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Lesson Info

Distributing Your Digital Creation

So let's start outputting this stuff. So I'm gonna go ahead again and I'm gonna close up the ones that we're working on here. And I'm gonna revert here just to make sure we've got the most recent version. And I'm going to start outputting in different formats. So again, thinking to what it is you wanna do with this. Is this a price sheet that you wanna put on your page? And you just wanna have a lot of great photos to show and then you've got your pricing sheet, and the other services that you offer, and you wanna put it on there, you're probably gonna go with a pdf, and it's gonna be a static pdf. So it basically looks like a printed document. In this case, again, it looks like printed pages. We could have each of these as it's own stand alone page even, not even two side by side. It'd be a little funky once we get the collage that jumps the middle of the page like this if I did it in single pages you would get half a picture and half a picture. But I could easily do that. I could exp...

ort that as single pages. And for printing sometimes that's what you wanna do. Like I said not in this case cause we have images spanning the spine that's here, but we could absolutely do that. So again, that just looks like a printed book. But we could also decide that we want to print it in what's called spreads. Or to output excuse me not print it. I'm going to output it to a pdf so that when they open the pdf and in this case a pdf is pretty ubiquitous, right, everybody knows what to do with a pdf and how to use a pdf basically. It's just sometimes we start putting fancy things into pdf's that worked on one end but don't work on something else. Basically again where is this going? Is this going to your team that you know all have the same thing and you get to control what item or what app they open up their pdf in? Cause when it comes to tablets there's a million different apps just for reading pdf's and each one has it's own set of rules. Or is this something you're gonna put on your website and you have no idea if they're gonna look at it on their desktop or if they're gonna look at it on a tablet, or even on their phone, I don't know if you've ever tried to read a pdf on the phone. I do that, but it's a lot of zooming and panning, and moving around which doesn't always work. Obviously if you've got a product sheet you probably don't want them to, but you can't stop them from looking at it on the phone either so just keep that in mind as well. You don't know where it's going. But in this case I wanna be able to look at it side by side, that's kind of how I envisioned this when I laid it out I'm like you know what I wanna see that side by side, even though this kinda looks like print where you've got a title on the right side but with an image on the left side it works as one piece as well. Alright so I'm just gonna think. What I want is I want it laid out in a wide landscape version like that, right. So I'm gonna come in here and I want to just export this. So I'm gonna do file, export, we're just going to a pdf, a static pdf, this is like the simplest. This is like if you've been doing printing you're used to this. This is basically just replicating a print version of it almost so I'm gonna do export. And when you are exporting to a pdf, you have two different versions, there's two flavors of In Design in pdf. So you've got an interactive and a print version. So we're gonna go with print, even though interactive maybe makes more sense cause it's digital, but we're gonna go print, we're gonna just put in a few settings that work well for a digital. So I'm gonna say print and it's just gonna give it a pdf extension and there's a ton of things. And we're not gonna go over everything that's in here. But things that we might wanna worry about. Size, so there's some built in styles here. I'm going to use just actually in this case, I'm gonna do a pdf, let's go with a, let's just leave it with press quality, I'm sorry, yeah, press quality. There aren't as many as there usually are. Okay so I'm going to use that, and the thing I do wanna make sure, is I wanna make sure, that I have spreads checked. So what a spread is, is when we looked in the pages panel we had two pages side by side. That is a two page spread. So everything that's all in that one row in your pages panel, is a spread. If you had three pages, you can't do it with facing pages well you can, but if you had single pages you could have three or five pages across and then you could print it as a spread, so you could have a really wide pdf. And the great thing about most pdf readers, is each page can be a different size or each spread can be a different size and it adjusts to it, in fact we're gonna do this in spreads but if you noticed, page one and page were actually just single pages by themselves. And I'm actually gonna show you something we can do to change that as well. But it's gonna be spread so it's gonna take everything in each row and it's gonna be it's own thing so spreads is what we want, we can optimize for fast web view if we want, and let's view the pdf after we export it. Talking about resolution in this case you're probably gonna have more than you need. I used press quality, so we're looking at 300 to 450 ppi which is way too much. I could change all these if I want to. I'm not gonna worry about it because in this case it's not gonna make it that much larger of an image. I do make sure the last two are checked it just reduces things without any loss as well. And if you know where you're outputting it you might have a lot more of these things you wanna control. You basically wanna make sure that you don't have like bleed settings turned on if you had a bleed and you pulled the image all the way past to that bleed mark that we set up in the very beginning you basically wanna make sure this is deselected it should be deselected by default, but you wanna make sure that's there cause otherwise it's gonna include that bleed and then your size might be wrong. Just you know these are print options mostly. So basically the only thing I'm worried about in this