Character style issue when exporting to epub

[Marwa Alz]

Im designing a book that have over 120+ pages, and Im using both pargraph and character style, my problem is when I export the book to epub, the word that I use the character style on (bold, color, italic) when exporting it does not have spcae before the word or affter, Im using ITC Avant Garde Gothic Std‭ ‬font which is an open font, I tried different font and it has the same issue, if you can guide me, I dont want to outline the text as I need the search option feature for the word to be open.

attached an example from indesign and epub.

if you can kindly advise on this issue.

BR

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Both of the above. It is almost certainly the reader itself.

If this is a reflowable EPUB (which it should be; fixed-page is obsolete except for special uses), and you're using the Adobe viewer, the problem is very likely ADE. There are, unfortunately, a lot of noncompliant EPUB readers out there and Adobe's is one of the least reliable.

Thorium should show the book correctly in all respects, although it may have font-size issues; a reasonably good but not flawless alternative is Calibre (just the reader, not the tool package). Kindle Previewer is a little clumsy to use as a reader but it can give a fairly clean proofing of EPUB books as well.

However, specifying/embedding fonts is poor EPUB practice. You are better off using the reader-based generic fonts as there are many issues, on top of the above ones, with embedding fonts in EPUB files and forcing readers to use them reliably.

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[derekwatson]

I am getting a weird issue with grep style when exporting to ePub. All quotes in the book are in italics, set by anything within quote marks. It seems to be random as not happening everywhere but in many cases, the final work appears in a smaller type size. All is fine in ID file and when exported to PDF.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

First question: in what EPUB reader? As this discussion already notes, they vary considerably and are often the cause of such systematic glitches.

A first fix for these things is often the "purge" — export the document to IDML, then open that and re-save as an INDD file under a new name. Try the EPUB export from that. This process purges old data that piles up in docs, and can fix all kinds of little broken formatting and structure issues.

[derekwatson]

Thanks will try that... testing in Apple Books and Kindle previewer app 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Yeah, try the purge thing; also, use a vanilla viewer like Calibre, Thorium or (web plugin) EPUBreader for a baseline view. Apple's reader can be a little nonstandard but Kindle Previewer, while having its own quirks, tends to be pretty good. So I'd say you do have a file glitch; see if that fixes it.

[derekwatson]

Will try first thing and feedback!

thanks

[derekwatson]

Fixed the issue... I think it was caused to the italics being .25pt smaller than the rest of the body text for aesthetic reasons, when the size is removed in character style, all works okay. Not sure why it was shrinking random quotes and only the last one or two words though!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Yes, that will do it. Applying a style that changes the text size will work about half the time (usually, when going smaller), but will cause weird problems in most cases. The most common is messing up line spacing; a tiny bump up in size (to adjust a style with a different font, for example) will often expand that line's spacing disproportionately.

EPUB is aggressive and, if not stupid, a bit single-minded about managing font sizes. There are all kinds of glitches if type is resized at the design level. The root of this is that readers have a strong drive to render body text at the basic reader size (~12pt), so if the body style (or what the reader decides is the body style) is anything else, it will be scaled to that nominal value... and used as the scaling factor for everything else. If for some reason you set the main text to 18pt, many readers will reduce that by 2/3... and then scale UP everything else by the same ratio.

My working conclusion is that most readers, but not all, dislike encountering text size changes midstream, and don't have good algorithms for dealing with it.