InDesign Docs

Adobe just put together  a DPS Getting Started Guide PDF for Professional and Enterprise publishers.

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The Digital Publishing Suite Gallery is a great place to check out apps created with DPS tools. Apps used to be added to the gallery through an obscure option in the DPS App Builder that’s no longer available. To add your DPS app to the gallery, take a couple minutes to fill out a form.

DPS Gallery Submission Form

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Publishers want to use many of the same techniques for digital magazine publishing that they use in their print magazines. With the v25 release, both Professional and Enterprise publishers can take advantage of a few new features that help them market their magazine more effectively.

First, take a look at Colin’s video. Then come back and read the rest of this article for additional details.

Click here to watch Colin Fleming’s video

First Folio Free

Here’s a common experience. Someone wants to check out the new magazine on their iPad, so she downloads the free app from the App Store full of anticipation. When she opens the app, she doesn’t see any content–just a library with issues for sale. So she gives the app a poor rating, deletes it, and goes back to play another level of Angry Birds.

With First Folio Free, publishers can now select an option in the Account Administration tool that entitles the most recently published retail folio to first-time users of an app. That way, when users download the app from the App Store, the most current issue can start downloading, providing a better initial experience for some publications.

Select this option in the Account Admin tool to enable First Folio Free. [Click image to enlarge.]

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

Download ScratchOff.zip

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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.

Folio Basics

Overlay Basics

Advanced Overlays

Effects

Single Edition

What’s New

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 Sections feature is new with the v24 release. This feature is primarily intended for newspaper publishers who want to allow their customers to download only specific sections of a folio, such as Entertainment, Sports, News, and Lifestyle.

How do you create Sections?

Simple. Go into the Folio Producer Organizer and open a folio in the Folio Producer Editor. Specify a section name for each article. Make sure that you specify the same section name for at least two articles. Section names are case sensitive, so take care when adding values. Copy/paste is a good idea.

If you don’t specify a section name for an article, that article gets downloaded when any other section is downloaded. You might want to leave the section name blank for articles such as covers and tables of contents.

Specify section names in the Folio Producer Editor. (Click to view larger image.)

You can also use the sidecar.xml file to specify section names for articles in a folio.

Once you specify sections for the folio, you need a v24.1 or later viewer to see the sections.

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If you want to create DPS folios for Android devices, you should understand a few things about the platform before making design decisions. It’s important to consider the different device sizes and dimensions and how DPS folios are displayed on these devices. I would usually provide a quick summary of what you should consider, but in this particular case, I think it’s better to ask you to sit down, grab a juice box, and spend 10 minutes trying to understand the intricacies of working with DPS on Android. No shortcuts.

(This article was written in October 2012. As the Android platform evolves, I’ll try to update this article.)

Differences Between Android and iOS Devices

You should be aware of a few key differences between how folios are displayed on iOS and Android.

Scaling

In iOS viewers, content is scaled up to fit in the screen. For example, a 1024×768 folio is scaled up to fit in the 2048×1536 iPad HD screen. However, on Android, viewers never scale up the content. A 1024×600 folio is displayed on a 1280×800 device with big black bars on all sides. Furthermore, on iPad viewers, only folios with a 4:3 aspect ratio will appear. On Android, any folio of practically any size will appear.

In this example, a 1024×600 folio is displayed on a 1280×800 Nexus. Instead of scaling up the content, the viewer adds black bars. (Click to enlarge.)

Although viewers can scale down content on Android devices, it’s a good idea to avoid it for performance reasons.

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If you’re using the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to create apps for mobile devices such as the iPad and Kindle Fire, it’s important to structure your source files appropriately. There are two main reasons for structuring files appropriately:

• To import articles, re-create folios, or create folio renditions for multiple devices.
• To transfer files from one computer to another.

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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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