case is I wanna make it spreads, I want to make sure all the pages are being done, otherwise, I can just choose pages here. And nothing, nothing big here I don't have any interactivity you notice I have bookmarks and hyperlinks? So hyperlinks are an interactive thing if I wanted it to like click on one item and jump to a different item in the document, I can do that. Even though it's for print technically, I can have the hyperlinks included, and those will actually come through in a print pdf. Some I'm just gonna say export. And when I do that it's gonna export it. It should launch, Acrobat or whatever we are using to read our pdf's. Let's actually go out to the desktop here, and find our pdf. Alright so that is the first page, that is the spread so it's single page, like I said in a minute we're actually gonna fix that. But then here's our two pages spreads. So everything looks exactly as I intended it to look. That's a nice book. We could export that out and again because it's pdf, everybody pretty much knows what to do with a pdf. They can open it, and there's no interactivity, they shouldn't have any problem on pretty much any device, that you look at that on. So that is the baseline, easiest, simplest thing. In fact it was a matter of just exporting, and then when we exported that one of the things that we could've chosen when we exported, is I'm gonna change this number to two, and I could have can save it, because I don't wanna again have to do that work again. So I can come in here and at any point once I get everything selected exactly as I wanted to, we can come down here, say preset, and I can tell it you know, book export, so that I have that read to go, and next time I create that book I can just export that and I don't have to think about all these settings that are there. That's the easiest baseline pdf. If we have interactivity in it, and I do have one that has some interactivity in it. Let's open that up. And you notice I also have this two page spread. I'm gonna jump here. I have this first one, and I have these two that are here. And that's because I thought well when I export it especially interactively maybe I want it all to be two page spread. I didn't want it to look like a print one. But I might have the same file that I want to go to print. That I want to go to interactive. So in this case I might print if I was going to print and I wanted these single pages, or I wanted the first few to be single pages anyway. I can export in spreads like I just did and I would just skip over page two and three. So I would tell it print page one, then I do comma, four through 16 or whatever I have, comma, whatever the last page is, so I can pick and choose whatever I want. But in this case when I do the interactive I want to skip page one and 16. Because I did the same thing here, I duplicated that page and I have that last page. Oh I'm sorry it's page 20 I don't want page 20 or one to show up, so I just want to export page two to 19. Alright so I'm gonna go ahead and hit export. And in this case though I want some interactivity and we'll look at the interactivity in a minute. Let's go to the interactive here, and I'm gonna choose pdf interactive and save. And I'm gonna go ahead and tell it that I want all the interactivity here, it should be on by default, cause it assumes that's what you went to is the interactive. So let's put some interactivity in there. And I'm gonna leave everything just exactly as is. So I'm gonna say export. And I exported all the pages, I meant to do two through 19. So I went ahead and export that out, and then we're gonna actually look at some of the interactivity that's here once it's done. So basically what I've done is I've built in this interactive and I'm gonna actually just print this page so we can look at that, so we don't have to watch the whole thing done, but one of the things I did was I created some interactivity. Keep in mind, when you do interactivity and you go to pdf, the pdf if you're reading it say in Acrobat on a, desktop, you're probably fine. And there's only certain things that are interactive that are in In Design that can be put into a pdf, and when we look at interactive menu it usually tells you interactive for Swif of all things, which is the file flash, and for pdf, and also for fixed layout epubs. So there's only certain things that pdf even can handle and one of the things it cannot handle is this thing where I have sort of a slide show so we can click through and see the slide show that's here. So what I wanna do is I wanna export that to when we export that to a different file format we can see what that actually looks like. But when we're exporting to an interactive pdf it's going to take those items, and it's going to put in the ones it can do but keep in mind if we're looking at it on a tablet, it might not actually even show up. Most of the time if I have things like this I have these little navigation buttons and those show up on most applications that you use on the tablet but not all. So for instance basically what I did is I just drew these little triangles that are here. And then I created a button. And I'm gonna just show you where the interactivity is. We're not gonna do a lot of interactivity but on our interactive we've got several different panels and one of them is buttons and forms. I'm gonna come in here and I'm going to just tell it that it's a button so I can pick any item and tell it make it into a button and that's exactly what I did. Now I can convert it back to an object, and so what I've done is I've told it it's a button and then I just tell it what happens when you either release or tap. So if I'm on a desktop machine and I click as soon as I let go of the mouse, something happens. In this case when I click on that right arrow and I let go it's going to do something. It's going to navigate to in this case the next state, so one of the things I've done is I've created this list of images that are in the states. In fact if I zoom out and I select just this item, I can see that I have five pictures on top of each other and I've created a multistate object. And I've told it each state, each picture, is it's own state, and then by