On Monday, a brilliant little gem of work-togetherness was documented on Adobe’s Digital Publishing blog: The New Yorker launches iPad edition using Adobe tools
For those of you who didn’t click on that link and kept right on reading (you know who you are), here’s the brief summary:
To create the new only-for-tablet version of the magazine, the design team from The New Yorker worked with Adobe’s Digital Magazine Solution and InDesign to create templates for the app’s HTML pages. This is a marked break from the typically rasterized content that appears in other digital publications (for example, the new digital version of Wired magazine, also completed with Adobe’s Digital Magazine Solution); since the features of The New Yorker are so text-heavy, and since they’re updated weekly, HTML was the perfectly flexible solution to allow for digital publication of the app’s super wordy articles instantly and often.
Now, back up for a second—let’s do a roll call of the major players here: digital publication; InDesign; text-heavy content. How might the content here best be produced, edited, managed, flowed to InDesign?
Need we say it?…
Yes, we must…
Buzzword! Of course!
Just the thought of the potential workflow here makes our heads spin with the joy of possibilities. As the world of print media begins to grow into the digital realm (that is to say, as more and more of what was historically print matter is digitized and published for electronic devices), Buzzword seems more (and better) poised to be a part of the action; the content lives up here in the cloud, and with last spring’s CS5 release, can be flowed directly into InDesign with the “Place from Buzzword” command. We’re ready and excited to see publishing—both on the small scale and the large—take advantage of tools like these for seamlessly going from concept to content to publication of materials, both text and image.
Are you finding ways to incorporate the marriage of Acrobat.com and the Creative Suite into your workflow? We would love to hear your stories. Drop us a line at acrobat.com_feedback@adobe.com, or comment below.
Comments
Here is what this article says to an outsider struggling to use Buzzword (and the rest of the Acrobat.com suite) and seeing no growth in the product over time: Buzzword’s purpose is to act as a conduit for raw copy to go from the web into InDesign.
Silly me! I was originally looking at Buzzword as a fully-featured, web-based word processor, but this is not its function at all. It’s just a passthrough from the web to a true word processing and layout product.
You want styles? Use InDesign. Want to use graphics in your headers? Use InDesign. Want orphan control? Use InDesign. Want more than seven fonts? Use InDesign. Want any of the hundreds of ideas yet to be incorporated into Acrobat.com? Sorry, use the Creative Suite.
Acrobat.com was never really intended to be a stand alone product. It was meant to be “married” to the Creative Suite and was always that way. I get it now.
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Hi Frank,
Thanks for the comment; you bring up a point that we wrestle with on a regular basis. Let me clarify: Buzzword may be used in conjunction with InDesign, but that’s certainly not the end of the story for Acrobat.com’s word processor. We’re still developing new features for Buzzword, although we admit that H&J manipulation and more complex layout features aren’t as near as we once hoped. Don’t give up hope! We haven’t forgotten that people still love Buzzword for its inherent functionality, and will use it independently of the Creative Suite. That was the original intention for the application, and we plan to carry on supporting it as an fully-functioning, free-standing entity.
Thank you for raising this point. Feel free to let us know if you have more thoughts on the subject; we’d like to hear them.
Kind regards,
Rebecca
Publish as epub seems to work ok, but for limited layout. If you want a sparkly magazine style event it is reasonable to expect that something extra is required. But Buzzword is ok to publish text, more than half of what most people need, my guess.