Indesign Epub Tutorial
Hyun Orth
First, any help is truly appreciated. I just did a whole Lynda.com tutorial on creating epubs from Indesign and managed to get a pretty clean file. I have only one unresolved issue. I have two tables in the file that are just lists of words. I used the table function, hoping it would reflow better in an epub. In InDesign, my tables have no borders. When I export it, there is a thin black border around the all the cells. The cells are also much too high. I tried setting the cells to a fixed height, but this didn't change anything. Can anyone suggest a way to:
As for tables, they should only be used for truly tabular data, not to fake columns. These are called reflowable EPUBs for a reason. Stop trying to force what you think it should look like on your readers. It's more trouble than it's worth and will invariable cause problems.
The only option for the table border that I am aware of is to open the ePub and edit the .CSS directly in a text editor. (Change the extension to .zip and use the extract command.) You will want to change the border to none:
I wouldn't have used a table. I'd have used a split column. Wouldn't convert the bullets to text either as you'll lose the ul and li markup. Better off using proper styles in InDesign which I am almost positive were not used. Adjust the spacing there.
Thank you all for your suggestions. I made some tests, trying out the different suggestions. First off, it is a reflowable epub 3. Sorry, should have mentioned that. I was viewing it in iBooks. I will try to view it across other platforms as soon as I figure this out.
BarbBinder, I tried your suggestion and it worked as you said. Screenshot below. I understand about changing the border in CSS at the end. However, I have a lot of bullet lists in this epub. By converting them all to text am I losing any functionality? They look the same in the epub. Screen shot with bullets converted to text.
Several people suggested using split columns, which I tried too and yes, it converts to one column in the epub. I might as well make it just one column and be done with it, since I made a separate indd file for my print version.
Finally, keep in mind that not everyone can actually see. I'm sure Bevi will concur that accessibility is very important. While it may be difficult to make your material 100% accessible, the things you're talking about here will actually make it less accessible and that, IMO, is inexcusable.
I was following the tutorial for creating a fixed layout Epub and the narrator drew attention to an image that spread across two pages on indesign and was displayed as one long image in his ebook reader. I have tried recreating this and my image gets split where a spine would be and is not one continuous image. I checked the document set up on the tutorial file and nothing special seems to have been done to this specific image to help it cross two pages.
It's Web, A4, landscape. I have tried synthetic spreads like the tutorial said, have also tried landscape spread and all the other options. Viewing on ice-cream, but the issue is the tutorial export shows a long landscape photo and mine is split in two images when I match all their settings.
This is what the indesign document for the tutorial looks like exported. There do not appear to be any special export options applied. I was wondering how to do this to any image and even adjust size. Like how a landscape photography book may look through Epub.
If you are more comfortable with video tutorials, we recommend taking a look at this official tutorial ( -to/ebook-fixed-layout.html). In addition, this Adobe Help page ( -content-epub-cc.html) lists all the important features of the EPUB export.
Wherever possible, please keep text intact and do not rasterize it. This will ensure that the rendering is sharper and crisper at any zoom level. It will also ensure that users can highlight or search the text. (These features are not yet supported in the Jellybooks Cloud Reader, but will be added soon.)
As a quick tip, all Adobe Fonts (formerly known as Typekit Fonts) available through InDesign are embeddable in your FXL EPUB ( -licensing.html#act-pdf). Other foundries may require a supplemental license in addition to existing licenses for print and PDF.
InDesign will let you know if any font is missing in the document. In the same dialog, it is also a good idea to check that all of your fonts are either Open Type (.otf) or True Type (.ttf), as these two formats are the only ones guaranteed to be supported in all browsers.
In older versions of InDesign CC, if an object or text frame bleeds off the page (as it might for print), then scroll bars could pop up in the exported ePub. This seems to have been corrected in the latest version of InDesign CC (14.0.2) but if you encounter this issue, you will have to adjust these frames.