creating this button I've told it by clicking on this button go to that next state and that's called a multistate object, this we cannot see in a pdf. But we can see it in some of the other formats that we're gonna look at. So just know that when you create something it may or may not let you do it. In fact when I decide to add an action and I say let's actually delete that action. And then I say I want to add an action, you notice it says pdf only, these are the ones that pdf can handle, these are the ones that Swif and epub can handle and also publishonline, which is something we're gonna look at. Publishonline is great because it will let you take any of the interactivity and it all can be used, so that's definitely a big plus of that. So just keep in mind when you're doing it like oh I want to do this, go to next state, I created this whole thing, and then I realize, oh I'm doing it as a pdf, I can't even put that in a pdf. And even the arrows, like go to the next page, you can put in a pdf, because that's basically a hyperlink. But sometimes it doesn't work. Depending on what they're reading it on. So again if you know where it's going, test it. If it's going who knows where, more simple is better. Right so just trying to keep it simple that way. So I have a few interactive things here for instance this is the button, and when you click on it, this image back behind disappears and your slide show shows up and then we can go through and walk through and again when we look at pdf publishonline we'll see all that there. So again when we export it to a pdf with interactivity we have to use export to pdf interactive and then all the interactivity that is allowed in a pdf will come through. So that being said a pdf plain is best, cause everybody knows what to do with it, it's simple. Pdf with interactivity is cool, cause it let's you use some of the interactivity but if you don know who's, how they're viewing it and who's using it and how they're viewing it, it might also not work exactly as planned. But again if you know who's doing it or maybe you're gonna be out there showing your clients it and it's on your tablet and you've written it exactly for your device, then you're fine. Just always know where it's going. One of the other things that we can do is called a fixed layout epub. I'm going back to the regular book without the interactivity in it. And a fixed layout epub is, if you've ever read an epub, if you've ever read a Kindle book, that's a flavor of epub. Basically it's reflowable, so as you make your text bigger it flows differently, well a fixed layout epub works in a similar fashion, it converts everything to html and css, which is just how it works underneath, but fixed layout means you can layout the design that you want and when it goes to the reader it looks exactly the same. Now the only, the real downside to that is that there are very few readers that allow fixed layout epubs. One of them is Ibooks, built for the Mac. So you can actually look at it that way. So any of the IOS apps or the IOS devices can also read them but if you're going to a PC, you probably don't have any way to read it. Most of the little individual readers don't have any way to display it they technically take it but they don't display it as expected or isn't there. So why would you do a fixed layout? First of all, it looks exactly as you want it. It's not reflowing the text, we set up styles, it looks exactly as we want. But also we can sell it. If you're monetizing it, fixed layout is great, but again it can only be sold to people that are using Ibooks most likely instead of Kindle or anything like that but because you can't sell a pdf, on the Apple books store. So that's something to keep in mind, monetization in that case. so let's actually look at what that looks like. I'm gonna do export again so I just did commander control e I'm gonna export this out and I'm gonna choose epub fixed layout so save that out. And I can choose where my image comes from I can either rasturize the first page or if you have an image that you wanna use for your cover you can choose that from here. I'm gonna leave pretty much everything the same I wanna make sure that my viewing app is set up to be Ibooks. So I can look at that, I'm gonna leave all this the same conversion setting 150 ppi is fine, I'm gonna export that out and when I do we should launch into Ibooks and it'll open up and then the great thing is if there is interactivity in that it will also maintain that. Again that's gonna take a second, I'm gonna actually open up one that I already have in here. I believe this is entire thing. So I have this, ope just the first two pages there. I'm gonna close that up. So I can actually open up, this book here, I should have the whole thing. There we go. So that's what a fixed layout epub looks like. It looks exactly like our layout that we had. Looks like a pdf. You can open up a pdf in here as well and it would look pretty much the same. Problem is if you wanted, again, to monetize it, you would have to do the fixed layout epub. You're just limited on who can view that. If it's your sales reps and they all have Ipads, you're totally fine, you can load that on an Ipad opens it up, looks great. So that is a fixed layout epub, as opposed to a reflowable. Which is your other option when exporting to epub. And the last one, I want to make sure I have the interactive one open here and let's revert so I make sure I have the freshest copy here. So in this case I want to have all the interactivity that's here, I want to make sure that anybody anywhere that has access to the internet can see it. And that is this publishonline which is built into In Design. It is part of the Adobe ecosystem so that to me is the only drawback I think outta this whole thing is that it is hosted on Adobe's site, so I know a lot of government people can't do that, anything that has security we can't really worry about that but we're photographers and we're, you know, crafters and we're designers and we're just trying to get our portfolios out there so having it hosted on Adobe's site is no big deal to me. The other thing is if you have a site and you want it there, you can