There’s been a lot of criticism of the Adobe DPS along with the release of the new iPad.

The Adobe solution for publishing to the iPad is to save out two images for each page (landscape and portrait views) resulting in text that can’t be resized or selected and large file sizes (500MB not uncommon).  With the new retina screen on the iPad, there’s a general worry magazine sizes are going to balloon as assets for the new iPad are generally 4x the physical size.

From Mag+, in the same space as Adobe DPS: It’s Not About File Size: Why you should learn to stop worrying and love the new iPad

The first thing I noticed when trying my current mags (Wired, .Net Magazine) on the new iPad, was the very obvious low quality of text and reading experience.  The new Qantas inflight mag however, was beautiful and crisp – I’m sure they’re using native text within the app along with a different publishing engine other than Adobe DPS.

Criticism aside, I was able to read .Net mag in full page view without having to zoom in – something I couldn’t do with the previous iPad screen – sure the fonts aren’t quite crisp as they could be, but it was still an improvement.  Adobe are working on it, and I’m sure future editions are going to be crisp and fully utilise the striking new screen.

Learn more on the topic @ http://digitalpublishing.tumblr.com/

Now we just need an elegant solution for web content… Adobe are going some of the way to working on that too.