Lessons

Lesson Info

Multiple Actions

We're going to look at triggering multiple actions. So, this is a bit more complex here, involving two or three things that is a little bit of to-ing and fro-ing, it is not like hard, like going down into the earth and bringing back coal, that's quite hard, it's nowhere near that. It's very very much a modern technological world problem. But it is fiddly, or can be fiddly, I mean we're going on a quite nice little pace here, with a very very simple layout just involving three different things, three different spreads here or pages and a few different simple interactions. And so we're going to build out the next one. I've allowed a little bit of extra time in here for this one just in case we have any problems but I think we might be okay so fingers crossed for that. I'm gonna explain the nature of the interaction we're going to create first of all. So we got our navigation, that sits on the side of our layout okay? And we click something, that triggers the navigation to appear on the l...

ayout, okay? And we would then, the chances are you wouldn't want to close it unless you opened it by mistake. So I'm giving people the way out just there, the chances are you're going to need to select an item okay from on that layout and then what you're expected to do is to go there and make sure that it's closed or if it was something that was on the layout, okay, you'd expect it to actually close the navigation as well, so it's not always present. So let's go to page three here so I'm gonna start by doing command J three, this is the one with our movie content and we can imporve the way that this looks during, I'm so thirsty this morning, the way that this works and looks in just a moment. We'll get this bit out of the way first of all. The movie icon on here is actually going to take us to this page, okay and so if we just get ahold of this, we'll go to the master page, so command J, A to go out to the master page. For your viewing comfort I'm gonna zoom in. You know there's actually something else I could do for your viewing comfort here, I'm dealing with a vertical item, in a horizontal playground, as it is at the moment. You know there's a sneaky little trick you can use in InDesign to actually change that, and what I typically, I don't normally use it in this particular circumstance I'm just thinking of your ease of viewing, but remember earlier I was talking about catalog productions and those things, the catalogs I used to work on had an order form in the center pages. It was a different orientation to the rest of the document so the rest of the document was typically in a size A5, that's an European, well actually it's several countries, it's an international standard size for paper and the open spread was kind of A4 which was double A5 and so the form would be that orientation so landscape, and the rest of the document portrait because of course you're seeing the one place in the document you're seeing an entire spread. And when you're working on this form, you work like that, because you'll be looking at the line item form, actually it was like that but you're working like that and you'll know when you'd been doing it because after an hour of working on the form your neck would start to wake or when you got home after an evening you'd think why does my neck hurt? And it takes you a few months to work out where the problem lies, it's actually in the view menu if I go to the view menu here, okay and you can see I have rotate spread here. And I'm gonna rotate this 90 degrees counter clockwise so now for your viewing comfort, true north is still true north in the document, but just for your viewing comfort right, it means I can get a little bit more zoom, okay. Just a bit more zoom out of this layout so it's now easy for you to see even if you can add it on the bus juggling along just like that earlier well whatever, you get the idea, right? So I'm gonna open up my layers panel and in here what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to the video button there, I'm not gonna reorder these things because it's not a real project so it's fine for now, and it's up to you how you work it you might be cool like that but there you are so now that's selected, where do you think I'm going now? If you think, I'm going to the buttons and forms panel then I'm just so impressed with how much you're remembering, it's very very good here so I'm gonna click on the plus, remember we don't need that menu thing, it's completely redundant and E-pub interactivity. And what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to choose, hang on, go to destination just here. So you can choose go to a certain page, and I'm gonna choose go to destination. Destination is somewhere inside of a document. Now I'm gonna rename this as video, this is one of the places I can do it, and it actually might make sense to do it in here, view video. Like so video, super typing fun. Don't hire me for typing, hire me for my wit and charm. (laughs) Okay so video just there, that's a good place to name it, and when I'm doing this typically that is how I work, I work downwards like that, I process through the dialogs as I go. The event is going to be on release, or tap, okay like so. It's just going to take me out to a particular page here. It's got go to destination, so in the document here, it's actually giving me the document but we're saying the same thing and I don't think of a destination specified in there. Do you know what, I'll just choose something else for the moment because I could of set that up slightly different, and you'll also get to see how removing a particular action works, so there we go so I thought something would come back and bite me, some point which is actually just done so instead I'll choose, let's choose actually I'll choose the go to page action, should of thought about that. Should of been a better way to do it. So I can choose a page to go to, this is going to go to page three, there like so. Okay so when I hit that trigger, it should do that. Now we're gonna have to test that again, just to make sure that's working before we move on to the next steps so it really is like assembling, you don't wanna build the whole thing and then mine through it to do it, there are times where you will have to do that, because people will make changes and I'm gonna just clear the spread rotation here, not that it will effect what we're doing too much but it's just a good idea to do that. And I'll go to page two, because there's no point in being on page three because I'm gonna go there already, okay? Let me come along and choose this, test the spread, so