InDesign Docs

If you’re creating magazine apps for the iPad and other mobile devices, you have a lot of design decisions to make. Let’s go over a few of them.

Single-Folio or Multi-Folio Viewer App?

When you submit your content to the Apple Store or Android Market, each magazine or book requires its own branded viewer.

For most projects, the decision of whether to create a single-folio or multiple-folio viewer is straight-forward. If you intend to create a book or a one-off promotional piece, such as the Essential Guide to TRON, create a single-folio viewer. If you intend to create a magazine with multiple issues, such as The New Yorker, you need to create a multi-folio viewer that allows your customers to download folios as you publish them on the Adobe fulfillment server.

For multi-folio viewers, Adobe plans to charge $0.30 per download. Adobe does not charge anything for single-folio viewers, because they’re downloaded from the Apple Store or Android Market, not from the Adobe fulfillment server.

Orientation — Vertical, Horizontal, or Both?

You can create portrait-only, landscape-only, or dual-orientation folios. Note that you cannot mix and match orientation types, such as a horizontal-only and dual-orientation articles in the same folio. The layouts of single-orientation folios do not change when the customer rotates the iPad.

In a prerelease forum thread, one publisher claimed that magazine apps should be portrait-only because people are accustomed to reading portrait magazines. I don’t think that reasoning holds up. Aren’t those same people also accustomed to reading websites on landscape monitors? And watching t.v. and movies on landscape screens? I don’t think there’s a “right” orientation for the iPad.

I’ve seen well-designed portrait-only and landscape-only magazines. The new Golf Digest and Reader’s Digest apps are portrait only. One of my favorite apps, Harvest to Heat, is landscape only.

Golf Digest is portrait only.

Harvest to Heat is landscape only.

One major advantage to portrait-only or landscape-only folios is that you have to create only one design. If you have a printed magazine, converting the layout to a 768×1024 page size isn’t nearly as difficult as converting it to both a 768×1024 and 1024×768 page size.

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The interactivity features in InDesign were originally designed to work with SWF and PDF formats. When using DPS tools, some of these interactivity features are fully supported, some are partially supported, and some are not supported at all. The Buttons feature is partially supported in DPS. One limitation makes it difficult to create button hot spots: the Show/Hide Buttons action is not supported.

Fortunately, there’s a workaround. The key is to create a multi-state object (MSO) that includes both the hot spot image on the base state and the “close button” image on the target state, but no object in the MSO can be interactive. Once you create the MSO, you place invisible interactive buttons on top of the MSO These buttons switch states. Here’s a quick video of the button effect shown in the Desktop Viewer:

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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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The set of tools you use alongside InDesign CS5 to create digital magazines for the iPad and other mobile devices is called the Digital Publishing Suite. While you can use InDesign CS5 to create eBooks and interactive PDF and SWF files, the Digital Publishing Suite requires additional steps and applications to make your digital content commercially available on mobile devices.

Design, bundle, and view.

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Writing about the new Digital Publishing Suite has been keeping me so busy that I haven’t been updating this blog with juicy InDesign tips. If you’re interested in creating books or magazines for the iPad or other devices, go to the Adobe Labs site. You can download the necessary tools, as well as the user guide and the tutorial assets. To see what kinds of questions people are asking, go to the user forum.

If you’re interested in submitting an app you create to the Apple Store, you’ll want to join the prerelease site. Go to the Adobe prerelease page and choose Digital Magazine Publishing for product. The tools on the prerelease site are updated more frequently than on the Labs site. Also, the prerelease Downloads site includes a document called “iPad Publishing Process Overview.pdf” that helps you get started with the submission process.

If you have an iPad, check out some of these apps that were created using early versions of the Digital Publishing Suite tools.

InDesign Magazine Viewer (Free)

Mobile touch devices can provide a reading experience that’s better in some ways than websites or printed magazines. But the apps have to be done correctly. The “Take Color for a Spin” article in this issue takes advantage of this new format. Unfortunately, some of the other articles use a basic, flat structure when slideshows, videos, and other interactive designs would have improved the viewing experience. Then again, it’s free. Let’s hope future versions of this great magazine take better advantage of the format. (Download in iTunes)

Martha Stewart Living – Boundless Beauty ($3.99)

Martha made a guest appearance at the Adobe Max conference, and an Adobe bigwig named Kevin Lynch just returned the favor and entered Martha’s kitchen.

I bought this issue, but I haven’t been able to critique it yet because my wife has taken possession of my iPad. I may have more to say if I can get my iPad back. (Download in iTunes)

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