Introducing the Adobe Digital Magazine Workflow

Mashable reports Adobe is working on a new kind of creative software specifically intended to help you publish digital magazines for tablet devices such as the iPad, the company revealed today.

This new software, which will soon take its place in the Creative Suite pantheon, will be downloadable from Adobe Labs and will include tools that bridge the gap between print-oriented InDesign and software for interactive formats.

The company’s goal is to make it simpler for more publishers to create and profit from tablet magazines like Wired’s hugely successful iPad offering. Wired used InDesign and a mix of other software to make its product.

The new Adobe technologies will focus on mobile hardware-specific needs, including 360-degree image rotation and pinch/swipe gestural navigation for panning and zooming. This is currently accomplished through an AIR utility, the Interactive Overlay Creator. In future versions of InDesign, the Interactive Overlay Creator will be an integrated feature.

Adobe will let you import layouts from InDesign to the new workflow. From there, you’ll be able to add metadata, experiment with portrait and landscape layouts, and export content to the .issue format — a brand-new, ready-to-render file for digital magazines.

Watch an overview of what Adobe is calling the Digital Magazine Workflow/Digital Content Builder above.