Intro to ePub – part 2 of 3

Posted by Kirsten on August 3, 2011 in Adobe, Software, Tips for Trainers, Training, Tutorials and Demos

ePub Tips, Tricks, and Links

In the first post of this series, I had you create a very simple file (with a template the Terry White was nice enough to provide) and preview it in Adobe’s Digital Editions software.

In this post I’m going to share a lot of links and some general Do’s and Don’ts for epub and digial book creation. In the third and final post we will be making a file from scratch.

What am I getting into?

If you are a regular InDesign user making content for eBooks can be a bit of a brain twister. In essence you are making webpages. Much of the control you had is gone, and some of the really fun features that can be seen in interactive files won’t work in book readers. To give you a sense of how new this might be, I’m putting some of the tips I gathered together below

General

.epub is an XML based format designed to enable text reflow. All content will be linearized so plan for one long stream for text and images.

Layout

Make each page one text box with inline graphics
Make the cover ONE image
Create separate document for cover page â€“ have it be one image or imported ID file
The book panel is a good way to make separate chapters that are seen in the conversion
InDesign has an option for automatically making a TOC in an epub file. Create a TOC style and specify it on export. The Automatic ID TOC is turned into navigation men

Formatting

You are creating Cascading Style Sheets when you convert (think like a web designer)
Change Nested or Grep styles to regular styles
Use Space Above, Below, and Indent to make space around images
Soft Returns are turned into hard Returns
Use Paragraph and Character Styleson the text (these will convert to CSS for the .epub file).
You can’t totally control the fonts the user will see (the type of reader that is used will determine how fonts are seen)
Convert Nested and Grep Styles to Paragraph and Character Styles
Epub does support font embedding, but not all eBooks formats do and not all eBook readers that support the epub format will use embedded fonts
Use OpenType Fonts

Exporting

If you don’t want to make a new file you can apply XML tags to existing content and use the Structure pane to reorder it for export
For long documents break document into chapters and use the book panel
Create a Table Of Contents â€“ this will become navigation in the e-reader
For a true TOC you may need to make a manual page with hyperlinks or cross-refâ€™s
Un-anchored content will float and end up at the beginning or end of your file
Keep main graphics between 300 and 600 px wide
The cover is often best at 800×600
Images are converted to RGB
Add Metadata

Graphics

Epub supports several image formats, including JPEG, GIF, PNG
Anchor Images to an empty paragraphÂ (then center align and use space before and after) or paste Inline
Use color images
InDesign coverts graphics to JPEG and GIF when exporting to epub unless you choose to copy the original images
Convert InDesign artÂ by Cut/Paste into Il or PS and Placing in ID

Conversion

Altered

CMYK will be converted to RGB on export
Convert Tables to lists or images if you can

Preserved

Hyperlinks to URLâ€™s, files, email addresses, and text anchors
Cross Refâ€™s are converted to hyperlinks on export (Note: Some eBook readers donâ€™t support any hyperlinks)
Footnotes are kept, but are converted to endnotes

Discarded

Multiple Carriage returns
Empty Frames
Frame attributes such as Fill and Stroke
Custom settings for Anchored Objects
Text wrap setting. Use Space before and After instead
Hyperlinks that reference specific pages
Master Page Items
Automatic Page Numbers
Page Breaks
TOC generated by the InDesign TOC feature (do this anyway â€“ it becomes navigation )
Artwork made with InDesign vector tool (those you should copy into Illustrator and place back into InDesign)
Not all text formatting is preserved

Links

Digital Editions Reader
Open-source EpubCheck program hosted by Google at code.google.com/p/epubcheck
Free, standalone, cross-platform Javaâ„¢ app, ePubChecker
More information on epub format -Â http://idpf.org/
Free open-source eBook conversion tool www.calibre-ebook.com
InDesign to Kindle – Adobe
Terry WhiteÂ – http://terrywhite.com/techblog/
Colleen Cunningham has a massive and massivly helpful list of resources here - http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2011/indesign-to-ebook-resources/

Ok, got it – now what?

Take an existing Indesign file (a reasonalbly fancy one) and export it to epub. Look at how the content is moved (and what doen’t convert). Next time we will finish will a soup-to-nuts tutorial – see you then!

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