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Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Audio in a PDF eBook - Episode 3

An audio recital of the text on a page is embedded and then controlled with a play and pause button. We show how to add an icon to a button.

Audio in a PDF eBook - Episode 2

We do all of the audio embedding in Acrobat Pro 9. The audio is prepared beforehand in a wave file format.

The screencast shows how to make the audio play on entering the page and stop on leaving the page. We also show how a basic button can stop the audio.

Audio in a PDF eBook - Episode 1

We place an audio file on a page in InDesign and then modify its appearance and behavior in Acrobat. We are using Indesign CS3 and Acrobat Pro version 9.

Monday, May 12, 2008

Building a Static Page within ExpressionEngine

Sometimes we might want to create a page that doesn’t use dynamic content from the blogging/content management system but we want it to have a similar look. We can use Dreamweaver to help in this process.

In this session we look at this process so that we can create a page that has a link to a downloadable eBook (PDF).

I should mention that we do it this way becasue our team of learners do not have FTP access to the server. Images and PDFs can only beuploaded through the EE control panel.

An earlier screencast also showed how Dreamweaver could help edit templates.

Friday, May 02, 2008

From InDesign to XML

As well as a PDF of the eBook we may also need an XML file to keep for future generations (maybe PDFs will not be readable in 20 years time!).

This ScreenCast goes through the steps to create an XML from the InDesign ebook. The steps are as follows:

1. make sure that all text is 'styled' using paragraph and character styles
2. create tags that will be used in the XML (the names could be the same as the names of the styles)
3. map the styles to the tags
4. show the structure
5. export to XML
6. view with Internet Explorer

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Showing Extra Information on rolling over Hypertext

Want to show an image when rolling over some text in the eBook? This shows how to do it.

We use a form button and place an 'Icon' on this button. We then create another botton to show the first button.

Music Credit: Oleg Galkin | This piece is called Flora

Monday, April 14, 2008

Adding Interactivity to the PDF eBook

Three basic methods of interactivity are shown:

• Adding a hyperlink on a master page in InDesign. This gets carried over to the PDF.
• Adding a link in the PDF opening page
• Adding a forward and back button on everypage.

Monday, March 17, 2008

Setting the Initial View for the PDF

In this session I look at how metadata set in the InDesign document will have an effect on what the users see on opening the PDF. The session looks at setting the initial view within Acrobat, so that the PDF shows the full opening cover page in all its glory.

Music Credit: Oleg Galkin | This piece is called Flora

Friday, March 14, 2008

Interactive Contents for eBook

This session covers:

• Using styled content, such as headings and subheadings to create contents page
• making the contents list with page numbers
• separating the headings and page numbers with dots
• exporting to PDF and showing how the contents become navigation links
• showing how this also creates bookmarks

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Placing Graphics in InDesign (session 2)

When adding graphics to an InDesign document there are some details worth knowing:

• Images can have outlines or stroke
• Images can be viewed in better quality while working on the design
• Images can be anchored to a place with the text

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Placing Graphics in InDesign (session 1)

The page layout software, InDesign, is very powerful and there are several ways to integrate graphics with text. In this first session we look at:

• placing graphics on a layer and adjusting the transparency
• Placing a graphic within text
• wrapping the text around the graphic

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Text Processing (removing unwanted paragraph breaks)

If we source a public domain text on the web, such as those from the Gutenberg project, we may well find that each line of thext has a fixed length. This is because the text was probably scanned in and then converted to real text through OCR software. The text is laid out exactly as it was in the original source. This facsimile is not appropriate for our needs.