Creating a slideshow using InDesign for a Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) folio is done using multi state objects (MSOs). One of the choices in the folio overlays panel for slideshows is to Hide Before Playing. At first glance this would be of good use when you don’t want your content to show. But once the slideshow is played, there’s no way to hide it again. So, what to do when you want to be able to not only show content in a slideshow but also hide it?

The answer is actually quite simple. Because each state in an MSO can contain just about anything, we’re going to add a state to our MSO that to your reader, looks like nothing. Let’s see how it’s done.

As you can see in the screenshot below, I’ve already created an MSO, but I want to be able to “hide” it.

4states

We can’t just hide an MSO but we can add a state that appears to hide it. Let’s draw a frame, making sure that it has no fill and no stroke. We’re going to add that as a new state. This is done by selecting the MSO and the empty frame and clicking the New button at the bottom of the Object States panel:

add state

Voila. We now have a new state in our MSO that, to the naked eye, contains nothing.

state5

We can now create a button that will select that state and appear to hide the slideshow:

gotostate

We’ll finish it up by adding that button to the first four visible states in our MSO. With InDesign’s native features this is, quite frankly, a royal pain. The object needs to be added to each state individually and the go to state action will be lost when you do so, meaning you have to reapply it to each button.

Fortunately, as I wrote about recently at InDesign Secrets, this is now a piece of cake with an inexpensive extension called Object States Assistant which I’ll use to add my button to those states, while keeping the go to state action. This is done by using the add objects to some states command:

osa

That button will now appear in the visible states and the user can tap it to “close” the slideshow.

If you don’t have Object States Assistant you can cut the button to the clipboard and navigate to each state in the Object State panel and choose the Add button to paste it into the visible state but don’t forget to reapply the go to state action to it:

paste into

Final notes

What ever you choose for the first state in your MSO is what will show when the reader goes to that page in the folio. If you want the slideshow “hidden” by default, just drag the empty state to the top of the stack in the Object States panel.

There are any number of ways to navigate through a slideshow; buttons, swiping or even allowing it to run by itself. There’s no best answer here since it will depend on the content.

I hope you find this tip useful.