Digital Publishing Company

We currently offer two common types of viewer.

• An HTML-based viewer for Active Paper.
• A Flash-based viewer for Active Magazine.

The HTML viewer is built around showing individual stories. The reader can see the whole page or, by using the left hand nav, read an abstract of the first lines of the story. When they click on the story it opens in a new window and can be viewed either in its original newspaper layout or as plain text view. This viewer is normally used for broadsheet newspapers. Read more about Active Paper.

The Flash viewer is ideal for magazines, brochures and also tabloid newspapers. Here the whole magazine is viewed as double page spreads, exactly like the original. Flash enables us to add visual effects, such as the gutter in the centre fold and page-turning effects.

The process behind the scenes is to extract the JPGs from the original magazine PDF and optimised them to show high quality images (usually 120 dpi) without paying the penalty of the usual associated download speeds. Text is rendered as a PNG file and, from these two, the Flash file (.swf) is created.

As the magazine cover loads, the .swf file for the next ten pages downloads in the background. If the reader proceeds at normal speed on a broadband internet they should be able to read the whole magazine without ever having to wait for a page to load.

The viewer has the following features.

• Index of contents.
• Free-text search.
• Zoom-in, zoom-out—any level of magnification from one to 8000%.
• Page-turning either by right corner turn or using left-right arrows.
• Print pages (configurable, can be disabled).
• View plain text of an article, save, email or print it (configurable, can be disabled).

Flash files are able to contain rich media files enabling us to embed movies, audio, but also other .swf files within the page. This allows for creative animation and reader interaction.

This is just scratching the surface of what can be done and the next generation of viewer will have archive integrated into the magazine.