actually grab it if you do Iframes, you can grab the code for an Iframe so it basically embeds the Adobe site into your site, so that's great and it's just part of your creative cloud subscription that's there you can just publish right to it and you can also get some analytics and see who's looking at it as well. So in this case I've got this original book that's here and actually am I in the interactive yeah, let's do the interactive make sure we have interactivity here. And I also want to make sure that I'm only using pages two through 19, that's what I want right. Yeah two through 19. And I don't want to use those first and last ones I wanna use the wide layout that I'm using. And I just want to publish it. So it's pretty easy I've laid it out I like the way it looks, I'm just gonna go up here and click this publish online. If you don't see it, go to your preferences In Design preferences on a Mac or edit preferences on a PC. And come down to the very bottom to publish online and this might be turned on, disable, because when you first use it every time you get near it there's a bit sign that comes up and says hey check out publishonline and you may have turned that off or someone else may have turned it off cause they got tired of looking at that. So I'm just gonna click publishonline. And as long as your connected to the internet you're good. It's gonna ask me a couple things. Do I want to publish a new document or update a new one? This is great if you have a product catalog or anything you want to update, so if you update the existing one it's great. You made a change, you swapped out some photos, and you just want to make a new version of that same one. If you've already given out that link to everybody saying hey check out my portfolio, you can update it and then the link is still the same. So you want to make sure you update it if that's the case. I'm gonna say publish a new one. I'm gonna give this a name, just an appendit so I make sure I don't have the same one, pages two through 19 I want to print it in spreads I do want them to be spread all the way across and then I also can allow viewers to download the document as a pdf if I want to, so the great thing is even if they have it and have access to it while online, but you want them to have it with them to take with them, you can tell them they can download a pdf. Now the only thing I don't want with that is cause I have those builds, those images all sitting next to each other and it looks really ugly all stacked on top of each other so I probably would not allow that, I'll leave that unchecked. And you can also have this share and embed option in the published document so people can share it if you want so that's on by default if you don't want them to share it or embed it in their page then check that. Then we're gonna come into the advanced and here's where we tell it what the cover page looks like. The thumbnail. And this is great for us looking at the analytics, or if they're just looking at it online to just have that thumbnail that's there. So I can either take the first page and rasterize it, I can choose a specific page, or I can choose an image. And in this case I actually have an image sitting here that I wanna use, on output here. I think let's go in here. So I have this because otherwise it might take the first page, which is page two, which is the left side of this page, so I made sure that I made an image of the entire spread so that it'll grab the whole thing. And I can change what the resolution looks like. 96 is pretty good, I can make it high if I want to it's gonna make it bigger, take longer to load. I just basically leave those as is. And I'm gonna say publish and it's gonna publish that online we're gonna get the interactivity with it. And I'm actually going to cancel that. Because I already have that there. To get to your dashboard and see those files, I can come here under file, and come down to publish online dashboard. And when we come up and look at it here's this wide one that's here, I'm gonna click on that. And there's our document that we had, I can scroll through and look at each page, I can also look at thumbnails down here. So I can actually see those. Now I do of course have a really ugly page of a thumbnail, that's where all my images are stacked on top of each other. You can actually cheat and make another layer that has an image on top of it that doesn't print so that you just, it's there, but you don't see it. Or actually hidden button, a button that is hidden but nothing ever gets triggered with it. When I come in here and I get to that interactive we can actually see what that interactive was supposed to look like as I roll over this little map when I click that other image goes away and it loads this multistate object that you can't do in a pdf. And then here's my little navigation buttons as well. So you can lay out what your portfolio looks like but you can also build in some animation you can put in movies if you wanted if you had some great video of this waterfall you could have it so it's an image when you see it in the pdf but when you click on it here it triggers a movie and it actually shows you something that you've shot there in Iceland as well. So I love the publishonline because anything you can throw at it, anything that In Design can create it comes through, it looks like you expect it to, your text looks right, your images look right, your pages are laid out right, and even your interactivity makes it through so if you are making a portfolio of your photos or you've got your just your product catalog, think how easily you could throw this on your page. You could either just give them the link to this page, or you can build an Iframe on your site, grab the code from your backend from your dashboard, which you can get to from In Design, grab that code, drop it in and then it's part of your page, but it's actually calling the information out to the Adobe page, and when it's time to change the images change it update the existing one, and it's still there, and nobody else is, none the wiser, as they say. So those are some of the digital ways we can output pdf, fixed layout, and also publishonline.