Create, Brand and Publish Flipbooks with AI

20 September 2026

What if creating an interactive flipbook was as simple as describing what you wanted?

In the second tutorial in our series on using ChatGPT with FlowPaper, we go well beyond importing a PDF. We start with a standard tourist brochure and use ChatGPT to turn it into a branded, interactive publication — changing the appearance, adjusting the toolbar, editing images, adding links and publishing the final result online.

Most of the process is handled through ordinary conversational instructions.

What You’ll Need

There are a few things to set up before you begin.

Start by downloading the ChatGPT desktop app from ChatGPT.com. The desktop version is useful for this workflow because it can work with applications running locally on your computer.

You’ll also need the FlowPaper desktop publisher, available from FlowPaper.com.

Mac users should choose the version that matches their processor — Apple Silicon or Intel. A Windows version is available as well.

Once FlowPaper is installed, launch it and install the ChatGPT integration from the application menu.

Keep FlowPaper open while you’re working and make sure you’re logged in. It’s also a good idea to avoid manually changing the publication at the same time ChatGPT is editing it.

Import a PDF and Preview It in ChatGPT

We begin with a tourist brochure in PDF format.

Normally, you might import the file into FlowPaper yourself and then work through the publication settings manually. With the integration installed, you can simply ask ChatGPT:

Use FlowPaper to import this PDF and show me a preview.

FlowPaper processes the document and returns the interactive publication inside ChatGPT.

From there, you can flip through the pages, inspect the result and decide what you’d like to change next. There’s much less back-and-forth between applications, which makes the editing process feel surprisingly direct.

Apply Your Website Branding

A generic flipbook is useful, but in most cases you’ll want the finished publication to look like it belongs to your website or business.

Rather than hunting down logo files and copying color values one by one, you can point ChatGPT at an existing website and use that as the reference.

For this example, we ask:

Grab the branding colors and logo from NewZealandTrails.com and use them in FlowPaper.

ChatGPT collects the relevant branding information and passes the changes to FlowPaper.

The flipbook is then updated with matching colors and a logo so that it feels much more consistent with the existing website.

The PDF itself hasn’t been redesigned. What changes is the presentation around it, which is often all you need to make an existing document feel properly branded.

The appearance of the publication is only part of the experience. You can also decide which controls readers should have access to.

In the tutorial, we use a simple instruction:

Disable the sharing button and add a download button to the toolbar.

The toolbar is updated without affecting the branding we’ve already applied.

You can use the same approach for other FlowPaper controls. Instead of opening settings panels and working through individual options, you can describe the result you’re after and let ChatGPT handle the configuration.

Edit Images Inside the PDF

This is where the workflow starts to move beyond basic publication settings.

ChatGPT can also help modify the content of the document itself.

On the first page of our brochure, we ask:

Enhance page one by adding a flare to the sky and brightening the image.

The image is edited and passed back into FlowPaper, where the updated version becomes part of the publication.

That means you’re not limited to taking a finished PDF and placing it inside a flipbook viewer. You can make visual changes to the source material as you go, without breaking the overall workflow.

Add Interactive Links

FlowPaper supports interactive elements such as links, hotspots, images and YouTube videos, and these can also be added conversationally.

On page five of the brochure, there’s a photograph of a pair of hiking boots. We want the whole photograph to act as a link, so we tell ChatGPT:

Add a link area to the photo of the feet on page five pointing to https://newzealandtrails.com. Don’t make it a hotspot. Make it a regular link area and have it cover the whole image.

ChatGPT identifies the relevant area on the page and adds the link through FlowPaper.

Being clear about what you want makes a difference here. In this case, we’re deliberately asking for a standard link area rather than a hotspot, and we want it to cover the full image.

If you’re not sure what else is possible, you can ask ChatGPT which interactive elements FlowPaper supports or open the desktop publisher and explore the available options there.

Remove Objects From Existing Pages

We also try a more substantial image edit by removing a person from a photograph on page three.

The instruction is short:

Remove the human on page three.

ChatGPT edits the image and sends the updated page back to FlowPaper.

For the example in the video, there’s no need to open a separate image editor, export the page, make the change and then rebuild the document afterward.

That’s one of the more interesting parts of this workflow. You’re not restricted to a small menu of predefined AI actions. You can describe the change you want in plain language and continue working from there.

Use Your Existing ChatGPT Account

The FlowPaper integration works with your existing ChatGPT account.

You don’t need to buy a separate package of FlowPaper AI credits just to use these features. Instead, the integration uses the capabilities available through your ChatGPT account while FlowPaper handles the publication itself.

The tutorial also touches on a few other possibilities that aren’t demonstrated in detail, including working with multiple publications, modifying text and redacting information from PDFs.

Those examples show how the workflow can extend beyond the branding and image edits covered in this video.

The basic idea remains the same: describe the outcome you want, and let ChatGPT coordinate the changes with FlowPaper.

Publish Your Finished Flipbook

Once the publication looks the way you want, you can publish it without leaving the conversation.

In our example, we ask:

Publish this to FlowPaper Cloud and give me the URL I can use for sharing.

FlowPaper publishes the finished flipbook, and ChatGPT returns the link.

You can then open the publication yourself, copy the URL or send it directly to your audience.

So the workflow runs all the way from the original PDF to the finished online publication without requiring you to manually work through every step.

A More Conversational Way to Work With Flipbooks

This tutorial covers the first version of FlowPaper’s ChatGPT integration, and it already opens up some interesting ways of working.

Rather than adding AI as a collection of isolated buttons or commands, the integration lets ChatGPT work across several parts of the publishing process.

In a single session, we took an ordinary PDF, imported it, previewed it, matched it to an existing brand, changed the reader controls, edited images, added interactive content and published the result online.

There’s plenty more to explore from here.

We’ll be covering additional ChatGPT and FlowPaper workflows in upcoming tutorials.

Ready to try it yourself? Download FlowPaper and start building your own interactive flipbooks with ChatGPT.