Come on over to our live blog event direct from the DPS Summit in New York starting at 9:15am ET. Follow along as we unveil the next generation of DPS. Also, stay tuned throughout the week for more updates, announcements and video from Adobe and partners.
Source Interlink Media (SIM) is all about fueling people’s passions, whether their interests run toward hot rod cars or home theater systems. With 78 titles, the publisher saw the opportunity to reach even more readers through tablet devices. To quickly repurpose its content, SIM turned to Adobe Digital Publishing Suite and new Adobe InDesign software script. The script automates the process of converting PDF files into InDesign files that can be easily imported into Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.
With an ambitious goal of having 40 titles live in 40 days, SIM got to work converting its titles. Dale Bryson, prepress director for SIM says, “We’ve automated the process of transforming PDF files to digital editions using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, eliminating what would otherwise be a very labor-intensive, error-prone, and repetitive process.”
Using the script, the 40 titles are all thriving, and available on Apple Newsstand. It takes minimal resources to create the digital editions, which offer SIM a new revenue stream for the company in terms of both subscriptions and advertisements. Using the InDesign script and Digital Publishing Suite, publishers can also convert back issues to digital editions in a fraction of the time it would take to re-create them from scratch.
The InDesign script that SIM used is available from the Digital Publishing Suite Developer Center, at www.adobe.com/devnet/
A tutorial showing publishers how to use the script to automatically create InDesign documents from PDF files that are ready for Digital Publishing Suite is available here: www.adobe.com/devnet/
Read the SIM success story here: http://adobe.ly/Jjr05v
Tomorrow, 9:15am ET! Visit the live blog as we unveil the next generation of DPS. Adobe, in partnership with leaders in the publishing industry, will reveal the latest advancements in digital publishing. Don’t miss it!
Adobe Digital Publishing Event 2012 live blog: http://adobe.ly/DPSnyc2012
By Neil Enns, Sr. Product Manager, Digital Publishing Suite
Today, when many of our customers today first publish, they produce great, high-quality, publications for a single device. For example, they often start getting production for the iPad working smoothly, and then turn their attention to targeting other platforms supported by Digital Publishing Suite such as the Kindle Fire or other Android devices. In other cases our customers have developed great content for horizontal reading, and then want to add support for vertical orientation display.
Traditionally, when using CS5 or CS5.5, adding support for these additional platforms or orientations has meant creating an additional set of InDesign documents. Every orientation or platform requires its own set of InDesign documents, and the number of files to manage quickly becomes unwieldy. By the time you support two platforms with two orientations you have four InDesign documents for each article in your publication!
With InDesign CS6 we’ve added a new feature called Alternate Layouts to help manage this. Now InDesign documents can contain layouts for multiple devices and orientations. If you want to have a horizontal and vertical layout for your article you can do so with a single InDesign file. Need to add Kindle Fire or Nook support? No problem! Just add another layout to your document.
The Pages panel in InDesign CS6 showing three alternate layouts: iPad horizontal, Kindle Fire horizontal, and iPhone vertical.
While reducing the number of files you have to deal with is nice, there are additional benefits to Alternate Layouts as well. The assets in the document are shared across each layout which makes it easier to keep content up-to-date. Say, for example, you find a typo in the article text just before publication. With Alternate Layouts you can make the correction in the document’s primary layout and then use the links panel to push the change to all the other layouts in the file.
Finally, we’ve added support for page rules to InDesign CS6. With liquid page rules you can give InDesign hints about how to adapt your content when creating an alternate layout. For example, if you have a completed iPad layout you can add liquid page rules to your design and then generate a layout for Kindle Fire. The resulting layout can then be manually adjusted to give the exact look you want. The addition of liquid page rules is, we believe, a great workflow enhancement to help our customers quickly get started on producing content to reach an even wider audience.
This week we are featuring PowerOn by Roland User Group in our app review series. Roland makes music equipment — from dynamic keyboards and synthesizers to their famous Boss guitar pedals. Watch this video to see how they leveraged interactivity in Digital Publishing Suite to ease the purchasing process for customers and provide inspirational examples of music icons that rely on Roland equipment to craft their sound.
Top interactive features include:
Download the app to see many more features that Roland has included in the app.
Roland and Digital Publishing Suite, Professional Edition
After halting production of its print magazine in 2010 due to the tough economy, Roland saw an opportunity to inspire musicians and aspiring musicians through terrific articles that include audio, images, and videos that they can interact with on the iPad.
Martyn Hopkins, brand manager of Roland UK, says it like this: “Only 10% of people play a musical instrument, yet 70% say they would like to. What better way to inspire musicians and aspiring musicians than through terrific articles that include audio, images, and videos that they can interact with on the iPad?”
The Power On digital edition consolidates the best content from across Roland into an interactive publication available in multiple languages from more than 110 different app stores worldwide. The publication has been translated into German, and is now being translated into French and Dutch.
Unlike its print publication, which Roland produced with the help of third-party resources, the digital edition of Power On is created completely in-house using Adobe InDesign and Digital Publishing Suite. Leveraging existing knowledge of InDesign helps Roland avoid long development and publishing cycles and provide the rich and engaging content that readers have come to expect.
The digital edition provides musicians with compelling editorial, videos of musical performances, products that can be rotated 360 degrees, and much more. Product features even enable viewers to virtually tweak audio settings on equipment, playing with the gear to hear the digital nuances.
Roland is leveraging the built-in analytics of each edition to determine which areas of the publication are most popular to inform future publishing efforts. By gaining deeper insight into open rates, popular articles, and statistics showing where the majority of time is spent by readers within the digital magazine, the publisher will continuing to improve editorial based on the needs of its subscribers.
Roland aims to publish quarterly, and is also looking toward introducing an Android version. Hopkins concludes, “Adobe Digital Publishing Suite provides a fast, fun, and effective way for us to reach our audience on tablets—where we know they spend an increasing amount of their time.”
Read more in the Customer Showcase PDF.
