Fixe dotted frames and vertical line in an ePub

[Anne Guervel]

Hello,
I laid out a paperback book on Indesign that contains dotted frames and vertical lines.

Is there any way to make them appear correctly on an ePub file?

Thank you for your help.

Have a nice day!

[Eugene Tyson]

Pretty sure they'd probably have to be images - but hard to know from the description - have you got an example?

[Anne Guervel]

Hello,

Please excuse my delay in replying, but I've tried lots of things before.

I joined a PDF with mark.

I've created styles for 1 and 2, but the writing is stuck to the lines.

For 3 I think only an image will work

For 4, I've combined line and image, which I've anchored at the beginning of the line, but it's still very stuck.

I'd like to fix that in a reflowable epub. I hope I'm making myself clear.

Maybe it's something to do with Calibre or Sigil?

Thank you for help

Anne

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

Yes, you can have dotted frames in a reflowable EPUB. It's not much more complex than applying a dotted line style to a text or graphics box. If that's not clear enough, be a little more specific about what you're trying to accomplish and a more detailed explanation is possible.

The same is true for vertical lines, but for both of these graphical elements, they have to be used in the right way. If they are part of a parent page layout, no. Nothing from parent pages appears in a reflowable EPUB, including headers, footers, page design elements etc. Every element in a reflowable EPUB has to be part of, or anchored to, some element in the main text flow. So if you want a text box with a dotted outline, it has to be anchored to the text where you want it to appear. Details like lines, similarly, have to be part of a text style or an anchored graphic element. You can't just "paste them on the page" as you might for print, and if they're part of an overall page layout, with elements on the parent page, they'll be discarded.

Looking at your example, the vertical line on #4 would have to be a paragraph style element, carried over from style to style, but yes, both the dotted boxes and vertical line can be done in EPUB.