So, if you would indulge me, can you recommend the best way to create an eBook whose source is a manuscript comprising five chapters of total 30 double-spaced pages from Microsoft Word, plus a title page and a table of contents?Īside from the title page and the table of contents, the pages would comprise body text of headings, subheadings and text - pure typography without any images - except maybe for a branding flourish at the beginning of each chapter. We're 7-10 years from having that capability. And once we have a better standard, it will be a couple more years for Adobe to give us the tools to create EPUBs to it, and also for EPUB readers to process the new standard. In the future, EPUB will be better because the standard is now controlled by W3C/WCAG, the folks who create the HTML and accessibility standards. Your EPUB isn't going to look like your print layout. And it doesn't matter which tool you use, InDesign, hand-coding in Sigil, etc. It's more lame than HTML (which actually can produce some nice visuals, but nothing anwhere close to what we can design for print (or PDF) in InDesign). It's not built into the EPUB standard, nor can any ebook reader process it.Ĭome to grip with the reality of EPUB: it sucks, from a graphic designer's viewpoint. I have not succeeded in getting it to create even the simplest paragraph indent (yes, using a Paragraph Style) correctly." InDesign makes beautiful print documents, faithful to the custom kern. Quote: "it also bore no relationship to the print document that I made it from. were never considered essential for that file format. It was developed out of something called DAISY, which is a file format that gives basic text access to those using screen readers and special text-to-speech technologies. View and test your EPUB, and note that all of your excellent graphic design has disappeared, and you're viewing the most boring, butt-ugly design your eyes have ever seen.ĮPUB was never designed to be a visual format, much less a "visually rich" format.Now, get out your favorite beverage or "substance" of choice.One solution: Take a high-resolution screen capture of your tables and anchor them as inline graphics. They will smush down to fit the device's screen width, which in most cases makes them unreadable to everyone. Tables are still not workable in EPUB.Use only JPEG and PNG file formats for graphics.Don't use any text wrapping because it is not widely supported across e-Reader devices and in EPUB itself. At this stage of the EPUB industry, you really can't control fonts very well in an EPUB file and across the majority of devices. Sometimes your users will see just Times New Roman and Arial or the e-Reader's proprietary fonts. They may or may not be used by the e-Reader, depending upon various requirements from different manufacturers. Adjust all styles to use open source fonts, such as those from Google Fonts.These are not yet supported well enough in EPUB devices. Adjust all styles to NOT use ligatures or any OpenType special features.Keep to the basics, such as Heading 1, Heading 2, Body Text, Lists, etc. Minimize the number of paragraph and character styles used.Turn on the Style Highlighter and ensure there is no "swimming pool green" anywhere in your document. Your layout used a Master Text Frame on the Master Page.Adjust the master pages to reflect a mobile-friendly orientation and size.Work with a copy of your original INDD layout file.I wouldn't call them "tricks," instead strategies to minimize the amount of tweaking you need to do.
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