From the course: Creating HTML Layouts with InDesign

Controlling image quality with custom rasterization - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: Creating HTML Layouts with InDesign

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Controlling image quality with custom rasterization

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- In this video I'm gonna show you how to control how individual images are exported from InDesign to HTML. Gonna start in the Exercise Files in Chapter 06, 06_02 in the start folder, and I'm just gonna open the alice.html file in my web browser. Now the thing I'm focusing on here is that while the first image was centered in my layout the second image was not, nor were many of the subsequent images. So I wanna fix that so that this image of the rabbit sits on the right hand side, just as it did in the original layout. The other thing I'm thinking about is maybe someone's gonna come in and view this on a retina or high definition display and these images aren't really set up to be high quality, so I wanna export them with a higher resolution just to compensate for that. And to set a base line for myself I'm just gonna right-click on this image and Open the Image in a New Tab, and that way I can see what the image looks like outside of the HTML. It's about twice the size as it is in the HTML layout and I'll compare it with the output after I've made the change. So I'm just gonna close the browser windows, and open up the alice.idml file in InDesign. And the first step is I'm gonna go up to File, and Save this As an indd file, and call it alice, and save it in the corresponding end folder. Now I'll select the image of the rabbit and go up to the Object menu and choose Object Export Options. There's the Alt Text that was added in the previous video, what I wanna do is actually go over to this third tab EPUB and HTML. Now if you're familiar with this tab from previous versions of InDesign, it's a little bit more complex now. There use to simply be a check box that said Custom Rasterization, and now it's this drop down menu for how you want to Preserve your Appearance From Layout. Now I think this is an improvement, but it is a little more complex to look at. So there are four options, including the Default, and besides the Default there is Use Existing Image for Graphic Objects, and that's basically going to pull a source image if there is one. You can Rasterize the Content inside of frames, or you can Rasterize the Container, and that's what we're gonna do here. So since my image is line art I don't think JPEG is a very good Format for that, I'm gonna choose PNG instead. I'm gonna leave the Resolution as 300 PPI, that's significantly more than would be used on a typical screen, but it's pretty good for a retina display. So the Rasterization options that I've chosen here really apply to fixed layout or reflowable. The layout change that I'm about to make is really specific to reflowable. And that's where I wanna make this image sit on the right just like it does in the layout. If I was exporting to fixed layout I wouldn't have to make any changes because it's gonna pick up the fact that that image is on the right. So for reflowable I wanna check Custom Layout, and in the drop down menu for Custom Layout I'm gonna choose Float Right. Now the other reason I might want to set a higher resolution is that under Size I could choose an option like Relative to Text Flow that would actually scale the image up or down based on the size of the text frame or the size of the browser window. So that's another reason I might wanna have a custom resolution. For right now we'll just leave that at the Default and click Done. And then I'll go up to File and Save the document, and I'll go out and Export it, this time to the end folder as html, and I'm gonna go ahead and leave the default options and click OK. And you see the rabbit is on the right side, just where I want it to be. And if I right-click on it and say Open Image in New Tab, go to that tab, now see the image is much larger relative to the HTML layout, so we've accomplished a higher resolution. This image wasn't so high quality to start with, so it's not gonna make a huge difference, but if I go back to my layout it does look crisper than the other image. Now that you've got a handle on customizing image output we can go back and apply this same kind of control to the other images in the document. But rather than doing this one image at a time I'll show you how to use object styles to save more time in the next video.

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