Obviously, adding a link to the entire spread would not offer readers a great user experience: the two pages combined would be a single hyperlink, and readers would encounter difficulties even turning the page.
When using InDesign you could either use TOC style or PDF bookmarks to generate the table of contents. This will then define the table of contents that readers will encounter in the user interface of the Jellybooks Cloud Reader. As a reference, you can check the appearance of the table of contents you have designed in apps such as iBooks or Adobe Digital Editions 4.5.
For the Navigation TOC option, its value should correspond to the method used to construct the table of contents within the document: select Bookmarks if PDF Bookmarks were used, else select Multi Level (TOC Style) if TOC Style was used.
Spreads are displayed in landscape mode, which can either be a mobile device held in landscape orientation or a browser window expanded to landscape dimensions. As a result, you should keep 2-page spreads AS-IS, and not transform them into landscape pages.
It is important that the metadata of your EPUB file be complete and accurate, as some fields will be used in the user interface of the Jellybooks Cloud Reader. For example, the title of the publication is displayed in the navigation bar at the top of the screen.
Trying to convert a pdf file to ePub to read on iPad and eventually upload to the Apple store. I have tried Calibre, Wondershare (paid version) and pdf to epub converter. I also have the native inDesign file used to create the pdf and tried exporting it as an ePub file. Of course it worked but when viewed on the iPad, the formatting was off. Every ePub file I have created has had formatting issues when viewed on the iPad. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!!
But you have to be aware of limitations in the export--InDesign epub export is not at the point where you can expect everything to look the same as you have it laid out. There are specific fixes for the exported html and the css.
In addition to Liz's boks, you might check out the video tutorials I've done on lynda.com for this, called InDesign CS to ePub and the iPad. There are 3 diff. titles, one each for InDesign CS4, CS5, and CS.5. Working on another for CS6. Here's the link to the CS5.5 one: _cs55epub
Another good place to ask InDesign > EPUB questions (or any epub question) is on Twitter with the #eprdctn hash tag; ebook production folk use that tag. Not sure if you're into Twitter or not, but it's worth it for that alone.
It's kind of amazing that e-books and the epub spec is so popular and yet the state of making ebooks is still kind of in the semi-dark ages. If it weren't for Anne-Marie and Elizabeth I wouldn't be on the verge of finishing my institute's first InDesign to ebook conversion.
Are you looking for a PDF to EPUB converter on PC or for the ipad? The same with you, I have a PDF that I converted to epub in PDF Converter so I could import it into iBooks. It worked but the color images all came out looking like photo negatives.
The hardest lesson I had to learn is that with epubs, you surrender any fantasies of control over formatting, layout, everything that you think is creative and cool. It's no wonder you think it doesn't look right. Epub is exactly like CSS/HTML in that you set up your design with your divs and your type styles and all that, but then it's going to look different on each platform. Don't think it's ever going to look like your InDesign pages. It's very cut and dried with minimal control over line breaks, page breaks, and how type and art line up. Once you get used to it, however, it's kind of liberating.
I've been using Calibre for a while now to convert pdfs to ePub for reading on my iPod Touch (via the Stanza App). It does butcher graphic print pdfs from time to time, but it's overall the best tool I've found for the job like Vibosoft.
The iBooks App on the iPad reads standard ePUB documents and Adobe InDesign CS5 just so happens to export them out directly. Great! There are some limitations that you have to be mindful in your document itself. These are limitations on the standard more so than of InDesign. For example, InDesign is an amazingly powerful page layout application that pretty much allows you do do anything you want on the page. However, ePUB has limitations on how the content has to flow to make it possible to have this single document on a multitude of different devices. I recorded this video to walk you through some of those things to look out for:
When your book is viewed in Adobe Digital Editions set to a wide viewing area, the headings and inline graphics are left justified. Is there any way to center them? I was thinking you might have to unzip the ePub document in Springy, then edit the cascading style sheet, then zip it back to its original state.
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