Making InDesign Buttons with Hyperlinks
Jennifer wrote:
I am trying to make an interactive PDF using buttons and rollovers. I set up the rollover (which works just fine). However in the rollover state, I have text that I would like to use as a hyperlink to navigate to a specific page, and the hyperlinks are not working!
This is an interesting problem, because InDesign’s interface doesn’t always make it clear how to create certain interactive features. In this case, it sounds as though you assigned a hyperlink to the text with the Hyperlinks panel. That may be logical, but it’s doomed to failure because the hyperlink is being lost inside the button object. That is, when you export a PDF, InDesign is creating two objects: The one with the hyperlink and the one with the button. The button sits on top of the hyperlink, so the person viewing it can never “click through” to the hyperlink. Frustrating!
Instead, if you want to make a button that triggers a hyperlink to a Web page, it’s better to assign that action using the Button Options dialog box.
Here’s how you do it in CS2 or CS3: After making the button (either by choosing Object > Interactive > Convert to Button or using the Button tool), double-click on the edge of the button object to open the Button Options dialog box (or choose object > interactive > button options). Then click on the Behaviors tab and choose Go to URL from the Behavior pop-up menu. Type in the URL, click the Add button, then click OK.
Now the button itself will trigger the hyperlink, and you don’t need to use the Hyperlinks panel at all. Also, don’t forget to turn on the Interactive Elements checkbox in the Export PDF dialog box! Without that, the buttons don’t work at all.
Dave, as far as I have experienced you will have to create hyperlink destinations in the Hyperlink panel if you want to jump to specific pages using the “go to anchor” option in the Button Option dialog box.
(However - I cannot check it out at the moment.)
Jennifer wants to go to specific pages.
Best regards
Nina Storm
Interesting thought, Nina. I read it differently. But you make a very good point: You do need a text anchor in order to go to a specific page in a PDF. This appears to be a technical limitation for PDFs, which I’ve never understood. But whatever the case, here’s how you do that:
1. Go to the page you want to target, place the text cursor inside any text frame (even a new empty one), and choose New Hyperlink Destination from the Hyperlinks panel menu.
2. Choose Text Anchor from the Type pop-up menu, then give the anchor a name.
3. Go back and select the button, then open Button Options. Instead of the Go to URL behavior, choose Go to Anchor. (If you’ve already used Go to URL, you’ll need to select it in the list of actions on the left and delete it.)
4. Choose the anchor you just created, click Add, click OK, and you should be good to go.
Thanks, David. But now that the CS4 is out of the bag, could you illuminate us on whether there are improvements in the Hyperlink mechanism (which I’ think has pretty much sucked so far)? I particularly have in mind the updating speed of the Hyperlinks panel when there are many, many (several thousand!) hyperlinks in the document.
There are significant improvements in the UI, though I’m still not satisfied, and I hope they streamline things more in CS5. I don’t know if they’ve done any work on speeding things up when there are thousands of hyperlinks. Sorry. You’ll have to try it and let us know when you get a chance.
One of the changes in CS4’s UI is elimination of the button tool. To create a button, you must use the convert to button function.
The overhaul that this has gotten is very much improved. I always had problems getting states to work the way I want them to. It was just very clunky.
In CS4 it just seem far more intuitive. But like David I have no idea how well it works with oodles and oodles of hyperlinks.
I read the problem above differently and I am having a similar problem of my own. I believe that InDesign doesn’t currently have the capability to do this, but please enlighten me…
I created a rollover tool bar; within this toolbar, I placed other buttons (i.e. next pg, previous pg, close, etc.) However, after exporting to pdf, the rollover toolbar seems to be ‘arranged’ above the other buttons, therefore, when mousing over it, the rollover works perfectly, but the other button within it don’t work. Is there a solution?
I also have a button- problem: I make the buttons as said by Jennifer, but when exported to pdf the buttons disappear, they are not visible or clickable. Could this be a bug in Indesign?
@Barbara: Make sure you read the last paragraph in the post above… if you don’t turn on Interactive Elements, the buttons disappear.
@Mariano: No, PDF’s buttons aren’t really very robust for making things like drop down menus and buttons that overlap other buttons, etc.
@ david: stupid me.. thanks!