InDesign Docs

For demo purposes, DPS Tips is now set up with direct entitlement. That means that you can click the Sign In button in the library and use any of the following accounts to sign in. Once you sign in, you can download bonus folios. These folios are basic placeholder articles at this time, so don’t get too excited. When someone in the DPS world throws out terms like “direct entitlement” or “restricted distribution,” you’ll have a better idea of how it works.

Account 1: All bonus issues

Username: tips
Password: dps

Account 2: Only the “Colin” issue

Username: fleming
Password: colin

Account 3: Only the “Bob” issue

Username: bringhurst
Password: bob

For more information about direct entitlement and restricted distribution, see Entitlement DPS Developer Center.

Creating scrollable frames in DPS is easy. Just create a content frame and a container frame, paste the content frame into the container frame, and then use the Overlays panel to specify scrollable frame settings for the container frame. (If you’re confused, see the help article about scrollable frames, and then come back.)

But what if you know the content isn’t final and you’re going to edit the scrollable frame content later? And what if your scrollable frame content includes a bunch of buttons and overlays that are hidden from view?

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When you create a stack of overlays in a DPS article, which overlays take precedent over others? While the answer is complicated, it’s also logical. Before I go into which overlays win out in a stack, first I need to explain the concept of “inactive” vs. “active” overlays.

Inactive and Active Overlays

When we’re teaching the concept of interactive overlays, we like to explain that non-interactive content is added to the background image of the page while interactive overlays appear on top of this background image, which is why they’re called “overlays.” While that’s accurate, it doesn’t tell the whole story. It fails to take into account that some overlays can be active or inactive.

Let’s take a look at Colin’s image sequence of the Fremont Bridge in Seattle. You can experiment with this example in the Advanced Overlays issue of DPS Tips, or you can watch this quick 10-second video.

Notice what happens to the red arrow and the image sequence overlay. Tapping the image sequence hides the red arrow, which is part of the background image, and double-tapping the image sequence exposes the red arrow again. Why?

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If DPS articles include memory-intensive overlays, you might run into trouble when viewing them on mobile device with obvious memory limitations. Sometimes the app becomes sluggish, sometimes it crashes, and sometimes it takes a PDF article too long to load.

How do you avoid these memory problems? If you go against guidance and do something like create a pan and zoom image with a 5000×5000-pixel PNG image or scale down a huge video, you’ll likely crash your app. However, in some cases, individual overlays that by themselves wouldn’t cause memory problems can be a problem when combined with other memory-intensive overlays on the same page or even on adjacent pages.

Whenever you turn to a page in an article, the DPS viewer loads each page above and below that article into memory, and it loads the current page of the next or previous article. This pre-loading improves the performance of articles and helps prevent crashing when users swipe quickly.

In this example, viewing page 2 of the third article loads the pages above and below it as well as the first page of the articles before and after.

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In DPS Tips, I included several HTML examples that are used in Web Content overlays. I’ll attach the source files for these effects.

NOTE: Several people have reported to me that they cannot download the .zip files. I’m looking into this.

Scratch Off

Let’s start with the scratch-off effect example.

Download ScratchOff.zip (as used in DPS Tips)

Download ScratchOff_simple.zip (no extra text or borders)

1. Create two images the same size.
2. Name them “foreimage.jpg” and “backimage.jpg.”
3. Unzip the file, and replace the foreimage.jpg and backimage.jpg with your images.
4. Rename the scratch_off_v.html file, if necessary. Change the suffix to _h for horizontal-only folios or remove the suffix for dual-orientation folios.
5. Create a Web Content overlay the same size as your images.

Continue reading…

In the DPS forum, people frequently answer questions by pointing to the such-and-such article in DPS Tips to see an example and steps. In response, several people have mentioned that they don’t always have access to an iPad or other device to view DPS Tips. You don’t need an iPad. If you know where to look, you can view all the DPS Tips articles on a computer.

I used the social sharing feature to make all of the folios available in most computer browsers. If you click the following links from an iPad, you’ll jump to the first article of the issue in the DPS Tips app. Click any of these links on a desktop or laptop computer (or a new Surface tablet), and you’ll see a “Web Viewer” version of the articles in each issue.

DPS Overview

Overlay Basics

Advanced Overlays

DPS Features

HTML Effects

Information

In Web Viewer, click the icon in the lower left corner to switch to a different orientation. Click the icons in the bottom center to view different articles. Click the icons in the lower right corner to view different pages in the article.

Article displayed in Web Viewer. (Click to view larger image.)

Note that not all features are available in Web Viewer. For example, panoramas are not yet supported. You’re better off using DPS Tips on an iPad or another mobile device, but if you’re away from your iPad, use these links.

The “Optional URL Scheme” option in Viewer Builder is a relatively obscure feature that can come in handy. If you’re viewing this blog post on an iPad or iPhone in mobile Safari, tapping the following link opens the DPS Tips app if you have it installed (and updated to the newest version):

OPEN DPS TIPS

NOTE: If you click this link from a computer browser, you get an error message. Similarly, if you tap the link on an iPhone or iPad on which DPS Tips is not installed or updated, you get a “Cannot Open Page” error message. It’s useful only when you tap this link on an iOS device that has the newest version of DPS Tips installed.

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The DPS Tips privacy policy describes the privacy practices of the DPS Tips app on mobile devices.

DPS Tips collects data about how you use the app, including the type of device you’re using, the number of issues downloaded, and the way in which you interact with the app content. This data is collected anonymously.

If you need to use the same text in two InDesign documents, it can be a hassle to keep the changes consistent. If you find a typo or need to add a paragraph, you have to make the change in two different places. To simplify editing, you can use the InCopy export options–and you don’t need to have InCopy to get this to work.

Being able to share text between two documents is especially important when you’re publishing to mobile devices. If you’re using the Digital Publishing Suite to create magazines for the iPad, you can create separate horizontal and vertical documents so that a different layout of the same content appears when the iPad is rotated.

Quick Summary: Export a linked InCopy (.icml) file from one file, and place it in the other file. When you want to edit the linked text, check out the linked story in one document, save the changes, check it in, and then update the other document.

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