How to add Pan and Zoom option to the text and images?

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
July 21, 2023
2 replies
794 views

Hi,

I am creating a fixed layout landscape epub and would love to enable zooming in every page = every text frame / every picture.
I have not found "Overlay + Pan and Zoom" option anywhere in Indesign 18.4., the tutorials from years ago show it in places that seem to be elsewhere in the current version.

This topic has been closed for replies.

BobLevine

Community Expert

Overlays are a relic from DPS that also work in AEM Mobile. They were never intended for anything else but they do work with in5.

The overlays panel is still there and still contains pan and zoom but you'll never get it to work with EPUB.

D

Dolores24718564q1blAuthor

Participant

Would it work if I export the book as PDF?

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

PDF is still fixed pages, but most viewers — especially the real thing, Adobe Acrobat Reader — have good zoom, pan and image viewing built in.

As Bob says, Adobe went though a phase of sort of trying to create their own e-doc system, but it was lousy at launch and more or less abandoned half-finished. ADE and the various features are still there, but about all they ever worked on were Adobe's marketing materials. 🙂

Nearly all e-doc systems depend on reader features for their presentation, not document settings.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Things like image pan and zoom are functions of the EPUB reader, not the EPUB document.

And I believe it's only second-tier readers that support such features, meaning you will have to trade off reliable, standards-based rendering (for good or bad) to get this ability. Most readers will 'pop out' an image if it's double-clicked, though; Calibre, for example, does.

I'll add the usual caveat that fixed EPUB (FXL) is a difficult, limited format. Reflowable EPUB is strongly preferred unless the book is largely fixed art pages.

D

Dolores24718564q1blAuthor

Participant

Thank you. I thought I could do something about it from the document.

Yeah, the book has a special page design with many photos. Reflowable EPUB ruins everything.
The book is mean to be published on kdp, but kdp previewers did not enable zooming in. Not a problem for viewing on a computer, but texts on phones and ipads could be harly readable to some people, without zooming in.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

That's one of the problems with fixed page layout: it is often unreadable on even smaller tablets. Allowing the contents to scale to the screen is the only reasonable e-book solution, unless you view it on a large screen or pan around a lot. (To me, that "loses" more than adapting to a liquid/reflowable layout.)

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