Hello and welcome to another training session with Computer Tutoring. This time we're going to
have a look at interactive forms within Adobe InDesign. Now if you want to follow along you
can download the exercise files from www.computertutoring.co.uk or you just need to
type a couple of boxes in , basically first name and last name - it's quite straightforward. So
first of all we're going to create a couple of text fields, and then the idea is, we put in the
names and we're going to have a submit button, we convert it to PDF and that's a format that
you can distribute using Adobe Acrobat. We're not going to cover the latter part of it, but the
collating of information and the distribution of the form, it's just the creation of the form
and converting it to Adobe PDF. So how do we do it? First of all if we click on the T tool over here,
there we go and we draw a text box, that's good, then we'll just go back to our selection tool,
and just go over to the textbox, what we need to do, is covert this text to a text field -
right click on the box, go down to interactive, and down and click on convert to text field, when
you click on convert to text field the buttons and forms panel appears, so we need to give this
text field and name. There are certain rules with the names, well let me zoom in, its giving a default
name, I'm going to delete that, and I'm going to type in a name, first_name, don't forget to press enter afterwards.
Now, as I said there are certain rules here. Don't press
the spacebar you can't have any spaces, and don't start with a number, and don't use any
funny characters like symbols, ? or the # key. So far so good.
Now armed with the selecting tool again I'm going to go down and hold down the Alt key on the keyboard and
drag create a duplicate, and this time I want to call this one last name. So last_name
Don't forget to press enter. So now we've got our two text fields here, last
we need a submit button. I'm just going to use a text field again for that, so I'm just going to
draw a text box, notice that the arrow on my cursor is black, if I hover it, just to
line it up underneath the last name it turns white, showing that it's going to be lined up perfectly
with the last name. I'm going to drag across to create my button here, and I'm going to type in some text.
Submit. I'm going to centrally align it, go to my move tool, there's a button over here on the
right hand side, I'm going to align it vertically. Last but not least, I'm going to just put a
color in the background, so just going to double click on my color options just down here,
then I'll do a nice blue color, bit like this one here, and okay and it's almost ready to go,
last thing I need to do is convert it to a button, so right click on the submit button or
text box at the moment - but soon will be a button, go all the way down to interactive, and then
across to convert a to button. Notice the little button in the bottom right hand corner, indicating that
this is now a button. So I now need to give this a name, so I'm going to call this one submit_form
and press enter. Please note, no spaces and no funny characters. We are now going to add an action
to this button. So click on the plus button to the right of actions, and go all the way down to, and
click on submit form. Click on submit form - that's the action it is going to do, but where is it going
to be submitted to? I click in the URL box, now if you're quite okay with PHP, ASP or some server-side
scripts, you can write a bit of script to handle that code, and you can type the URL to that page.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, what we're going to do is type in mailto:
and then enter an email address to which you want to receive
the information. Then press enter. Ensure that is your email address, as I don't want to get lots of
emails from everybody who's tried this. That's great - so almost done.
Now one of the most vital pieces of information you need is how to export it. What you do is,
you'll go to file, and export and then on my desktop I've created a folder called 'interactive
PDF' this is one I've done earlier - 'my form' I'm going to get rid of my form. You can call
your form whatever you want, I suggest lower cases and no spaces, but the most important thing is making
sure you select Adobe PDF interactive, if you don't do that it will just be a normal PDF. We click on
the Save button, yes to replace it, click on OK to accept the defaults, and here we have a nice
interactive PDF. I can click in first name, and type the name in, and then when I click on the
submit button the form is ready to send. If you want to know further information about how to distribute
and collate form information in Adobe Acrobat then please see one of our Adobe Acrobat probably one
of our intermediate courses will suit you fine. If you want anymore videos, if you
haven't already done so please see the Computer Tutoring website. Thanks very much for watching