Skip to main content

Your PDFs -- How to Make them Sing with Tizra

By
Early on, Tizra made a very conscious decision to provide special support for PDF content, in large part because it's simple for publishers to create and work with.  But nothing is ever so simple that it can't be improved with better understanding.

With some of the new features we've been adding to Tizra, it's now possible to create much richer more interactive experiences just by using features that are already part of the PDF format.  To help with that, we created a new PDF prep guide.  It's packed with detailed, illustrated step-by-steps on some of the more advanced features of Adobe Acrobat.  You'll not only learn how to get more out of Tizra, but how to do more with PDF as well!  A few highlights...

These PDF Bookmarks become the
Table of Contents headings in Tizra.
Bookmarks in the PDF become your digital material's Table of Contents headings, which give your end users a quick way to reference exactly what's included in your online material, allows them to quickly link to each heading's content (if they're permitted to view the content, of course), and also provides a quick view of what sections -- if any -- are offered for free or download. Tizra's new PDF Guide provides step-by-step instructions on how to create, edit, rearrange, test and delete Bookmarks in the PDF.

These Hyperlinks in Tizra's PDF Guide display in the
online content reader and allow readers to quickly jump to
other sections of the help documentation.
Hyperlinks, which Tizra now provides enhanced support for, provide a great way to make your customers' reading experience even more interactive. You can create hyperlinks in your PDFs to take end users from the online content reader to other websites; to slide shows, videos, documents, etc.; and even to other places within the same digital content, such as links from chapters to appendix activities, or to other cross references.

Our PDF Guide walks you through creating hyperlinks to websites, digital files and other pages within the same PDF and also teaches you how to format the PDF text to look like a hyperlink, so that when your users are inside your online content, they'll know there's something extra to link to. Finally, we show you how to test those hyperlinks and make sure they're working properly. 
Logical Page numbers are another optional feature you can add to your PDFs. For some publishers, Logical Page numbers are unnecessary, and Tizra's digital page numbers work perfectly (page 1 is page 1, page 2 is page 2, ...,etc., no matter what the printed page reads). For other publishers, it is crucial that their digital  page numbers match their printed page numbers.

For example, a publisher who sells to schools where teachers assign digital reading using printed page numbers would benefit from setting up Logical Page numbers in their PDFs. Publishers who want their
Logical Page numbers allow users to navigate to
the printed page numbers (vs. the digital),
and even allow navigation to Roman numerals.
customers to be able to navigate to the printed page numbers, including those printed with Roman numerals, would also be good candidates for setting up Logical Page numbering. Our new PDF Guide describes in detail how to set up Logical Page numbers in the PDF and how to test them in Tizra.

These are just a few of the topics covered, so take a look!  We hope you'll find the guide useful, whether or not you use Tizra to deliver your PDFs.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Einstein Taught Us About Searching Inside Publications

By
When the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein went live on Tizra a few years ago, it was a huge step forward. Suddenly, anyone anywhere could search and access the output of one of the 20th Century’s great minds…from love letters to breakthrough articles that changed how we think about the nature of time and space. But the project also showed the limits of traditional tools for searching within large, complex publications. These limits sparked a collaboration with Princeton University Press and Einstein Papers Project editors, which this year resulted in a dynamic new search interface, which we’ll be demonstrating in a  Webcast Friday, December 15 at 1pm ET . The interface not only makes it easier for Einstein researchers to home in on relevant content on both mobile devices and desktops, it points the way toward faster, better searching within a wide range of publication types, from reference books to periodicals, technical documentation and standards to textbooks. Click To Re
Post a Comment
Read more

Behind the Screens, Pt. 1--Creating a Site With the New Tizra Publisher Control Panel

By Abe Dane
Now that it's public , we're excited to show the new Tizra Publisher web control panel in a bit more detail. To provide a real-world example, we'll show it in use building the eat.shop guides site for Cabazon Books, which went live a few weeks ago. While in practice the process is quick—with initial online selling capability available in a matter of minutes—there's a lot to the software, so we'll break it up over a few posts. 1. Upload a Document When you open your Tizra Publisher account, you're presented with the control panel homepage in your web browser. The cog dropdown provides quick access to key tasks from anywhere in the system. Start by using it to upload a PDF. In this case, it's the full 132 illustrated spreads for eat.shop nyc. Note how the progress bar informs you as the system imports the file, extracts metadata, breaks the PDF into individual pages, and indexes it for full-text searchability. Apart from the upload, which of cours
Post a Comment
Read more

Using XML to Create a Better Online Reading Experience for the American Payroll Association

By
Congrats to the American Payroll Association on their recent launch of XML-based publications on Tizra!  Thanks to this collaboration, APA's authoritative books for payroll professionals are now available in crisp, reflowable HTML, creating a user experience that feels like a truly digital native product, rather than a conversion from print. XML-based publishing also creates a better mobile reading experience, supports more precise search and navigation, and opens the door to better accessibility for users with low vision and other disabilities. Our partners at  Scribe  did a great job supporting APA through the process of producing the XML for loading into Tizra, and we’d definitely recommend them to anyone interested in such a transition. It’s hard to overstate what a big step forward this is for Tizra as a platform and a company. XML has long been planned for in the product's architecture, but now for the first time, we have a working example that demonstrates the pow
Post a Comment
Read more