For the most part, text on the new Retina Display iPad looks amazing. Load a PDF with proper vector-based text onto it, and your document doesn't just look like paper; it looks like perfect paper. You can zoom and zoom, and every nuance in the kerning of your favorite digital typeface just looks more and more glorious.
There's a big exception to this rule, though. Bitmap-rendered text – basically pictures of letters, which don't get redrawn when you change resolution – doesn't look so great on the new iPad. In fact, the text, upscaled to the new iPad's resolution, actually looks fuzzier than it does on iPad 1 or 2. And if you zoom in, it looks even worse.
This wouldn't be that big of a problem, except that the first generation of digital magazines designed for iPads 1 and 2 used PNG image files to render almost everything, including text. Now, these titles are widely switching from PNGs to a greater mix of PDF or HTML5 inside the same wrapper. Both of these formats have the added benefit of slimming down the size of digital magazine files, which would have easily broken 1GB each if they'd just switched to PNG images at four times the resolution.
This immediately suggests the question: Why would anyone have picked PNGs to display text in the first place?
The answer turns out to be really complicated, but in a way that I hope actually tells you more about how the publishing industry and the iPad works than examples where everything works out perfectly well. Issues of design control and workflow in print magazines transferred to tablets are well-established. The two issues I haven't seen covered, and which turned out to be decisive, are what I'll focus on here.
First, there are the technical limitations of the original iPad, and the ways in which both Apple, Adobe and publishers tried to artfully work around them. Second, a slow start in securing digital rights and proper copy-protection for fonts that had previously been only used in print.
Wait; what? I know. Read on.
(Disclosure: I'm Wired's media reporter, which means I work for Condé Nast, which publishes a lot of iPad magazines using Adobe's platform.)
"Before any of us saw the iPad 3," Adobe's Zeke Koch says, "we knew that content designed for the older iPads wouldn't look as good on the iPad 3 as the new stuff. But we didn't think the older content would actually look worse."
Koch is Adobe Digital Publishing's Senior Director of Product Management. He knows where the bodies are buried.
"Steve Jobs used to say that the iPad works like magic," Koch told Wired." Just like a magician, what the iPad does feels like magic because it pulls your attention away from the sleight of hand that it's doing. Technically, it's so much slower than any laptop computer out there, but it feels really fast, because it has tricks that it performs really well."
The biggest trick the iPad performed really well from the beginning, Koch said, is to move around images in a way that makes every interaction feel snappy, fluid, physical. Everything from the silicon on up is optimized for images.
But there's no comparable dedication to speedily rendering text. Try reading a text-heavy PDF on your iPad; even on the new model with the memory bump, you'll notice that the text is out of focus for a moment, and then it sharpens up. That's because rendering text on the iPad is actually more taxing on the device than flipping between images.
This, Koch said – and Condé Nast VP/tablet magazine guru Scott Dadich confirmed – is why publishers opted to go with PNG-based image files rather than PDF or any other format that rendered text and images separately. Flipping from one page to the next that loaded instantly and smoothly felt like magic. Flipping to a page that took a moment to load felt like a drag.
"You always optimize for the bottleneck," Koch said. "In the old days, it was always the CPU, so you would cache files so you could refer to them later. Now the CPUs are almost universally incredibly fast. What's expensive is loading files off from memory. We're moving from processing power to loading power, and doing work right at the second that you need it."
The biggest change to the new iPad, from both Koch's and Dadich's point of view, isn't actually the Retina Display. It's the extra memory and graphics processing power. Now Condé and Adobe can switch to PDF-based magazine files, like the new editions of Vogue or Wired – with HTML5 to handle some text and interactive elements – without the magazines taking forever to refocus when you turn the page. That makes the files smaller, too – or at least, no bigger, given the larger images optimized for the Retina Display.
Everyone I spoke to, both on and off the record, agreed that the major reason magazines adopted PNG files despite their problems with upscaling text to higher resolutions was that it just made page-flipping work better. But there was and still is another consideration, too, which I didn't entirely believe until multiple sources confirmed it, including both Koch and Dadich.
It's the font foundries – many of which will not license their typefaces to be used in PDFs, HTML5, or any other format that renders them dynamically.
This is because vector-based rendering requires either (in the case of PDF) an outline of every character – essentially a subset of the typeface – or (in the case of HTML), the font rendering software itself. In both cases, some foundries are concerned that someone will be able to reverse-engineer their fonts and reuse them without paying a license.
So if you see a magazine that's still rendering text as a PNG, it's probably not because the publisher doesn't want to present it in HTML. It's because that gorgeous magazine typeface isn't available to be licensed by that publisher except as a facsimile image.
Dadich says that this situation has gotten better since the iPad first appeared. "With the iPad 1, there was more trepidation from designers and foundries. It was a new situation for them to face, so there was less flexibility with font and font software.
"We want to protect the IP of partners and their designs," added Dadich. "It's important to us, too, because of the connection those typefaces have with our own brands. So we want to do this above board, pay the appropriate fees, and build the appropriate software so everyone is protected."
It's important to remember, too, that this isn't just about the new iPad. Publishers including Condé are creating digital magazines for Kindle Fire and the Nook; when Windows 8 tablets appear next year, in an unfathomably wide range of screen sizes and resolutions, they'll have to build for that, too.
"It's a moment of great opportunity for publishers," Dadich says. "Think about the work that Apple did with the iPod from 2001 to 2004. They re-educated people on what music is. Music wasn't something on the shelf; it's fun, it's emotional, it's carried with you. We have to do the same work with our content, on everything from tablets to smartphones – at 10 inches, three inches, seven inches, everything."
Update: It's not accurate to say that "that gorgeous magazine typeface isn't available to be licensed by that publisher except as a facsimile image." It's more accurate to say that typefaces aren't available under current licensing agreements and/or to be rendered through vector-based rendering in HTML5 or PDF. PNG-based facsimile images are the easiest way under some current agreements between publishers and foundries to get the same content up in the same typeface as the print magazine.
Cartoon by Dana Zemack, created for Wired
