How to Build PDF Tool Tips Inside InDesign

I love the tool tips that appear when you hover over icons in most modern applications and Web sites. These tool tips give you a written explanation of an icon’s purpose or a text’s meaning, and so are a user-friendly way to save on screen real estate. Move over, software developers and Web site engineers— now you and I can include this type of help in PDF files generated from InDesign! Let’s say you’re laying out a document that’s loaded with technical jargon and acronyms. It will be distributed as a PDF to a wide audience that may not know all those terms. Rather than bury the usual acronym glossary in the back of the document, you can enhance the PDF so that when readers hover over an acronym, the tool tip defines the mystery word. You can add these handy tool tips in InDesign in just a few steps. I’ll show you how to create an invisible button in InDesign that contains a tool tip; then export the InDesign file to PDF with the proper settings. Along the way, you’ll also pick up tricks on anchored graphics and Find/Change techniques.

Prepare

In InDesign, open your Buttons and Forms panel (Window > Interactive), and position it somewhere handy on your screen. Make your Frame edges visible (View > Show Frame Edges).

The Buttons and Forms panel

Build the Button

Create the pages of your document normally. I add the tool tip text descriptions as I create my layout; you can also do so as a final step just before you finish the document. When you’re ready to add a tool tip description, select the Rectangle Frame tool and draw a frame around one of the acronyms

in your document. With the frame selected, click the Convert to Button button in the bottom right corner of the Buttons and Forms panel. You’ll see that InDesign has created a button named “Button 1”.

Specify Button Options

In the panel you can enter a new name for the button if you wish, but the name of the button isn’t important. Type what you want to appear in the tool tip in the Description field.

Format the Rollover Area

If you don’t want the hover area around the acronym to be visible, you can leave the frame with no stroke or fill. However, if you want the rollover area to be visible to the reader, you may want to give it a stroke or semi-transparent fill. Alternately, you could format the text beneath the button to indicate that it’s a hot spot.

Test It

That’s all there is to it-you’ve created your first tool tip “button”. To test it, go to File > Export and choose Adobe PDF (Interative) for the Format. You can tweak the PDF export options as you wish, but you must set Compatibility to Acrobat 5 and in General options be sure to choose Forms and Media: Include All. Open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader. The button you just created should be invisible, but when you hover over it, the tool tip should appear.

Anchor the Button

The button you created won’t move with the underlying acronym text if the text reflows in InDesign. To accommodate this, embed the button object as an anchored object. Use the Selection (black arrow) tool to select the button you just created. Drag from the Anchored Object control (small blue square) on the button and place it just before or after the word underneath the button. Don’t place it in the middle of the word or you’ll confuse InDesign’s spellcheck feature. Hold Option/Alt and click on the anchor icon to open the Anchored Object Options dialog box. Here you can precisely tweak the position of the button. If you’re going to reuse the button elsewhere (see below), it’s best to set the X Anchored Position Relative to the Anchor Marker and the Y Anchored Position Relative to the Baseline. Now the button is anchored to the acronym and will move where the acronym moves.

Build a New Tool Tip

Making the first tool tip is the hard part. After you have one, you can duplicate it or create a new one pretty easily. To make a second button for a different acronym, choose Type > Show Hidden Characters. Use the Type tool to carefully select the “Yen” symbol that marks where the first button you created is anchored to the first acronym. (You may need to zoom way in to see the Yen symbol through the button, or choose Edit > Edit in Story Editor, and select the Anchor Symbol.) Choose Edit > Copy, click where you want the next tool tip to appear, and paste. Select the new button with the Selection tool. Use the controls in the Buttons and Forms panel to enter the new tool tip text in the Description field.

Build Multiple Instances of the Same Tool Tip

If an acronym appears a few times in your document, you can easily copy and paste the acronym with the Type tool, and the button that’s attached as an anchored object will come along for the ride. But what if an acronym that occurs dozens or hundreds of times, and you want it tool tip to appear every time? Not to worry-you can accomplish it quickly with Find/ Change. With the Type tool, select an acronym (the entire chunk of text in which the button’s anchored, not just the Yen symbol). Choose Edit > Copy, then choose Edit > Find/Change. In the Find What field, choose the acronym you’re looking for. In the Change to field, type ^c (which means “Clipboard contents, formatted”). Next, click the Change All button, and you’re finished!