Adobe® InDesign® CS5 Bible

Chapter 35. Using Animation and Creating Flash Documents

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Animating objects

• Creating motion paths

• Controlling animation playback timing

• Working with object states

• Exporting Flash files

Page layout is no longer about just print documents. For several versions, InDesign has been moving away from its print-only roots to embrace electronic media such as PDF files. InDesign CS5 takes this progression to the next level by not only enhancing InDesign's Web-export and interactive-document capabilities, as covered in Chapters 33 and 34, but adding a whole new set of capabilities for creating animations in InDesign that are then exported to Flash documents that users can play on their computers or in their Web browsers.

This inclusion of animation capabilities in InDesign CS5 means you don't need to be an expert in Adobe Flash Professional to create animations — you don't even have to use Flash Pro at all in many cases. Of course, to create highly complex and full-featured animations, you'll want to use Flash Pro and its ActionScript language. But even then, starting in InDesign to do the layout and basic user interface makes a lot of sense because InDesign's inherent visual approach makes such work easier to accomplish. You would then take the exported Flash file into Flash Pro to add the animation and scripting capabilities that only Flash Pro provides.

The Flash file formats (there are two of them, as explained later in this chapter) give your document the most interactivity possible, ...