Using the Viewer Display, you can have in5 generate a PDF of your document to make available for download.


But what can you do if you want to make specific parts of the publication or multiple pieces of other content available for download separately as multiple PDFs? 


You can add a button for each downloadable file. Here’s one approach for adding the buttons and the downloadable content:

  1. Create the PDFs that you’d like to make available for download. (How you make them may depend on the content.)

    • If they were created in InDesign, then

      • Export a PDF by doing the following:

        • Go to File > Export…

        • In the Export dialog, set Save as type to Adobe PDF (Print) (*.pdf).

        • In the Export Adobe PDF dialog, in the General section, change Pages from All to Range and set the page number of the page.

        • Click Export.

        • Make a new folder for the PDFs and save each of them to this folder.

  2. Make a button in your publication for each PDF using the Buttons and Forms panel (Window > Interactive > Buttons and Forms)

    • Set the Action to Go To URL.

    • Set the URL using the path assets/resources/[name of PDF] as in the example below:

      • For example, if you created table1.pdf, then set the URL to the following:

        • assets/resources/table1.pdf

  3. Export your publication with in5 by either going to in5 > Export HTML5 with in5... or to in5 > Easy Export Wizard... and clicking the Advanced button in order to switch to the Export HTML5 with in5 dialog.

  4. Go to the Resources section of the Export HTML5 with in5 dialog, under Folder, click the Browse... button to navigate to the folder where you saved the PDFs, and click OK to export.
    in5 will then take the contents of your folder and put it inside a subfolder called Resources in your output.


Be aware the PDF format that can be opened by a browser. Whether the PDFs are downloaded to the user's computer or open in the user's browser depends on the user's browser setting.


If you would like to make sure that the content does not open in the browser, then you could zip the file and make the zip file what is downloadable. A zip file would need to be downloaded and extracted in order to be viewed. The unzipped PDF could still be viewed in the browser, though, depending on what application the user has associated with PDFs. It's possible that the end user may not have a PDF reader or software installed.