Master Pages are not exported to ePub

Question

I'm typesetting a book in InDesign, 52 chapters plus. I have created a Master A page for general text, and a Master B page for the first page of a chapter. The Master A contains things like page headers (Chapter Number and Book title on alternate pages). The Master B contains text starting halfway down the page and a chapter title centred as per standard book formatting. This is all in line with a tutorial I found online. In print format, this works very well, however, when I try to export to ePub, everything from the master pages seems to be missing, including the chapter numbers. I have changed the 'export tagging' for all styles to enable export but the issue persists. I'm pretty sure this will be a simple change but for the life of me, I can't find it. Thanks.

James Gifford—NitroPress · Answer

As Uwe said, page formats don't export to reflowable EPUB, basically because reflowable e-books don't have pages. (The readers do a pseudo-pagination for reader convenience, but there is little control over what we regard as page elements.)

Design for FXL (fixed layout) EPUB is very little different from print layout, since the whole purpose of FXL is to replicate pages in an electronic format. IMVHO, it's a poor format for anything but solid-art books like children's books and graphic novels and should not be used for "text" books.

Reflowable EPUB is a very powerful format, but it has some knowledge and layout hurdles that are not completely evident from working within ID or working from print-page experience. It's a lot more like designing a long information page for the web. (It's even using the same document format, HTML/CSS.)

Once you understand what the export goal is, the layout choices get a little clearer.

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