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Edward Lipsett
Edward Lipsett
Known Participant
June 28, 2018
Question

InD>Epub>ADE issue

  • June 28, 2018
  • 2 replies
  • 453 views

I've been laying out books for paper printing in InDesign.cc for years, and repurposing the same data for ebook editions.

After the paper layout is complete, I change a number of things for the electronic version, output to ePub, and then manually edit the XHTML, OPF, NCX, etc. files.

It works reliably, although I still have to replace any bitmaps with high-res bitmaps in the epub/IMAGE folder before compiling into the final epub.

I ran into a new problem yesterday that I cannot figure out a way around or through.

Almost all of the books I make are overwhelmingly English, with scattered Japanese phrases here and there.

They all display in ADE, iBooks, Calibre (and even Kindle, after conversion to MOBI) fine.

The new problem has appeared ONLY when displaying a spread (2 pages at once) for this particular book in ADE.

(The same 2-page spread in iBooks does not show the same problem, and the ebook works normally on all players when displaying only one page at a time.)

Every other epub I have made shows the pages in normal left-to-right order; page x on the left, page x+1 on the right. Perfectly normal.

This file, and ONLY this file, displays page x on the right, and page x+1 on the left.

This is normal behavior for an epub file written in Japanese, especially vertical Japanese, but as I've said this book is overwhelmingly English, with scattered Japanese phrases all marked with XHTML lang tags (ja-JP).

The OPF file lists both languages in metadata:

<dc:language>en-US</dc:language>

<dc:language>ja-JP</dc:language>

My assumption is that there is some bit of code somewhere that ADE looks at (and iBooks doesn't) to determine if an ebook should be displayed in left-to-right or right-to-left mode when displaying two pages at a time. I've tried changing a whole lot of things in the OPF and CSS files, with no luck.

Does anyone have any idea what might be happening here, and most importantly, how to make it go away short of trying a whole new layout?

Thanks for your time.

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Edward Lipsett
Edward LipsettAuthor
Known Participant
June 28, 2018

I've narrowed the cause down to something in the DOCX>InD text input process. After setting up the page layout in InD, there is something in the DOCX source file (for only 3 out of about 20 files in this book) that causes the problem. If the same content from the DOCX file is manually placed into the InD document instead of importing, the problem does not occur.

I'm trying to find out what is special about those three DOCX files now, and what import setting can be used to make it go away.

Edward Lipsett
Edward LipsettAuthor
Known Participant
June 29, 2018

The problem is in the DOCX header information somewhere.
It is not a glyph problem, and has nothing to do with lang settings.

If the  DOCX file is saved as a DOC file, the problem goes away.

I am trying to find out what OS/Word versions were used to make those three files.

Steve Werner
Community Expert
Steve WernerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
June 28, 2018

Moving to InDesign EPUB forum

Edward Lipsett
Edward LipsettAuthor
Known Participant
June 28, 2018

Since the InD>ePub process is handled by InDesign, my assumption is that there is something in the InD file itself -- a text frame definition or something -- that is causing this to happen.
Perhaps it can be resolved in the XHTML files, which is nice, but it won't resolve the underlying cause, or make it possible to stop it from happening again.

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