Just recently, I was asked to produce both an iPad app and an interactive pdf sharing the same content. Interactivity would include custom navigation, some promotional movie material, and a couple of PowerPoint (ghrr!) presentations.

I designed the magazine as InDesign book (.indb) where every document (chapter) was one DPS article. Above normal layers I added two special ones: "DPS" and "PDF". I used each of them to carry only the interactive items relevant to each rechnology. E.g. navigational buttons shared the same looks but used different interactivity in their actions: for DPS – navto:// convention, and for PDF – go to page.

Other tweaking included reopening PowerPoint presentations in Keynote to make enhancements in graphs and transitions, and finally to export the presentations as movies.

Thanks to the book structucure i was able to export whole job to interactive pdf in one go, while each document was added as an article to a folio in DPS.

Whole thing was made in landscape orientation. Actually it worked fine, and the differences between the iPad version and downloaded pdf one were minimal.  I have also created a third version, with swipe-page swf effect to be pasted on customer site.

Tomek

I am away from my studio now, and have no access to project files.

I'll  try to make some some screenshots of the InDesign documents during the coming week.

The DPS version was not published in iTunes, it was shared  via acrobat.com.

Tomek

I'll echo Tomasz' comments.  Basic navigation buttons can stay the same - depending on how you built them of course.  What I will often do for slideshows is rebuild the buttons for the PDF version using the show/hide command trick if I'm trying to do a slideshow or something.

The problem with this, however, is that the LATEST VERSION OF ACROBAT IS BROKEN.  The two issues that need to be fixed, which I've already commented on in other forums and sent bug reports, are:

1. Rollover button state for PDFs is broken.  It will only briefly flash whatever you've got as your rollover state, then go back to the original state.  bleh.

2. WIth the show/hide feature, many times when you get to a page in which you've got several images as your slideshow, the image meant to be seen first is blank.  There's nothing there.  You have to manually click the corresponding button or another in order for anything on the screen to actually appear.

#1 has been going on since 10.1.1

#2 has been going on for at least 2 versions prior.

So far Adobe hasn't commented on either issue formally, and there's a real lack of complaints around the web in general.  This leads me to think that people either don't care or interactive PDFs aren't that common or both.  I create an enormous about of interactive PDFs, and always have to explain to clients what the 2 issues are...

I'm hoping that Adobe will soon release the web based viewer for DPS (or...even better...a proper desktop viewer) so that I can migrate away from PDFs altogether.  I get the impression that interactive PDFs are really going to be like Flash - a dying platform.

Hi Tomaz -- I'm the college professor still working with students who mostly don't own iPads. I did not try to use your folio-to-interactive pdf method previously since we do a lot of multistate objects. I'm wondering if the newer tools and pdf format option for articles offer new opportunities to do this.

I've created our most recent app with the old jpg/png format because we couldn't preview them in a desktop Viewer while multiple students worked on them. I now want to remake that folio in pdf and explore other output options. Any advice? New export instructions?