Digital Publishing

The AZARDI Interactive Engine goes FREE

This is a courtesy pre-release announcement for our blog and Twitter followers.

The AZARDI Interactive Engine is about to be launched for free use in any ePub 3 or publisher static website. You may have seen it's capabilities with EPUB3 UNLEASHED, and other demonstration books. We have created hundreds of ePub3 books in the past few months for commercial delivery for international learning publishers like OUP. That includes fixed layout, font embedded, interactive, audio books with high levels of interactive components.

Below is a link to the announcement page. It is still in draft format, so don't criticize the documentation (yet), but we are working hard and furious to address the interactive requirements and capabilities of ePub3 for publishers and to make it as "easy" as advanced interactive content should be.

The good news is it works in AZARDI (of course), iBooks and Readium. It also works with more proprietary and locked-off readers such as Vital Source.

Take a peek at what we are planning here. AZARDI Interactive Engine goes public.

Expect the full kitset to be available by the end of the month. It's exciting times in the world of digital publishing.

Fonts in ePub3

A small series of articles on using fonts in ePub3 has been published on the APEX@IGP information site. Topics covered are CSS-3 font properties, font sub-setting, using OTF font-features, plus some interesting resources and font presentation pages.  There is a font file size and browser compatability warning as well. Here are the links:

Private Search With Digital Content

As we evaluate the development priorities for new AZARDI features we always get caught between ePub3 spec features and useful user features. Except for Fixed Layout which is on the anvil at the moment, there are not a lot of compelling market driven reasons at present to pursue ePub3 obscurities and specialities such as CFI.

What we have been asked for is full-text search. So search floated to the top of the development tree.

We have search in our ECMS products, but we needed to start from scratch for this job. Enter DASE - Direct Access Search Engine. It had to be clippy, and work online and offline anywhere.

Best Sellers and XHTML

OK. So we are (happily) "out of a closet". HBG's David Cramer gave a presentation at BEA 2012 in which IGP:Digital Publisher was mentioned. IGP:Digital Publisher has been used for the comprehensive production of a wide range of best sellers by HBG over the last few years; in multiple print formats and e-book deliverables.

Dave is the HBG digital content guru, and a significant contributor in the IDPF ePub3 spec. He co-authored the fixed layout spec.

HBG is not the only one, but we have to respect NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) when they apply.  Others users include Faber in the UK and Oxford University Press for Online interactive content and audio readers. There are also a number of other quality publishers around the globe who understand the difference map between digital content and format outputs.

SMIL. It's AZARDI 11

AZARDI 11 has been released. This is a major feature upgrade. It can be downloaded from azardi.infogridpacific.com.

AZARDI 11 has significant changes in the reading interface and now matches AZARDI Cloud Reader (aka AZARDI Online). It supports SMIL Audio overlays in ePub3. There is a demonstration SMIL audio ePub3 on the resources page. This is the full  A Christmas Carol  by Charles Dickens, with some interesting highlighting patterns including single word, phrase, sentence and paragraph.