Discover how to digitally publish your work and ensure all pages are correctly finalized before publication. This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to use InDesign to publish online, including detailed instructions on how to set up title, description, page ranges, download options, and cover thumbnails.
Key Insights
- The article outlines how to digitally publish work using InDesign, starting from ensuring all pages are finalized to hitting the 'publish' button.
- It provides a walkthrough on setting up various parameters before publishing, including giving the document a title and description, deciding whether to publish all pages or a specific range, exporting as single or spread, allowing viewers to download the document as a PDF, and setting up a cover thumbnail.
- The article also discusses how to make adjustments to a published document, such as changing the position and size of buttons and updating the transparency of the buttons. Once the changes are made, the document can be updated online directly from InDesign.
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In this video, we'll be digitally publishing our work. So with all of our pages finalized, we can scroll through and make sure that we have everything ready to go.
We're going to go to File, Publish Online. From here, we'll have options for how we want to publish our document. For now, let's go to General, and let's give this a title.
In this case, I'm going to stick to Domus Digital Display. However, you can retitle this to whatever you'd prefer. And let's add a description.
In this case, I'll simply type out "Lesson 2 Project for Domus." Feel free to type whatever description you'd prefer. Next, as we go down, we'll see that we can publish all of our pages or a range of pages and export as a single or spread.
In this case, all of our pages are already set as single pages, so let's leave it as single. We then have the option to allow viewers to download the document as a PDF, and we could hide the share and embed options of the published document if we prefer. Additionally, if we want to add advanced options, we can do so.
And we have a cover thumbnail here, which is just our first page, but we could also choose a different page here, or we could make our own if we'd prefer as well. For now, let's simply leave it as the first page. And this thumbnail will show up if we post the link somewhere, so it's helpful to be able to edit this.
We can also change our image settings here. We'll change our resolution from Standard to 144 ppi, and for our PDF preset for the download, we'll select High Quality Print. From here, we'll hit Publish.
Next, InDesign will begin publishing the document and preparing it. Depending on how fast your internet speed is, it will affect the amount of time required to publish the document. Once your document is finished uploading, we can simply select View Document, or we can copy our URL and paste it in our browser.
For now, let's simply click View Document, and we'll see that our internet browser comes up, and we can actually see our work. Here we have Page 1, our link, and our animation scheme through, and we'll remember that we hyperlinked this. We'll see the link works.
Let's close it out, and to go to Page 2, we'll click this arrow. In Page 2, we have our two arrows here that we can click to move forward and backward, and we had our nice animation here. On this page, however, our actual arrows to change states cover up the arrows to move pages.
We may want to move these arrows, as well as they are not transparent like we wanted them to be. So let's move on, and we'll come back to fix that. On Page 3, we have our House on 44th, and here our animation works correctly.
Move on to our next page, and finally, we have our hyperlinks page. We can click on these and make sure that they work, and it looks like all of these should work. Great! Let's now close out our browser and go back to our document.
We'll click Close, and we'll make a couple of changes. The first change that we want to make is on Page 2, regarding our buttons. If we select our button, we'll see that the transparency is actually applied to the button rather than the object itself.
If we double-click, we can see our object here at 100%. Instead, let's simply select outside by double-clicking, and select our button again. In this case, we're going to remove the button features by going back to Buttons and Forms, and right here at the bottom, we have Convert to Object.
This is important to recognize, because if we no longer want something to be a button, we can go to Convert to Object. We'll do the same thing to this other button, go into Buttons and Forms, and Convert to Object, and then with both of these selected, we now want to move them out of the way of the arrow that lets us navigate between pages. To do this, I'm going to drag them down, holding Shift, and we'll leave them about there.
However, I also want to change the size of them a bit, so let's hold Shift, and I'm going to drag down with both selected to reduce the size a bit more. From here, I could either choose to move them all the way to the right and to the left, or I could put them in the middle here. However, feel free to add them wherever you think they're most appropriate.
In my case, I'll hold Shift and bump them over two to the left and to the right using my arrow keys, and now it's time to reassign them as buttons. Before we do this, let's select both of them, and now let's change our transparency from 100 percent. Double-click, and let's type 60, and hit ENTER. From here, we can now change them into buttons by clicking outside first, selecting the button, and from here, we're going to select Type, Button, and for our action, we're going to go to Go to Next State.
We'll do the same thing for our left button here. We'll go to Type, Button, and again, for our action, this time we're going to go to Go to Previous State. We click outside, and we can see a sample of this, and if we click Play, you can see the buttons now have the transparency, and both work.
Great work. Now to update our file, we're going to go to File, Publish Online, and from here, we're going to go to Update Existing Document. We'll select our file, and if you've published multiple documents, you may have a list here.
In this case, we'll simply select it, and again, select Publish. It will ask us if we're sure, and we'll click OK. Again, your computer may take a little bit of time publishing this document.
However, once it's uploaded, we're going to again click on the link to open it up, and check it out in our browser, clicking View Document. From here, Page 1 looks good. And as we see Page 2, the buttons don't conflict—moving the page first, then the state.
From here, we've now completed our project. Please copy this URL to submit as your midterm, or you can copy it from "Copy This URL to Share." Again, remember to copy this URL and share this as your midterm, as I'll be going online to check out your projects.
Let's save our work, hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our final project here, and in the next videos, we'll begin working on our next project. See you there.