CreativePro Forum

Return to Member Forum

• Author
  Posts
• • September 30, 2019 at 12:39 pm #1189682
    Patrick Flowers

    Member

    My company creates graphic-heavy interactive PDFs for clients that are hundreds of pages long. We create a TOC to link to each page and include a “TOC” button on each page to return to where they were. They eventually print off many pages of these documents to distribute, and this has worked fine since before I’ve been with the company (4 years).

    With Flash being iffy on a lot of client systems, my boss has asked me to look into creating them as an epub (or something else) instead of Interactive PDF. I’ve been able to successfully link pages back and forth, but the biggest issue that I’ve run into is the print feature. I understand wanting to protect the epub by denying printing and thus making tons of copies of it, but that’s exactly what we are looking to do. Any suggestions?

  • September 30, 2019 at 1:04 pm #14324007
    Ken Jones

    Member

    Hi Patrick

    What sort of interactions beyond the TOC links do you currently include in your PDFs?

    I’d suggest PDF is much more suited to printing than EPUB and, depending on your interaction requirements, there may be other ways to keep using PDF whilst losing the need for Flash.

    Thanks
    Ken Jones
    Circular Software

  • September 30, 2019 at 1:05 pm #14324006
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Do you need interactive features, such as buttons, video, or animations? If not, then PDF may still be the best option for you.

    Another option might be to have a link to a printable PDF. That’s kind of what they offer in the File > Publish Online feature.

  • September 30, 2019 at 1:59 pm #14324001
    Patrick Flowers

    Member

    Our files are teacher printables for student use. So they get a huge PDF with the TOC navigation to get to each chapter’s pages and can print as many as they need. That way they don’t need to scroll down to whatever page they need. The old way was to just PDF each chapter and not use a TOC, they would just download a zip of every chapter at the beginning of the school year.

    On each page are a button back to the TOC (just says ‘TOC’), a button to the answer side (the next page but with answers), and the Answer Page has the same buttons but one going back to the front side. The buttons are formatted with a “Go to destination” or “Go to next/previous page.”

    We have another doc where the teacher can create a test for each student. This is quite a bit more in depth with buttons that change between questions in an object state as well as questions numbers, but still an interactive PDF. We don’t use any other feature as far as the videos or animations go.

  • October 1, 2019 at 5:32 am #14323997
    Ken Jones

    Member

    Hi Patrick

    As David suggests, PDF may still be the best option for you and you could add links in the PDF to a printable version if you wished to allow that.

    You may be interested in how my company’s product MasterPlan can allow secure sharing of PDF and interactive EPUB pages to any permitted web page. With support for full text search (including across multiple publications) and TOCs in the PDFs and EPUBs. More info https://see.masterplan.circularsoftware.com

    Feel free to contact me at https://www.circularsoftware.com/contact/ for more info.

    Thanks
    Ken Jones
    Circular Software

  • October 1, 2019 at 8:46 am #14323991
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Excellent point, Ken!

    (We are starting to use MasterPlan here at InDesignSecrets, and it’s cool!)

  • October 3, 2019 at 7:07 am #14323979
    Patrick Flowers

    Member

    I appreciate the input! I’ll be sharing it with my boss in a meeting today and we’ll see what she suggests we do moving forward.

  • November 11, 2019 at 8:42 am #14323732
    Patrick Flowers

    Member

    Sorry to bring back this thread, but I’ve begun working on them again. I have been able to convert the buttons to hyperlinks and move between pages just fine, but I run into another issue – they print. I know with a Button, I can tell it to show on the PDF but not be printable. With a hyperlink, I don’t seem to have that option. I need it to appear on the PDF without printing, but the only option so far is to have them on a layer, and changing the layer options to print/not print – however, that still won’t let them appear on the PDF when I export.

    Are Button options the only way to make them appear but not print?

  • November 11, 2019 at 11:50 am #14323731
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Is the hyperlink applied to text? Or is it an object? You could make it non-printing in the Attributes panel… or if it’s text, you could change the character style applied to the hyperlink before exporting for print.

• Author
  Posts