SWF vs JPEG vs others?

[rxb216]

Hello,

This is my first post and first question on the Megazine forum. I did my best to search the forum but did not see the answer to my question.

Some background:

I am in the position to prepare my content for Megazine. My desire is to create a 16 page brochure. I have the content in many formats (JPEG, PDF, AI, etc). The content itself is a mix of text, tables, graphs, charts, and images. I will obtain a commercial license when I go live with the content. The content is standard 8.5" x 11" in size (per page). When the brochure opens up then one sees 17" x 11" pages (2 pages side by side). The content is NOT vectorized.

Question:

I am confused what format to use for my content? Should I use SWF or JPEG or perhaps another format that Megazine supports?

I heard that if I convert to SWF then my text can be searchable correct? That isn't all that important to me however.

I need my users to be able to zoom in move around without my difficulty. Does one format shine over another in the case? I heard that SWF content has some issues when zoomed it?

Finally, is it possible for the content to scale in size as the user resizes their browser window? I want to ensure that the brochure always fills the browser window if the user decides to make their browser window bigger or smaller.

Thanks

[Ecnassianer]

Finally, is it possible for the content to scale in size as the user resizes their browser window? I want to ensure that the brochure always fills the browser window if the user decides to make their browser window bigger or smaller.

What you want is Liquid Scaling, here's the page on the wiki:
http://megazine.mightypirates.de/wiki/index.php/Liquid_scaling

It also sounds like your content might have a lot of images you want to zoom in on. The zoom solution I liked best was Adaptive Zoom:
http://megazine.mightypirates.de/wiki/index.php/Adaptive_Zoom
But there might be better methods based on what your content is.

[rxb216]

Thanks, yes the liquid zoom is exactly what I am looking for.

By the way will the content be "resampled" as the browser window becomes smaller (as the user reduces the browser window size)??

I also need my first question to be answered. SWF, JPEG? or something else? Is there some documentation that cites why a person should use one format over another?

Thank you

[rxb216]

hmm, i converted my content to SWFs and now nothing gets displayed.

I replaced:
<page>
<img src="page1.jpg" />
</page>

with:
<page>
<img src="page1.swf" />
</page>

I'm curious why this is no longer working...
Here is the error from the console:
Warning: Error loading file: file:///C...mp2/megazine/data/page1.swf in page 0: Error #2140

[rxb216]

All is good, just had security issues with Adobe. what a great program, thanks!

[Hans Nücke]

Thanks for the confirmation; I was about to point you to
http://megazine.mightypirates.de/forum/index.php/topic,543.0.html
and there Q03... ;-)

Regarding your jpg or swf question:
If you have a lot of (small) text, the swf is best, as long as you can manage to have tagged text and embedded fonts with your PDF, so the text can be vectorized.
Then text also with high resoltuions is excellent.

You have to keep an eye on the image quality, setting the switches in the pdf2megazine.bat file (calling the pdf2swf tool) appropriately.
Some hints can be found here:
http://www.vservu.com/blog-tip-ls
There look for blog #1, 2, 3, 7, 11

A way to optimize is using different jpg resolution files for different zoom levels using scale (explained in the blog above).
And with the next version you can match your different resolutions with fix zoom scales using the zoomsnap paramenter (already discussed a bit in this forum; search for zoomstep and zoomsnap)

You also will find many details in the wiki already (either go to the specific plugin and tag chapters like book, page, chapter, navigationbar, search, ...
A search also will take you to the chapters of interest.
megazine.mightypirates.de/wiki

Good luck and success with your conversion efforts