EidosMedia says an extension to its Méthode publishing platform comes close to the ‘holy grail’ of effortless creation of dedicated tablet editions from existing content.

The company’s tablet publishing module allows tablet editions and print editions to share the same page planning space, marketing vice president Massimo Barsotti says. “This latest extension comes close to realising that ideal through extremely tight integration between print, web and tablet workflows,” he says.

Stories and graphics can be dragged from the print edition into the tablet layouts where they reformat automatically, with portrait and landscape orientations created in parallel.

But although paginaton and formatting of content is largely automatic, staff can make manual adjustments using the same tools as for print editions.

“In its most automatic form, the tablet edition is managed just like an additional print edition,” chief technology officer Ismail Gazarin says. “That means that for a daily publishing schedule, the tablet editions – both portrait and landscape – can be created in parallel with very few additional resources and with complete control and visibilty at every stage of the process.”

Tablet editions are exported as PDF pages with an interactive overlay driven by HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. This provides quality zoomable text and graphics combined with flexible navigation and interaction functions.

Says EidosMedia chief executive Gabriella Franzini, “We believe the latest extension is a key enabling technology for publishers… especially those who need to work within the constraints of a daily publishing schedule.”