One of the most common requests from a mag+ customer is for the ability to quickly publish content into the mobile app. To achieve this, customers end up publishing the PDF version of the content directly. Although this does save our customers the additional effort (and time) that is needed to create an interactive version, something that mag+ lets you create perfectly, problems such as lack of responsiveness, smaller font-size, letter-boxing etc. do affect the overall reading experience and leave a lot to be desired in terms of wowing the customer and winning his loyalty.
Let us try and understand this problem visually.
Being at the extreme right end of the graph means better user engagement but at the cost of increased content creation time. The other extreme, PDF based plain content, means that your content is pretty basic, and less engaging, but can be published rapidly. This becomes more of an exercise in optimization: how to produce more engaging content in the least amount of time.
If you are also faced with a similar problem and are looking at a rapid authoring solution that gives you more than just the plain old basic PDFs then this new feature will help you immensly. Mag+ has recently launched a PDF to HTML conversion tool that lets you convert the PDF content into fully responsive feeds. The tool will extract the content from the PDF and transform it into a fully responsive content (friendly for mobile and desktop viewing). The content will work in a similar manner. A new issue will be pushed onto the library screen. On clicking the issue, users will see the cover page followed by a TOC. The TOC will link to each of the individual article that will be rendered as per the device’s form factor.
This is how the process will look like for the end user:
This is how the responsive feed will look like on iPhone X:
For an iPad:
We are currently working on providing the ability for our customers to upload the PDF directly on the publish portal for the conversion process to start. Till then, you can share the assets with mag+ at support@magplus.com. The process will typically take 5-6 working days to complete. The customer will be intimated once the feed is made available on the app.