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James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
August 4, 2023
Question

EPUB and the Articles panel

"My vague recollection was that this practice doesn't work well, or reliably, so I've given counter-answers when it's raised. But it's been a while since I've looked at the process, and thought I'd do some experimenting before some bigger brain comes along and embarrasses me. (Again.)"

 

And... that bigger brain is me. Deleting most of this OP because:

 

1) The Articles panel and feature works exactly as presented in assembling EPUBs, if

2) You're smart enough to assign the Article content correctly.

 

See followup post.

Ce sujet a été fermé aux réponses.

2 commentaires

James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
August 5, 2023

Original post largely deleted. I got it completely wrong (through inexperience with Articles as ID handles them). In short, using Articles to order EPUB export contents works just as presented, and offers some intriguing possibilities for e-doc and multi-format publication.

 

I'll just weakly cop out that I've rarely used the Articles feature and had forgotten that you can create all the "Article" elements you like, which are just empty folders until you actually assign content to them. When testing with empty boxes, I got an empty document. Fancy that.

 

I do still strongly recommend the practice of "one EPUB, one text flow" because that model is so central to how the export and e-book model and processing work. I would (still) go to great lengths to get everything into that one flow, with anchored elements, over any other alternative.

 

And, I retain some dim memory that there's a catch or glitch in using ID's Article feature for EPUB content, one of those little things that will bite you in the ASCII because it doesn't conform perfectly with how some readers handle the files. But until I can find and prove that glitch, consider it a phantom.

 

And apologies to @Mike Witherell, here and in other topics, and to others I questioned about recommendation for this practice.

 

It's just been one of those weeks. 😛

BobLevine
Community Expert
Community Expert
August 6, 2023

Thanks for the update on that. I honestly didn't know one way or the other since it's been so long that I had looked at it.

BobLevine
Community Expert
Community Expert
August 5, 2023

If I mentioned the articles panel as a way to handle this it was a very long time ago. I don't remember the last time I looked at it.

James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
August 5, 2023

I probably should have left it at "others" instead of being specific and vague. 🙂

BobLevine
Community Expert
Community Expert
August 5, 2023

Nah. It's fine. I took no offense.