EPUB ebook file is creating white boxes where transparency should be

[Miranda_Artz]

I'm a comic book creator and I've recently been learning how to format my books. I figured out the print versions but the ebook EPUB is giving me trouble. I'm new to InDesign and trying to upload my comic as an ebook to Amazon Kindle.

(The red box on the right is the oval PNG image box, and it's creating a white box too.) 

All pages are flattened (PNGs) and have no moveable objects/text on them EXCEPT for the Table of Contents Page and page numbers, including the little oval which is also a PNG. (Please see pictures attached) The page numbers and oval image are Master Pages/Parents but they will not stay transparent when exported to an EPUB. Same goes for text boxes that are not Master Pages/Parents.

I tried to look around the community forms for help but not finding what I'm looking for. If you know how I can fix this issue please let me how and where to find the settings you are talking about as I'm very new and am still getting used to the program. Thank you!  

[Frans v.d. Geest]

Group, use Object Export settings to rasterize - but that will rasterize text as well, that kind of 'live' tranparency is not supported in ePub...

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

This. EPUB doesn't support transparency, at least, not well. (Nor does Kindle.) You can get it on vector objects using SVG, but then you have to deal with SVG... 😛

For fully graphic pages like yours, you are best off creating fully composed, flattened images for each page, and not trying to combine graphic and text overlays.

[Miranda_Artz]

Alright, welp. 😅 Since it's looking like I just need to put everything on my PNG images to begin with... I guess I'll just do that. Thanks for your help anyway.

[rob day]

Hi @Miranda_Artz , By transparency you mean the text frame in your first capture is filled with white or [Paper] and the fill is set to 0% trnsparency? If that’s the case why are you using transparency at all? Can’t you set the text frame’s fill to [None]?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Simple text frames will overlay with transparency, but nothing graphical will.

There is next to no reason to build composite pages in InDesign for a comic book/graphic novel. The whole page image should be composed in Photoshop, or in a primary InDesign file and exported to a flattened image. Anything else is just begging for a hundred different positioning, composition, color, transparency and other faults on export... and all to get the same net result.