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e-book vs interactive PDF

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    • June 23, 2015 at 10:45 am #76183
      Marilyn Kagels
      Member

      I’m a digital scrapper who is learning InDesign for scrapping. I’ve made interactive PDFs and wondered if there were any advantage in making a fixed-layout e-book instead. How would my family view it?

    • June 23, 2015 at 1:19 pm #76200
      Anne-Marie Concepcion
      Member

      The advantage to making an FXL is that your family could view the document and play with any interactivity in a mobile device as well as iBooks or Adobe Digital Editions. FXLs support many interactive features that PDFs don’t, including animations. And though PDFs support buttons and MSOs and videos and such on the desktop, they usually fail on mobile. FXL ebooks, opened in iBooks on an iPad or iPhone, handle those w/aplomb.

      The file that results is an .epub instead of a .pdf. So they just need an eReader that opens EPUBs. Which iBooks does on iOS devices. Android eReaders have a spotty record of what interactive features they support.

      In sum: If your family/readership is mainly using Macs and iOS, and you want to include more interactivity, give it a shot. It’s as simple as exporting to EPUB (fixed layout). If most everyone is on Android/Windows, it’s a more difficult row to hoe.

      AM

    • June 23, 2015 at 1:19 pm #76201
      Anne-Marie Concepcion
      Member

      The advantage to making an FXL is that your family could view the document and play with any interactivity in a mobile device as well as iBooks or Adobe Digital Editions. FXLs support many interactive features that PDFs don’t, including animations. And though PDFs support buttons and MSOs and videos and such on the desktop, they usually fail on mobile. FXL ebooks, opened in iBooks on an iPad or iPhone, handle those w/aplomb.

      The file that results is an .epub instead of a .pdf. So they just need an eReader that opens EPUBs. Which iBooks does on iOS devices. Android eReaders have a spotty record of what interactive features they support.

      In sum: If your family/readership is mainly using Macs and iOS, and you want to include more interactivity, give it a shot. It’s as simple as exporting to EPUB (fixed layout). If most everyone is on Android/Windows, it’s a more difficult row to hoe.

      AM

    • June 24, 2015 at 6:03 am #76212
      Marilyn Kagels
      Member

      Thanks, Anne-Marie. Our family is a mixed bag of Apple and Windows, so I’ll give an EPUB a try. If any of them use Chrome, would Readium work on their computers? I downloaded it to preview any FXLs I make.

      Are there other digi-scrappers in the forum? If, so what have you done with InDesign?

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