Using Adobe Publish Online

Michael W. Perry says:

Quote: “Also, keep in mind that Publish Online pages are not responsive. That means, for example, that while most documents will look fabulous on an iPad, they may be too small to read easily on an iPhone without zooming in and out.”

That, in a nutshell, is precisely what’s wrong with digital publishing. It fails to accomplish what should be its most important objective: displaying well on all sizes of devices. Attention has been devoted everywhere but to what matters.

First there was a silly madness about multi-media. Anyone who’s actually done publishing knows that 99% of the time, that’s a non-starter. It costs lots of money to do video poorly. It costs a Hollywood budget to do it well. Fiction or non-fiction, it doesn’t matter.

Now it’s easy to see that Silly #1, multi-media, is being supplemented by Silly #2, interactivity. True, the cost curve for that is not nearly as awful. No expensive team, location, and actors are required. The same person doing layout can make it interactive.

But for what purpose? I have laid out and published dozens of books for myself and others. I can think of only one, my Lord of the Rings chronology, Untangling Tolkien, that would benefit from an significant interactivity. Most books and magazines only need the modest interactivity already provided by a table of contents. Any more than that simply overwhelms users with choices they have no need to make. It turns what should be a clean and attractive screen into something cluttered and distracting.

What is needed is precisely what that quote above describes. People read digital publications on a wide variety of screens from a smaller smartphone through tablets up to large desktop screens. One size fits all formats such as these make no more sense that making one size of shoes for everyone.

What’s needed isn’t more multi-media or interactivity. What’s needed isn’t even new. It’s much like what Framemaker offered in print media in the late 1980s.

With Framemaker, the flexibility came with added content. Add a new paragraph to a 1,000-page technical document, and the entire rest of the document would reflow, Dealing intelligently with illustrations and tables. That’s because an illustration wasn’t locked to a specific place on a specific page as with ID. The person who placed it specified where it was to go in a broader sense, i.e. at the top of the next column. Adding text merely shifted the page where it appeared not how it appeared. The basic layout remained the same. For tech writers, that saved a lot of time.

Digital documents need to display similar intelligence with screen size changes. The person doing the layout shouldn’t be stuck with designing it for an iPad, knowing the result will look awful on an iPhone. The layout and the display software should be smart enough to adapt.

For example, what’s two columns on an iPad, with the illustration at the top of the second column, not only becomes one column on an iPhone, it deals intelligently with that illustration. The person doing the layout can choose how that illustration displays on smaller screens. If it matters that readers see it, he can have it appear on the next screen on which it fits without triggering awkward screen breaks. If it doesn’t matter, he can have a placeholder icon that, when tapped on, displays that illustration full screen. Whatever the choice, the result looks professional.

In much the same fashion, text needs more flexibility as to whether it is hidden or displayed. Currently, those laying out an ebook face three choices about supplemental information:

1. Leave it out.

2. Place it into the text.

3. Use a clumsy and (in iBooks) ugly pop-up screen.

Allowing a feature much like the accordion text of webpages would solve that problem in a far more elegant way.

I could go on and on. What neither Adobe or anyone else is offering is a way for those doing digital publications to control how they appear. They’re faced with two choices, Both equally bad.

1. One is crude, reflowable formats that give almost no control over appearance. Thus far, no on seems to have even made them smart enough to handle windows and orphans.

2. The other is a fixed layout designed for only one specific screen size and unsuitable for any other.

This is really crazy. The first reflowable formats started off right, breaking lines of text to fit onto a screen. But they stopped there rather than move on. Guided by whoever is doing the layout, they should be able to adapt, intelligently and attractively, to any size display. Webpages can already do that to a great extent. Why not other publications?

Only when that can be done will genuine digital publishing be available.