Alexandria, Virginia –  IDEAlliance^®, a leading association that develops best practices and specifications for print and electronic media, is announcing a free educational Webinar to be held Wednesday February 5. The Webinar will provide a brief introduction to OpenEFT, address where it fits in the open format landscape, and examine tools that will enable the use of OpenEFT today. Click HERE to register. 

What is the OpenEFT Open Format?
OpenEFT was developed by magazine publishers as a fast-tracked, open specification for the packaging, delivery and rendition of magazines and other highly designed content on tablet and mobile devices. Published in September 2013, this open digital magazine publishing format immediately caused ripples throughout the global publishing community.

Apples and Oranges
Although some view OpenEFT as a competitor for vendor-developed formats for publishing interactive, fixed layout magazines and newspapers, that is not really the case.  While OpenEFT was a tactical effort to provide an alternative to today’s proprietary formats, the design principles that guided the development of OpenEFT position it specifically to serve as a bridge between publications produced today with traditional page layout workflows and the dynamic digital-first, cross media workflows of the future. In addition, OpenEFT was specifically designed to enable the delivery of interactive ads, produced on a wide variety of agency systems, via publisher's existing print ad portals, with a metadata packet to carry ad ticket information and to enable a much-lacking proofing capability with standard and precise rendition instructions designed allow seamless ad insertion into interactive magazines by the publisher.

Global Implementations
IDEAlliance outreach to the global publishing and technology community translates into OpenEFT implementation development across the globe. An early implementer with its headquarters in Paris and quite familiar to publishers in Europe and Asia is Aquafadas.  According to Matthieu Kopp, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, “Since Aquafadas began creating digital publishing solutions, we have been waiting for an open format for magazines such as OpenEFT; one which can support enhancements. With extensive experience dating back to 2009, Aquafadas has been working with leading press publishers creating highly enriched magazines with smooth features for an outstanding digital reader experience. We are therefore proud to be an IDEAlliance OpenEFT Partner and actively support the OpenEFT format in our product lineup starting with a full-featured OpenEFT visual editor based on Adobe InDesign®. We are really excited to participate in the future evolution of the OpenEFT format and therefore delighted to share technology and experience as it will ultimately help satisfy publisher needs." According to Kopp, Aquafadas is implementing OpenEFT as a first class export from the Aquafadas Plug-In for InDesign.  A wide range of enrichments are supported via the Aquafadas palette. Enhancements currently available in the beta release include audio, video, slideshows, popups, scrollable frames, image sequences and a number of links. The beta release can be downloaded from http://www.aquafadas.com/en/digital-publishing/pluginindesign/