we'll bring in the menu by clicking the hamburger. Ooh, I haven't refreshed the layout and this is another common mistake here, you see the layout in front of you and you think oh that's fine, I'll just work with it and you think that isn't working. You need to refresh it, right? You got to reload it in this window, this window is like a test environment, and it's just using the information you last had when you launched it. So you must remember to actually click this thing down at the bottom to actually get it to rebuild that environment so you got everything the way it should be because otherwise, you'll be chasing your tail. You'll be thinking there's something wrong, it's not working and it's probably working just fine. Okay so, I'm gonna click on the hot dog hamburger menu at the top there, come down to the video icon, and click on that, and right here here's another thing. So you might think oh no Tony's broken it, it's not working. Not true, let me show you. I'm gonna zoom in on this so you can see it, okay? I'm gonna zoom in on the bottom right hand corner of the layout of the E-pub window here, and you can see that it's default state is to set the preview to a single document. It's less load on the program to do it that way. But here I need to set the document to preview the entire document, that means everything's got to be loaded into the panel but I actually need that and I then need to click play again for it to load all of that content, it will start right from the very beginning. So I got controls here, how I can move through the pages and I need to move on to page two. And, now I can click on the hamburger menu at the top there, come down and click on that, and you can see it takes me to page three. So that is a successful action there. That's it there, perfect it's working really really well. So, we're gonna make a little tiny tiny modification here to what we've got going on on page three, so we can add a multiple action to it. This is a tiny bit more involved, so I'm going to go to page three, command J3, and I'm gonna draw a text box, I'll start off by drawing it off the layout so I don't acidentally interact with any other content here. So draw the text box like so, and in that text box, I'm going to say click on this, click on this image to watch the movie. Okay, like so. Something like that, that will do just fine, okay? Got that just there. And then I'm going to actually, I moved away from editing in text, I'm back with the selection tool I hit the escape key to do that, I'm gonna fill this with paper, with a color, and then I'm gonna use command B, that would be control B on Windows, to access the text frame options, and I'm gonna set some alignment things here I'm gonna set so it aligns to the center okay? So that's gonna move the text into the middle here. If I turn on preview here, you can see that like so. And then I'm gonna hit okay for that, that's just fine as is, I could do a couple of other things in here if I wanted to, but that's groovy. And then I want to align the text to the center. Here's another short cut, shift command or shift control on Windows, tap C into text. See if you can guess what the things are for left and right? If you're thinking shift command L and shift command R, again I'm so impressed with how awesome you are. And I'm just gonna remove the accidental semi colon from my work just there so I'm just gonna pop that on on the top here okay? And I'm going to get that and add it so that it fades in kind of switching out from my original plan to do this but I think this will be fun, and let's just test that. So that should fade in just there, let me get it to play the layout, so it's just rebooting that. Oops, let me just change it back to single documents for the time being, and gonna play that so click on the image to watch the movie and now if I click on that, yep, you can see tahts not actually doing anything at all at the moment. We're click on the play bar. Arr, I'll be going That's because it's not set to be a trigger. Let's resolve that, so we got multiple action for this. So here we got this box, I'm gonna change the text here. Okay click on this box, let's be interactive about it, let's call it dialogue, let's click on this dialogue, there is no dialogue, it's one way. Click on this dialogue to watch the movie, let's come up and go to our buttons and forms panel just here, okay, and what we'll do is we'll add let's bring this thing back on. Sorry, just want to add this play button here so I got two routes to watching this movie. Here we are, I got it, click on this dialogue or the play icon to watch the movie. And I'm just gonna drop that down to a new line, I'm just holding shift here to create a line break like so. Shift and hit and return to do that. So let's do this action now, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to choose video, and then I'm going to choose the option to play, that's just fine, so that's exactly what that's doing, that's perfect. Alright, done, what I would also like it to do is to dismiss the play button just here. And you can do that with the menu, you don't need the close button if you actually add a separate icon on there, you're acting with page elements, that's navigational what we're doing so it'll disappear when the new page is drawn. But if you were getting that menu to do different things on the spread like show and hide things, okay, then that is something that you might want to do to add multiple actions which is doing a simplified version of that here without messing with our navigation. So I'm going to now come back to up to the actions here, and I'm gonna click on the plus, and you're gonna see show hide buttons and forms. Now that pops up like so, okay and I can see that I've got this visibility thing here right with a couple of buttons there, button four and button nine. What did we learn earlier on about these buttons right, giving them a name but I'm showing you something in that particular context so I'm just gonna call this one dialogue here, I'm gonna name it up at top, and that should actually hopefully refresh and just let me just turn and click through these things here. Let's just make sure that that is named that way, that's good and this one here is called button force, I'm just gonna call this one play movie. And like so, and so those things are there. We come back to the action of this one, you can now see that they are both named in there, just needed me to do that to refresh. Let's add another layer of complexity, right so I'm gonna bring this one back on and this one is called button five and it's called stop movie, it didn't show up in that list before because it wasn't on the layout. if it wasn't on the layout, it's like a nightclub, if it's not on the layout, you're not coming in. Really simple, so back to my dialogue here, and back to the button and forms panel. So I have a nice little set of things here, so I'm still with the show and it's selected on the layout so I'm still with the options here. It is going to play that video, okay? It is going to show and hide buttons and forms. So, I need to do one other tiny tiny little thing first before I do that, I'm gonna go to this stop button just here, and I'm gonna turn on the option, hidden until triggered. That means it will not show up on the spread, until something else invites it to show on the spread. Back to that button just there so I've clicked on the big button in the middle. So show and hide buttons and forms. I can then go through these visibility states. So you can see the I there, shows that it is visible. The line through says it's not visible. And the X shows it's not affected by this button at all. Maybe because that might be the state you actually want it to be in, okay? In fact I'm actually going to leave dialogue as not affected by this button at all and stop movie, I'm gonna make that so it actually shows. Now let's see if I got that in the right order, and we'll test out that layer and so we'll go to the E-pub panel here. Remember reload, it's in single spread mode here, or single page mode, hit play so it rebuilds that layout. So there you are those things are fade in. So that's visible at the moment, it shouldn't be visible, it should actually be hidden so let me see what happens when I click on it. Arggh I be goldbeard, I be stuck here, on this island, Interesting. I used to teach all about diseases. Beautiful, I can hit stop here fortunately, and it goes away right so this is like, this is common. These kind of things, unless you're building them day in and day out, okay you'd be fine with doing that all the time but I don't build these every single day, I gotta be honest so, it's easy to trip up on that so, let me go back and re-examine this here. Okay so play movie did seem to disappear, so I'm gonna turn, start movie off, just there. Okay like so, and also I'm gonna get it to dismiss, I'm gonna get it to dismiss all three. That's a fairly good test, I'm also going to do a quick save just in case. We've been qorking quite a long time without a save and unlike character animator which is awesome and you don't need to save it, InDesign you definitely do so let's refresh that. All of those items are there. Arrgh, I be goldbeard, I be stuck here, on this island, I used to teach all about, Really, and they all disappear and now I need to use that so everything there disappears. So the problem is here, with this button which seems to be acting up. So I did it in the animation panel, I think. Or did I, let's have a look. We're gonna check hide until animated. Let's test that out again, let's here refresh the spread, nope still on there so this one's gonna be tricky. Gonna go to the buttons and forms panels a few different places so that's hidden until triggered, interesting, so let's go back up to buttons and forms, and let's just double check that that's ah, here's the thing, can you see the event? Yeah, it's triggered to go on page load right so it's going to load just there so if I turn that off, and go back to E-pub interactivity and refresh that load. That looks a lot better, right? So it's not gonna do anything at the moment I just wanted to clear up the thing where it's not visible in the star off. If I just hit here, right we're on the right track. Hopefully you can see the kind of detective work I was doing there to narrow down that problem, okay? I was methodically working my way through the different variables there that might have been changing there so looking at all the places I know where hide is and where the visibility is and the last one I looked was when that loads. Might have done it the other way around, might have gone to that pace and would have solved it a lot quicker but if you can, and sometimes you cannot sit up, want a better phrase, the wood for the trees, here right then that's what you have to revert to. You have to literally go back, sit through it, think is that what's causing it, test that, no, that's not what's causing it, that's fine. And at home, in my studio, I actually got an array of three monitors, I got my big center screen in the middle, I got a smaller screen over to one side and another big HD screen on that side. I have the E-pub interactivity panel either on one of those things so it's ever present, and it just sat there so I can just click and look to the side and see it there. But working like this is how most of us do it so that's fine so now I need to go back to this button, back to the buttons and forms panel and what I need to do now is change the state of stop movie, from invisible, through inert, which is what it was a moment ago, to visible, let's try that out. So we'll go that panel, reload that, okay. So on come those elements, so what should happen now is I should click on this, it should disappear. The play button should disappear, and the stop button should appear. Arrgh I be goldbeard, I be stuck here on this island. I used to teach all about - So it's gonna require a little bit of further work there. We've got time so we're good to do that. I might however, because I've got a controller at the moment I'm gonna persist, I'm gonna make sure that it actually happens, hide until animated should be working from there so let's just have another quick dig around in here buttons and forms. I'm gonna turn off hidden until triggered, let's try that and get replay that layout. And click on that, Arrgh I be goldbeard I be stuck here, Oh I don't know. I just need to just, one more look for on here. If I don't get it this time, that should be showing. You see here the little decoder for the things, right so ignoring it and show and hide it should, it should do that, I'm gonna try. If I do hit an integral trigger that's gonna actually hit this element just here. And that's kind of curious, one more go, and if it doesn't work I'll move on and if I get a chance at the end I'll come back to it and try and solve it. Arggh I be goldbeard I be stuck here. We'll I'll be, and sometimes it goes like that. Let's move away from that just for the minute. It will work and I'm probably gonna kick myself in just a minute or two when I figure out, or a bit later on when I figure out what I've actually not targeted just there but I do need to dig in there a bit more and figure out exactly what's going on.