neiltingley wrote:

When are you going to give us better quality fonts etc in the ipad edition? It looks rubbish and is hard to read. Its very basic indeed. I don't see the point of having an ipad edition if its a poor relation to the print one. Look how good the Economist looks on Ipad3 for example.

I am afraid that we have iPad 2s here in the office, and both the Zinio and Apple Newsstand editions look fine and no worse than The Economist.

Quote:

I've got a print and an iPad subscription ... loyal customer. Allowed to whinge.

No problem with complaining but which of these editions are you referring to, Apple Newsstand or Zinio?

The developer of our Newsstand app responds that as the app edition uses the PDF format, nearly all the text is vector (font), which is sharp at any size.  He doesn't understand the criticism, therefore. However, he does point out that a pdf optmized for the iPad 2 does take longer to render on the iPad 3's Retina display, depending on how complex it is.

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

I have not seen editions on iPad2 or iPad3, but I find the Zinio editions on my iPad1 disappointing. The text is OK but I do find it makes my eyes tired. The big problem is reading the charts in the measurement section, these are not very clear. In particular, it is difficult to read the axes labels/scales. Note however, the reviews posted online are exceptionally clear on my iPad. For example, the recent Joseph Audio Pulsar review, the online charts in Measurements are wonderfully clear on my iPad. However, in the Zinio version Figures 5 & 6 are nearly unreadable (the others are not much better). This problem is not restricted to my iPad. I find the same problem reading the Zinio editions on my 27" iMac. To me, this does not seem to be an iPad problem.

Axiom05 wrote:

The big problem is reading the charts in the measurement section, these are not very clear. In particular, it is difficult to read the axes labels/scales. Note however, the reviews posted online are exceptionally clear on my iPad.

This is something we are aware of and appears to be due to the extreme amount of JPEG compression used in the preparation of the electronic editions. The JPEGs we prepare for the website reprints have much less compression and as a result are far more legible.

What is puzzling us is that while the same original files are used to prepare the Zinio and Apple Newsstand editions, the definition of the graphs in general is better preserved in Zinio than in Newsstand. We are investigating this and hope to have it resolved in the near future.

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile