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KathrynWork
Participant
July 29, 2023
Question

Need help with indesign to reflowable ePub

  • July 29, 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 347 views

I pasted my content from a word doc into indesign and cleaned up the formatting. But when I export to a reflowabe epub, it goes crazy - my first page if correct and the rest are something else. BUT, if I export as a pdf, everything is fine.

 

What did I break?

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Derek Cross
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 29, 2023

Creating Reflowable ePubs is not intuitive. A knowledge of HTML and CSS can be invaluable for subsequent fine-tuning. In your InDesign document, you need to apply Paragraph (and Character) styles to all text, anchor images, no folios and note that content on Master/Parent pages is not implemented nor is the Paragraph Shading facility. After you've created your ePub test it on as many readers and devices you can.

James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
July 29, 2023

All that, especially the first sentence. EPUB is the first format/sub-field that many designers encounter where WYSI is not WYG... the contrary pony to the general state of design where any mess on the screen prints exactly like that on paper.

Derek Cross
Community Expert
Community Expert
July 29, 2023

The OP might be better off uploading his original Word document direct to Kindle via the Amazon site. It doesn't cost anything so it's worth experimenting to see what comes out!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=G5WYD9SAF7PGXRNA

 

James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
July 29, 2023

Start with these basics:

https://nitrosyncretic.com/DPR/dpr_indesign_epub_basics.php

 

Export to PDF is, more or less, just printing; the document can have all kinds of sloppy elements and problems and still come out on pages just as you set it up. But export to reflowable e-book means the doc has to be 'technically' perfect or close to it, with meticulous use of styles,  avoiding elements that don't work (like tabs), and so forth.

 

See if any of that addresses your doc problems, and come on back for more questions if not. 🙂

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com
Legend
July 29, 2023

Damn. @James Gifford—NitroPress's webpage is excellent advice. Memorize it!

 

|    Bevi Chagnon   |  Designer, Trainer, & Technologist for Accessible Documents ||    PubCom |    Classes & Books for Accessible InDesign, PDFs & MS Office |