic is on a Master Page, so to change it, I need to go to the Master Page.

I'll go up to the Pages panel. Double click on A-Master, and now, I can select that object. I'll select it, then zoom in to 200% by pressing Command 2 or Control 2 on Windows. Now when you're making a hyperlink, you can either select text with the Type tool or select the entire object with the Selection tool. In this case, it's a graphic so I need to select the object, the graphic frame. Now I need the hyperlinks panel, and I could find that by going up to the Window menu, and then choosing from the Interactive sub-menu.

But, I want to show you a faster way. Instead, I'm going to come up here to the Workspace menu. It's up in the Application bar, and currently, it's set to Advanced. But I'm going to change this to Interactive for PDF. This Workspace is called Interactive for PDF, but it's not really just for PDF. They really should change that so it's just interactive. Anyway, inside this workspace you can see a bunch of different panels, including the hyperlinks panel. So, I'll click on that. And now, to make my hyperlink, all I need to do is make sure this is selected on the page, and then, type a URL in the URL field at the top of the panel.

Now in this case, instead of typing it in, I'm simply going to pull it out of this pop-up menu. Every time you make one of these hyperlinks in InDesign, it'll save it, so you can pull it out of the menu later. Okay. That's it. I'm done. That whole frame is now a hyperlink. And you can see it listed over here in the panel. Let's go back to the first page of the document. I'm going to use a secret shortcut, Command or Control Page Up. That's kind of like hitting the Back button in a web browser. It goes back to the last page that I was looking at.

Now, let's zoom back to fit the page in Window. And I can do that with a Command 0 or a Control 0 on Windows. And I'm going to grab my Type tool, and drag over this first line of text. I'd like to make that text a hyperlink. But this time, instead of typing a web address in the URL field, I'm going to come down to the bottom of the hyperlinks panel, and click the new hyperlink button. Up comes the new hyperlink dialogue box, and I have all kinds of options for my hyperlink here. First of all, you can choose what kind of link you want to make.

You could choose a URL that would send somebody to a web page. But in this case, I'm going to choose Page. This will make it so that somebody clicking on here will jump to a Page. Let's say Page four. I'll just type that into the page field here. I can even tell InDesign to give it a zoom setting. So when it jumps to page four, it will immediately fit the whole page in the window. Now, I'll click Okay. And I can see I have a hyperlink, but there's only one problem. 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, then InDesign applies a character style to the text. Fortunately, you can easily edit that style in the characters style panel. Or, you could simply turn it off by double clicking on the hyperlink here in the hyperlinks panel. See when I made that hyperlink? It showed up in the panel. And because my cursor is flashing inside that paragraph, it's highlighted in the panel too. So now, to edit it, I'm simply going to double-click.

Now, I can change this character style pop-up menu from hyperlink to any other style, or I'll choose none. Then when I click Okay, you'll see the text has returned back to the way it was. Now I want to point out a couple more things about the hyperlinks panel. First, take a look at the hyperlink we created. Right down here in the hyperlinks panel. You see that? In the right column? There's a little page icon. That icon tells me this is a page link. And if I click on that, it'll actually take me to the page. There's page four.

If I click on the number next to it, it's a hyperlink back to the original text. That jumped back to page one and selected the hyperlink on the page. The green dot in the right column up here means that that hyperlink is currently active. It's a web address. And InDesign goes out and sees the web address as working. If you see a red dot there, it means that you may have typed in the URL incorrectly. Now as I said, when you export to an interactive PDF or an EPUB or whatever, all of these hyperlinks will work great.