The next generation iPad’s Retina Display doubles resolution and pixel, but it also raises concerns, especially among magazine publishers who fear their editions may result in files too heavy for easy consumption…
David Sleight, a publishing and design consultant, put it best:
“The iOS apps created by systems from Adobe, Woodwing, Mag+, and others—the platforms used by the bulk of traditional publishers to crank out their iPad magazines right now—are essentially collections of PDFs or JPGs exported out of programs like InDesign and bound inside a wrapper application. Basically, they boil down to pictures of layouts, photos, and text. Rather than create new rendering engines from scratch, these platforms rely on existing desktop applications to do that work, then package up the output. While faster to develop, this has negative consequences for the end user. You can’t resize text. File sizes are untenably large.”
