InDesign to ePub spacer issue

Question

So have a book I designed that uses a series of 3 dots (kind of like elipses) so separate some letters (corespondence) that appears in the book. The dots were created using a rule (but with a dots rule rather than solid rule) and a style name (dot spacer) and is used to separate the letters from the body copy that appears above or below the letters.

In converting to ePub, I cannot get these dots to appear, tried turning into a solid rule to see if that would work, but it doesn't. The paragraph style for these dots also has a space above and space below and that doesn't show as well. I create the style for these separators by having a pargraph return and then applying to the style to the blank line.

One other ePub question: Have a lot of images that vary in size thrughout the book. They are all anchored. Some take up a full page. Is there a way to get the full page images to adjust in size automatically to the screen size they are being viewed on. Right now I'm testing using Digital Editions and find that the full page images, overlap pages, unless I first set a fixed size for the image.

James Gifford—NitroPress · Answer

First, take Adobe Digital Editions and deposit it in the nearest digital waste can you can find. Throw it hard. It's a badly flawed reader in all respects, a half-finished and now abandoned effort by Adobe. It really should be taken out of availability.

I suggest Calibre Reader for general, vanilla EPUB viewing and proofing. Most others are quirky or nonstandard and you won't get a good sense of how the document will appear to most readers.

The quick answer to your image question is to give the images a size of "None." This applies no scaling or proportion factors to the image, and the usual result is a maximum-size image on each page. (Typically margin to margin; whichever set of margins it touches first is the limiter.) You can't set this in the global export menu; you have to set it for each desired image using right-click/Object Export Options. Which gets complicated, so you may want to start here: http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/DPR/dpr_indesign_epub_image_mgmt.php.

For a more general preview of ID-to-EPUB issues, see the companion essay: http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/DPR/dpr_indesign_epub_basics.php. There several other resources there as well.

As for your spacer, I am not sure this concept will translate, technically, to EPUB. EPUB is basically a packaged web page, with XHTML code and content and CSS styles. It may be possible to craft an equivalent in CSS and add it to the export, but I'd really look at simpler approaches like using the ellipse character (or any other attractive glyph from the standard ASCII set) and applying some simple character style to it that produces the effect you want. Basically, I don't think any underscore, rule etc. will appear with empty spaces as the holder; you might try it with hard spaces instead. (HTML deletes empty strings, so that's the underlying cause.)

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