Know Your Worth: Stop Thinking, Start Doing Download Epub Mobi Pdf Fb2

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Ingelore Clason

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Jul 17, 2024, 9:43:23 PM7/17/24

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I'm working on an intricate FL epub that has 9 pages. Three pages have a few animations. However, the remaining pages are very intensive. For example, one page has an MSO with 62 states, buttons, 1-2 sound animations on each state and approximately 40 of the 62 states contain graphic animations. Each of the 62 states also has a link to a corresponding nested MSO with 62 states and scrolling text. All on one page, and yes, it needs to state on that page.

Know Your Worth: Stop Thinking, Start Doing download epub mobi pdf fb2

Download File https://vlyyg.com/2yJYmR

I'm thinking it must be the animations and possibly the number of MSO states. I added an additional 22 sound animations with corresponding play and stop buttons. It pushed the iPad over the edge (white screen for 20 seconds and another 10 seconds or so to fully load). Of course, it works fine on the iMac or laptop.

Is there a way to get it to load more efficiently? I still need to add another MSO with 15-20 states with sound animations and corresponding buttons and nested MSO on a separate page.

1) I assume you are working in an iPad Retina document in InDesign. Check all graphic assets in the links panel, and ensure all of them do not exceed 72ppi. (This means you are working at the native resolution of the iPad's retina screen.) Then export your epub at 72ppi as well.

2) InDesign's way of exporting PNG and JPG files is rather terrible. Instead, prepare you graphic assets at the exact required resolution, place them, and change the object export properties to tell InDesign NOT to process or convert these, and rather use YOUR prepared asset instead. Never depend on InDesign's export if you require your assets to be great quality and small in file size. Also, InDesign's scale-down algorithm is lackluster. If you want to do it right, do it yourself. And avoid Adobe tools for this (see next point).

2a) Make use of external optimized tools to optimize your graphics. Adobe Photoshop isn't very good at this, and the other Adobe tools are pretty terrible. For PNG opimization Colour Quantizer works best, and is easy to use. But it is not available for Mac, so you would have to do this on a different machine, or run it in WINE for Mac. It is worth the hassle, though. Color quantizer

2b) Animated elements can often be shown at a lower resolution than the native iPad screen, because moving/animated elements are blurred anyway. Take advantage of this. Place these at lower resolutions, for example half the retina resolution (four times as little video memory used and much faster loading times).

2c) when InDesign exports a fixed layout epub and you have groups in your document, it WILL create useless giant empty PNG files. While the file sizes of these are minimal, when loaded up in a device's video memory it will be uncompressed! Meaning: a 1kb compressed PNG image suddenly gobbles up 9mb of memory when displayed on-screen. To avoid this, use epub unzip tools to investigate the epub contents, and replace these empty PNG dummy files with 16px by 16px versions.

2d) often the (art) style of the assets used may allow you to use much lower resolution assets. Fluffy clouds look just as convincing and "sharp" at very low resolutions and scaled up. Sketched art, or rough painted art

Finally, fixed layout epubs may not be the best choice for a highly interactive project with loads of animations and content. Consider using alternative tools to convert and export your work to an actual app (using a game engine, for example). But that would be much more technical, of course.

I believe 2(c) is most likely the majority of my problems. It's the whole memory thing/loading issue. I can see it stuttering on export. I'm definitely not a technical person (which is why I chose InDesign instead of an app), so I hope I can find these large PNG files. I do have several very small PNG files.

Also, I will change the resolutions. I chose fairly large resolutions and exported it at 150 dpi since the user may project it on a large screen. I'll do some testing this week (hopefully) and see what happens.

Don't forget that when you started out with InDesign's iPad Retina template/document, any bitmap image shown in the Links panel at a higher resolution than 72ppi is wasted: you should work at a max of the iPad's 2048x1536 resolution. More will not help, nor will it improve the quality when projected on a large screen. It will just needlessly gobble up resources and slow down things.

Finding the empty dummy PNG files is only possible by either unzipping the epub file and examining the graphic assets in the OEBPS/image folder. You will have to check for empty images (which still display as very large in an image viewer), and replace those with 16px by 16px versions.

One thing I forgot to mention is that InDesign does NOT support 8bit indexed transparent PNG files, and when you try to import these into InDesign the transparency will not work properly. This is why I tend to use a combined approach of (1) and (2). In ColorQuantizer when exporting a PNG an option becomes available in the save dialog called "Forced RGB", which basically prevents the PNG to be saved as an indexed 8bit version, and saves a full 24bit version instead. This makes sure that InDesign can read these optimized versions.

I am aware this sounds very intimidating, but it really is worth it: your book will be (a) much smaller in overall file size, and (b) process easier on slower (mobile) platforms (even on desktops). It also means your books may contain much more images and creative content compared to a direct InDesign exported version before it hits the file size limitations of online book repositories and markets. For example, the Kindle market sets a max size of 50mb(!) for an ebook. Although there are ways around these file size limits (such as splitting your book in parts or hosting it on your own site space), it does matter in the end, of course.

I have a fixed layout EPUB published to iPad (Retina) containing about 50 full-screen retina images in various slideshows within the EPUB - EPUB is about 130MB in size. I would be very interested in investigating your point regarding "Use Existing Image for Graphic Objects" point.

Just wondering, if I were to go through each image and re-link them to optimized JPEG versions (at the moment they are all PDS's) and individually set their Use Existing Image for Graphic Objects, what other step do I have to do? What about in the conversion settings in the export dialogue? See below.

Also, I am having issues with animated elements (I have animated the headings, text and some images to make it more dynamic) I have set all to Hide until Animated and used some CSS to force the hide until animation action, however some pages (random with each export) have animation errors whereby the animated elements appear on the page, then they disappear and then animate in. Could this be related to size in your opinion?

Yes, those overall export conversion settings will be overridden by the specific object ones. To make life easier for yourself, create an object style with the "Use Existing Image for Graphic Objects", and apply it to all your images (excepting the ones which you may not want to control yourself, of course).

When preparing your images for your ebook layout, first investigate the exact pixel size requirements by selecting the image frame in question, and checking the dimensions in pixels. This will yield the EXACT pixel size you will need to prepare that asset at. (That is, do make sure you are working with InDesign's iPad Retina document template.)

As for your animation question: not sure... Animation in InDesign is often rather finicky. Instead of using custom CSS to hide your objects before animating in, I'd just group these objects (with an empty dummy object), and attach the animate-in action to the child, and the animate-out to the parent. Then play around with the timing panel until it is timed correctly.

Thanks for the detailed response, I started out with InDesign's iPad Retina document template. The 50 or so full-screen images are 2048x1536 and are @ 72ppi. They have no transparencies so JPEG seems to be the best option. For comparison the average PNG file size in the EPUB zip is 3.5MB and the same compressed JPEG is 330KB. (Note: I had originally used compressed JPEGS but failed to know about the Use Existing Image for Graphic Objects option)

On the animation problem, this has been a real pain going on a year. The error/bug/glitches can occur whether it's applied to objects, grouped objects, text, grouped text/headlines etc... in fact, if I output the EPUB from the same InDesign file two times in a row, one after the other, it can result in errors appearing in different places....never the same places/pages.