autonumber paragraphs lose text in EPUB

[Nedlaw]

Hi. Apologies for the long post. I have a document that uses autonumbered chapters and figures (Chapter 5; Figure 2.3). When exported to EPUB, the autonumbered words "chapter" and "figure <chapter number>" are lost. They are part of the style definition, as shown below. This seems to be a major bug in ID 17.0.1 / windows 10, and it may have existed in previous versions. Is there a fix or a work-around? I would prefer not to hand-cobble chapter and figure numbers, as I expect several revisions in this book over the next year.

-j

Background:

I created a test file that has autonumbered chapter styles and autonumbered figures:

I created three styles: a paragraph, a chapter, and a figure. Chapter and figure have the following style numbering definitions: Note that in chapter the word "Chapter" is part of the style definition, and in figure, the word "figure" and the chapter number are part of the style definition.

I created the following export tag defintions for this test:

This is the EPUB that is created by ID. Note that while the chapter styles are auto-numbered correctly, the text "Chapter" is missing. Also in the figures both the word "Figure" and the chapter number (figure 1.1) is missing.

Here is the XHTML created by ID for the EPUB. The styles do not include any explicit overrides, yet they seem to be present in the XHTML calling the CSS.

The style sheet is very much longer, but I include it here for completeness:

Have I done something wrong here, or is this a bug in ID's export of EPUB? I have a 574pp book with all sorts of numbering to turn into a Kindle version for a client, and this autonumber problem is driving me wild. Any suggestions? I'm afraid I don't know how to file a formal bug report. Thanks to the community for any help.

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

There was a recent post similar to this, and I believe the conclusion is that export to EPUB does not support extra text in numbering strings. The solution was to make "Chapter" and "Figure" and so forth part of the fixed text in the paragraph, which poses other structural problems.

[Nedlaw]

I have confirmed that this is right. Text from autonumbered paragraphs simply is not included in the EPUB. It's unfortunate, but there it is. I need two SKUs -- one for print and one for EPUB. It doesn't even make sense to put the numbered paras under conditional tags, because the intent setting in Document Setup changes the pages too drastically. Oh well. Two SKUs it is...

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Unless I'm misreading you, there's two easy solutions. One is to edit the EPUB files to add that fixed text, a matter of 15 minutes in any good code/text editor.

The other is to just let it go... the one reader in 100 who notices the minor difference in the TOC isn't likely to file a grievance. 🙂

[Willi Adelberger]

Autonumbers are not part of the text (that is why they disappear if you convert text to outlines). Therefore I would recommend to save a copy of the file before making an epub and go to the paragraph style, right mouse click on that specific paragraph style, context menu > convert auto numberts to text.