In this lesson, you are going to learn how to add hyperlinks to an InDesign document. I have the hyperlinks document open from the lesson files folder in the chapter four folder. I have the digital publishing workspace chosen. So if you want your panels to be where mine are, you can go to the Window menu to Workspace and go to Digital Publishing. We're going to talk about two different kinds of hyperlinks in InDesign. The first one is an internal hyperlink, which requires a two-step process. We add a text anchor where we want it to link to, and then we add a link. And then the second one that we're going to talk about is an external link to a URL. Now, one of the things to keep in mind about using the hyperlinks feature in InDesign is that in order for these to actually work for us, we do have to export either to an ePUB, an interactive ePUB, a fixed-width ePUB, or a flowable ePUB, or we have to export to a PDF. And in a later lesson, we will talk about how to do both of those. But for now we're going to talk just about how to add those hyperlinks. And I will tell you about a quick checker as well right within InDesign. So what we have here is our Hiking Monthly newsletter. And we're going to make this into an interactive PDF. So we want to add links to make it easier for our viewers to go to see different places within our document. We have some guides in the way. So it's going to make it a little bit easier for us to see if we go to the View menu to Screen Mode to Preview. So, first of all, we have right on the first page this In This Issue, and we have three different articles that are in this issue. So we're going to create a link from that first article to where it is in our document. So if we scroll down and go over here to page two, we can see this is where we have our Asseteague Wildlife article. So we're going to select our type tool, and we're going to click right in front of that Asseteague Wildlife. And we're going to go over to our hyperlinks panel. Now, when you create a link to another area of the document, the first thing we have to do is create that anchor. In InDesign, it's called a text anchor because we're in a text frame. So we're going to go to the panel menu up in the top-right corner of our hyperlink panel. And we are going to choose a new hyperlink destination. So the type is going to be a text anchor, and we are going to name this Asseteague. And we're going to click OK. So now we have the destination for our link. So we're going to scroll back up to our page one. And we're going to select that text, Asseteague. And from that same panel menu of our hyperlinks panel up in that top-right corner, we are going to choose New Hyperlink. Now, when we do, it asks us what type of hyperlink. So we want to make sure that it does say text anchor from the top, make sure it says text anchor. And because we only have one text anchor in this document currently, that's what came up in our text anchor with our hyperlinks document. Now, the appearance option down here is how this is going to look in a PDF. And you'll notice here that InDesign is going to create a style. It's going to apply the hyperlink character style to this text. And for a PDF, it's going to have an invisible rectangle around it. We're going to click Ok. And when we click off, if I zoom in on this, I can see that it has changed the look of my text. It's now a lighter blue, and it has an underline under it. Very similar to what we see with links when we're out on a web page. If you would like to change what your hyperlinks look like, you can go to the Window menu to Styles and to Character Styles. And this is where we have that hyperlink character style. Now, we didn't create that. It was automatically created when we added this first link to this document. So if you wanted to change the color, if you wanted to get rid of the underline it all, you can just right-click on that hyperlink and edit the hyperlink, and the edit hyperlink dialog box will come up. Now, when we did that, when we added that hyperlink over here in our hyperlinks panel, it's telling us that there is a link to Asseteague Island and it starts, the source is on page one. So that's our source right here, Asseteague Island. But then the destination is this little anchor. And if we click on that, it will go to our Asseteague Wildlife link. I'm going to close out of that character style, zoom in a little bit on my document, and I'm going to scroll down now to my page five. And I'm going to put my cursor in this text frame under National Park Hikes. And I'm just going to zoom in on this a little bit. At the bottom of our page, we do have a link to a URL. So this is a link to the national park services, the government website, for our hiking trails. And we want our readers of our newsletter to be able to click right on that link and go directly to that site if they want to. So if we select that URL, from the panel menu up in the top-right corner, we could choose new hyperlink, or we could do new hyperlink from URL. If we do the new hyperlink, our dialog box will come up, and here it will come up with our destination. If it came up to text anchor, you can just go to that link menu and change it to URL. And then down here, it's going to give us that same character style, that hyperlink style, and our PDF appearance. And we're going to click OK. Now, one of the cool things about this feature is the fact that over here in our hyperlinks, it does tell us that we do have a green light. So this is an effective URL. So if you put in the wrong URL, InDesign is going to tell you. But because we have a green dot, it's letting us know this is a valid URL. And if we were to click on it, it would take us out to that national park's page. So in this lesson, you learned how to add internal text links to text anchors, as well as external hyperlinks to web pages.
