Meeting Summary: Introducing Adobe's Digital Magazine Solution

Thu, Nov 11th, 2010 at 6:00 PM

School of Visual Arts Theater

Event Details

It was a packed house on Veteran's Day for the final meeting of the year of the New York City InDesign User Group and our guest speakers, Noha Edell and Steve Hart didn't disappoint in discussing Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite. The DPS is a collection of applications that integrate with InDesign CS5 for publishing rich interactive magazines to the iPad. These tools are currently in beta and can be downloaded for free from Adobe Labs.

First up was Noha, who showed an overview of how the DPS works with InDesign CS5 (the only version of InDesign supported for this workflow). She showed the file and folder structure as well as naming conventions that must be adhered to. She then demonstrated how to add hyperlinks and slideshows to InDesign layouts using native functions such as multi-state objects. For elements that have no native support, she demonstrated how the Interactive Overlay Creator is used to add such content by creating "for placement only" SWF files. These SWF files contain the information that the Digital Content Bundler requires to add the interactive content.

Finally, Noha used iTunes to "sideload" the .issue file that she created and used the free Adobe Content Viewer to view the file on the iPad.

Next, Steve Hart discussed the business aspects as they relate to Adobe. He spoke about the details, pointed out that they are for large enterprise clients, and noted that nothing had been announced or decided for smaller customers such as freelance designers or small studios. For those large customers, there is a capability to track how many issues of a magazine are not only downloaded but read. This includes the ability to track how many people are reading the advertisements, giving publishers feedback that they've never been able to get in print publication.

The evening finished up with our traditional raffle.

Following are some useful links for those who wish to experiment with the Digital Publish Suite:

Digital publishing Home Page
adobe.com.digitalpublishingsuite

Digital publishing FAQ
adobe.com/digitalpublishing/faq

Learn how Martha Stewart Living magazine launched its first digital issue for the iPad using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite:
blogs.adobe.com/digitalpublishing/2010/11/martha-stewart.html

Martha Stewart at Adobe MAX
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWyKoP-fAF4&p=345E7C69BCA3581F&playnext=1&index=18

Digital publishing on Adobe TV
tv.adobe.com/show/digital-publishing

Digital Publishing blog. Keep up with the latest news on digital publishing tools and technologies from Adobe and see examples of Adobe Digital Publishing Suite in action.
blogs.adobe.com/digitalpublishing

Thank you

A big thank you goes out to Noha Edell and Steve Hart from Adobe, plus our raffle sponsors: onOne Software (www.ononesoftware.com), Teacup Software (www.teacupsoftware.com), O’Reilly Publishing (www.oreilly.com), Noble Desktop (www.nobledesktop.com), and Adobe Systems, Inc. (www.adobe.com).

Next Meeting

Next year’s IDUG schedule is a work in progress. If you have ideas for next year, feel free to email them to scott@scottcitrondesign.com. Until then, happy holidays from all of us; we look forward to seeing you in 2011!



Scott Citron, Bob Levine, and Paul Fallaha
Chapter Representatives
New York City InDesign User Group
newyorkcity@indesignusergroup.com

Photos from this Meeting

See the photos