Internet <-> Print Roundtrips?

[Brian Stoppee]

Do you need to convert web pages into print projects? The need for such things has evolved over the years. Currently, many media outlets push content to their websites and mobile apps 24/7/365. Those magazines and newspapers then adapt their Internet content to a print vehicle. Our Internet projects go back to the first weeks of the World Wide Web, creating content for NBC News, starting in 1995. Since our digital print experiences include when Aldus PageMaker 1.0 and Adobe InDesign 1.0 were in prerelease, adapting print for the Internet was an easy transition for us. In the early days, we’d create content about weather, nature, and the environment for web pages, PDFs, and broadcast. TV viewers would learn about our topics on the news, come into the network’s websites to read more and then download and print the PDF. We started designing web pages with Adobe PageMill. Then Adobe acquired GoLive, and eventually, the Macromedia merger brought about Adobe Dreamweaver. In our GoLive days, colleagues would send us a hyperlink to a website, we’d copy the link into GoLive and a webpage would appear in our GoLive page, ready for us to adapt. We’d rework the content and package it, (just like we do with InDesign now) and send it back. Today, how InDesign interacts with the Internet’s HTML source code is a different situation. Many InDesign users create eBooks, which are very HTML driven. Some clever Adobe Creative Cloud users further manipulate the HTML in Adobe Dreamweaver and add some Adobe Animate aspects, for an even greater reader interactive experience. But, what about bringing website content into InDesign to create traditional print projects? Is that on your radar, now, or do you foresee that in your future? We’re seeing many magazines doing such things. The print publication drives the readers to the web/mobile experience. Some data shows that the web/mobile experience drives subscriptions to the print publication. We have just begun to explore such things for book projects. That allows the traditional bound book to start on the Internet. It then gets feedback from readers. Once it goes to press, it then uses the web/mobile environment to make the book content have an ongoing life. For us, Adobe’s InDesign and Dreamweaver become the canvases where it all comes together. But, just about all apps in the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem become team players. How about you? Does such a workflow fit into your publishing future?

[Steve Werner]

Brian, I've unmarked this discussion as a question. You're not trying to gather information for yourself, you're trying to essentially poll users about your workflow ideas.

[Brian Stoppee]

Hi, Steve-

This is one of those blog topics we do which we feel works in the Adobe public forums. We usually open these things with a question just to get a conversation going.

Primarily, we (Janet & I) search for topics which interest us and if no answer is found anywhere, we try to post it to the Adobe public forums so when someone does a general search engine topic, they're directed here for years to come (well, in theory, anyway).

We have a little catalog of topics we want to write about.