Blank spaces in epub due to anchored images

[foaad61]

I am converting a book to an epub with plenty of images. The book is converted to a reflowable epub creating whitespace pockets before images or a full white page after a full-page image due to anchoring images. Is there a trick to eliminate these pockets or blank pages?

[Eugene Tyson]

Howdy, good morning (for me anyway)

There's a thread here with a similar query 

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/how-to-anchor-existing-objects-goal-reflowable-e...

Let us know if it helps 🙂 

[foaad61]

No this is not the answer to my issue. I already know how to anchor images. I wonder if there is a way not to have any blank spaces when the image is anchored to the next paragraph and larger for the end of the current page. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

Images are always anchored to the immediately prior paragraph and will flow wherever they fit on the reader page. Since page size, text size, overall content size etc. can be changed by the user, there isn't always a way to get a 'print like' flow for mixed text and images.

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[James Gifford—NitroPress]

First, I am not sure the images or anchors are causing the white spaces you note. There are text formatting issues that would do it, as well.

Second, a lot depends on the reader you are using; different ones (especially ones with different code 'DNA') will display things differently.

Third, there is no good provision in EPUB for text to flow dynamically around placed images. EPUB is a linear document format and text and images will appear where they lie in the flow; if an image takes half a page, there may not be enough space for more text on that display page and there is little you can do about it. You can use (CSS) float, but it's buried in the individual image settings, or via attached CSS, and it may not solve all text flow problems well.

But mostly... depending on the layers-within-layers of spot element definitions and overrides and so forth to either tell you much about the export or to try and adjust faults is almost useless. By default and without careful management of the InDesign document, those on-the-fly HTML containers and CSS defintions will change on every export.

Since you're obviously comfortable with it, I would get into CSS styling for your book elements, and start by assigning a named Object Style to the images so that you can apply direct, consistent control to them on export.

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