At its simplest Illuminatus lets you put together interactive and multimedia publications using the screen of a computer as the pages of an electronic book in a simple manner. It therefore allows ordinary people to create electronic versions of almost anything they can do on paper with greater pizzazz and with the advantage of being able to add sound and moving pictures too. Each page can contain a mixture of text, pictures, animations, video and sounds or music. These multimedia elements can be part of the page when it is first turned or can be delayed to appear later or can appear in response to the reader activating a button by clicking on it with the mouse or even simply by moving the mouse cursor over it.

When you have finished creating your publication you make a fully-independent program simply by "compiling" it this creates a ready-to-run copy for you to run outside the Illuminatus editor on your own computer, or "publishing" it which creates an installable version of the publication and chops it up into chunks the right size for distributing on disk. The process is much like creating a booklet with a desktop publishing package except the final result is an interactive multimedia document on disk or CD-Rom rather than printed on paper, hence interactive publishing.