The Preferred Viewer setting in the Zmags Publicator allows you to define more than one viewer and switch between them depending on where your publication is opened (desktop, mobile, Facebook, etc). There are a number of different situations where you may find this useful; this article is intended to help give you some ideas.
- Different aesthetics when embedded: You may wish your publication to have a different background, button positioning, or control bar colors when embedding in your website than it has when simply viewing it via the direct Zmags link.
- Using Verge in place of the Standard Mobile Viewer, Facebook Viewer: While you may like the Desktop Standard Viewer (page flipper) better than the new Verge viewer, you may not be a fan of the stripped-down viewer it switches to for mobile devices and Facebook. Defining a Verge viewer as preferred for Facebook and/or Mobile devices allows you to avoid using it while still keeping the page flipper for desktop viewing.
- Light box sizes: When using our built-in light box solution, it is possible to use "percentage-based sizing", so that your light boxes will adjust in size according to the screen they are presented on. You may wish to have finer control than this, however, and using a different viewer for various mobile devices will allow you to do this. (Light box settings are selected on a per-viewer basis.)
- Distributing to clients: If you have multiple resellers who will be presenting your catalog or magazine on their own websites, you may use preferred viewers to create a custom channel for their sites, so that you can define a separate viewer for each of them to help with branding.
- Altering button behavior by device: Imagine for example, that your publication is displayed in fullscreen only on mobile devices, and as part of a larger webpage on your site for desktop viewers. You may wish to define one viewer with a home button that simply turns to page 1 for desktop, but a second viewer whose home button actually returns to your website for mobile. This is useful because mobile devices viewing in fullscreen cannot simply click the website behind the publication as your desktop readers can.
