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Dorottya334674487s9r
Known Participant
September 3, 2025
Answered

Reflowable Epub 3.0 - InDesign - Image heavy book

  • September 3, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 203 views

Hello, 

 

It has been immensely useful to read through comments and discussions here on this forum regarding this topic. Thank you!

 

I have recently completed a reflowable epub 3.0 through InDesign (the file was originally prepared for print publication which already happened) - stumbling through it mostly but I have used a combination of

 

-InDesign paragraph style / space above/below / export tags for page breaks  

-InDesign Object export options for Images 

-and dabbled into CSS code (with the help of the book and links from James Gifford mostly for front matter)

 

The book contains over 30 images with captions (which I followed the rule of End of body paragraph / anchor for image / image / caption paragraph / nex text paragraph). I have selected for the images to be relative to text flow as far as size.

 

I have previewed the book with Calibre / Kindle as I was building it. The file passed through inspection and to be distributed via D2D (per client’s wish).

 

I had an overarching question: My client is noticing that the book looks “different” on ipad vs her computer screen, and is seeing white gaps (prior to photograph).

 

I am trying to figure out if this is my error and if there is something else that I could have done  – or that we just need to accept (and explain) that the nature of a reflowable e-pub with this number of images there will be gaps -  as the images are anchored to the paragraphs that are trying to fit into spaces on different screens and if the image height does not accommodate for the left over space it will pop up on the next page.

 

Or I am completely misinterpreting this and there is some magical CSS code that I should have used…

 

Thank you.

Correct answer Laura Brady

There is always going to be variation on how EPUBs render from reading system to reading system. That's normal. But if something looks erroneous in one RS, then that's worth investigating. 

 

Re: images and captions. InDesign isn't very good at this yet — but this is something I hope will be fixed in the next few months. In this instance, the image should be in a <figure> tag with the caption in a nested <figcaption> tag. Using an object style, you can map the images to <figure> tags, and the frame containing the caption to a <figcaption> tag, but you will have to edit the code so that the <figcaption> is nested. 

I hope this is useful.

1 reply

L
Laura BradyCorrect answer
Inspiring
September 10, 2025

There is always going to be variation on how EPUBs render from reading system to reading system. That's normal. But if something looks erroneous in one RS, then that's worth investigating. 

 

Re: images and captions. InDesign isn't very good at this yet — but this is something I hope will be fixed in the next few months. In this instance, the image should be in a <figure> tag with the caption in a nested <figcaption> tag. Using an object style, you can map the images to <figure> tags, and the frame containing the caption to a <figcaption> tag, but you will have to edit the code so that the <figcaption> is nested. 

I hope this is useful.

D
dorottyah
Participant
September 11, 2025

thank you! I appreciate your answer. 

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