3D Issue Professional Online Guide

Creating dynamic digital editions from press ready PDFs has never been easier. The 3D Issue converter allows you to automate the process and even maximise the output buy allowing you to remove crop marks, generate active links each time URL's or emails are detected in the PDF, permit keyword search, convert PDFs of different orientations and enhance the visibility of your flash magazine through search engine optimization.

Below we have listed a step by step guide to converting your publication using 3D Issue Professional.

1. Selecting PDF to include and defining page order

2. PDF Layout

3. Page Sizes

4. Setting output destination

5. Defining the quality and resolution of the digital magazine

6. Removing Crop Marks

7. Detect and Convert PDF Bookmarks

8. Automatic Email & URL detection

9. Keyword search functionality

10. Search Engine Optimization

11. Search Engine Visibility

12. Tracking digital visitors - Analytics

13. Automated Conversion

When creating a new digital edition, the 3D Issue Converter is launched by clicking the "new" option in 3D Issue Professional.

Users are asked to import the PDFs they wish to include in the new digital magazine edition.

Once all the PDF's have been imported, they are displayed in the batch process window. Here users can see the file location of each PDF, the number of pages in each PDF and also the PDF's page order number within the digital edition. Users can easily move batches up and down the digital magazine page order by using the "Move Up" and "Move Down" buttons or simply by clicking and dragging the PDF.

3D Issue Professional allows you to convert any type of PDF layout into a digital edition. Designers will often design pages as single page layouts or perhaps as double page spreads. This tool is designed to cater for these layouts and no matter what the configuration of the PDF files, it will convert it into a digital edition that reflects the print edition. All the user needs to do is state the page layout types. Are they "Single page layouts", "Double page spreads" or a "mixture of both". The converter will do the rest.

In previous editions of 3D Issue Professional, our solution was designed to cater for portrait (A4) publications. Now it doesn't matter if the publications are A4, A3, A5, broadsheet, tabloid or square. 3D Issue Professional will convert and display the outputted digital magazine accordingly.

Once you are satisfied that the pages are listed in the correct order, you must then identify the output destination. By clicking the browse button you can easily define the folder using the windows explorer tree structure. Once this folder has been correctly defined, you must then insert the issue id for that publication. This is where all files will be exported to.

Most press quality PDF's are sent to the printers at a resolution of between 200 to 300 dpi. In a digital edition these pages would be unnecessarily large and therefore would need to be reduced to enhance the end users experience. By altering the resolution and image compression ratio you can ensure that there is minimal downloading to view the digital edition. For example, a standard A4 publication is normally outputted at between 120-150 dpi at a compression of 30%.

Publishers often have PDFs with Crop Marks or Bleeds going around the circumference of their PDF pages. These markings are used by printers to determine where to cut publications when producing print publications. These markings are never displayed in the final publication and therefore we feel that it is important that 3D Issue Professional allows you to easily remove these crop marks / Bleeds.

Simply select the “Remove Bleed” box. During the conversion process, a window will appear with a page of the PDF and its crop marks. Simply drag the box in the corners of the page inwards to the point where the two lines would intersect and click “Apply & Exit”.

This will apply the crop mark removal to all pages of the PDF.

While PDF's based on print publication traditionally would not have bookmarks, PDF reports will often have bookmarks that act as index in the PDF. To ensure that you do not have to replicate this menu each time we have added an automatic generator.

The “Check for Bookmarks and add them to the contents menu” checks for bookmarks within the PDF and automatically adds them to the contents menu of your digital edition.

3D Issue Professional Version can now automatically detect and add URL’s and e-mail addresses to your digital edition. Simply click on the “Detect and Add check box” and choose which type of links you wish to have added to your pages. 

During the conversion process, each time that a URL or email address is detected, 3D Issue Professional will add a link (whether it be a button or hotspots) onto the page, starting from the bottom right corner. All you have to do is drag them to the correct location and you have live links.

The ability to search through and skip to articles of interest is the most popular reason among end users for using digital magazines. If you wish to add this functionality to your digital magazine you can do so by simply clicking the "Extract Text from PDF's" checkbox. Once selected 3D Issue Convert will automatically extract and store all text in a structured & compatible database & output it to the "3D Issue ID" folder.

In order to optimise the marketability of your digital editions we have added a new feature to 3D Issue Professional that will market these digital editions search engine friendly.

During the conversion process the text from each PDF page is extracted and added to a unique htm page. For example page 2 texts is inserted into 2.htm, page 3 to 3.htm and so on.

These pages can be picked up & indexed by search engines and when the user clicks one of those htm pages, the flash magazine is opened automatically at that page.

The added benefit of this is that this would allow you to easily create a search feature on your website that searches all your publications.

You can also enhance the visibility of your digital editions to search engines by adding meta tags to each of the .htm pages that are generated. Along with the text content of your webpage, one of the primary methods that search engines use to rank the relevance of your website to search queries is to look at the meta data of your webpage. To do this it looks at the following meta tags:

- The title of your webpage
- The description of the webpage
- The relevant keywords of the webpage

In the converter tool, click on the "Edit publication" button to add the Title of your publications, Keywords relating to the publications and a description of that issue. During the conversion process this information is then applied to all pages in your issue.

Collecting information on your readers is imperative to publishers. One of the best tools available for collecting such information is Google analytics. Not only can they tell you who is visiting your site, how long they spend on your site etc. They can also tell you the users monitor, flash and browser information. This information is invaluable in telling you what the optimum settings for your digital editions should be.

If you have a Google analytics account, the 3D Issue Professional conversion tool allows you to quick enter this information into the generated html pages and track each visitor.

The types of statistics that you can record are

- Where your readers are logging in from,
- How long they spend reading your magazines ,
- Total number of readers per issue,
- Percentage of new readers per issue
- Percentage of repeat readers per issue
- Number of zooms on each page
- Average number of pages read per visit
- Which pages the reader skipped to
- Which pages the reader zoomed in on
- Which audio files the reader played
- Which video files the reader played
- Which flash movies the reader played
- Which websites the reader visited
- What comments the reader forwarded
- What addresses the reader sent emails to
- What keywords the reader searched for
- How often the reader used thumbnail navigation
- How many readers used the exit button
- How many readers skipped to other editions
- How many readers altered the settings
- What pages the readers printed

Once all settings have been defined you can click convert. A process bar will appear to the left, stating the "work complete" percentage. Once complete, simply click on the exit button. You will immediately be taken to the3D Issue Professional interface where page and book settings can be implemented.

To see how you can add interactivity such as drop down menus, hotspots, preview rollover, digital video or audio; please read the Using 3D Issue Professional tutorial - part 2