How to Fix Duplicated Pages in InDesign When Exporting to Reflowable EPUB

[Jennifer Carson]

I've got a perfect ecxport from INDD to Epub except for the fact that two pages, the first page of chapter 31 and the first page of chapter 59 have been duplicated and inserted at the end of the EPUB. There is nothing different about these pages concerning layout or paragraph style from all the other chapters. There are no blank pages in the document. Has anyone run into this problem before and HOW do I fix it?! I have done all the things I know to do and nothing is helping.

<Title renamed by MOD>

 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Okay, I think two factors are in play here. First, I've never seen an EPUB export duplicate contents; if it's in the INDD, it goes into the EPUB, and if it shows up in the EPUB, it's in the work file somewhere. So those two pages are real artifacts somewhere in your file.

Second, junk that ends up at the end of an export is elements that were not anchored anywhere, so they are exported last, as secondary flow elements. (It's really common for novices to have their TOC end up at the end, because the TOC frame has to be anchored to text somewhere near the beginning to stay there.)

So I think you've accidentally duplicated those pages somehow, possibly by inadverently hitting Alt-arrow to copy+move a text frame. Two ways to check —

• Go to each of those pages and drag the text frame an inch or so out of position. Does a duplicate magically appear? Delete it.
• If not, the duplicate material may be hiding somewhere off the pages, out on the artboard. You can zoom out in Normal mode and page through, looking for junk frames out there in the wastelands. Or, maybe easier, search ("Document") for unique text on each page. Bet you find a hit somewhere odd. Again, delete that duplicated frame. (Note that if the frames are aligned, you'll get what appears to be a double hit on the same page; watch for that.)

And if not, there might not be any way to guess what's up without seeing your file. Report back with details of success or failure. 🙂

[Jennifer Carson]

Hi James,

so I followed your instructions--I pulled the text fram off a bit and no duplicate.

Then I searched the document for a unique text phrase--no luck.

So I zoomed out and looked for errant frames--again, no luck!

If you want to scour my file I would be eternally grateful if you can puzzle this out! I have spent so many hours already trying to figure it out!

Here's a link to the file.

Thank you in advance.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Zml2bq9f_e4_jKaAyXnF40rVZdy-TGNh/view?usp=drive_link

 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Happy to take a look. It's usually one simple thing, pretending to be complicated. 🙂

[Jennifer Carson]

You're amazing. Thank you!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Well, I'm often lucky. 🙂 Waiting for approval on the DL; one more thing you might try is the "purge" — save the file under a new name as IDML, then open that file, save as a new name under INDD, and try exporting from that file. That rewrites the structure of the document and purges unneeded data, and can often fix the most mysterious glitches, including ones that show up only at export. It's kind of a hail-mary here but worth trying.

[Jennifer Carson]

Okay! Ill try that! I approved the share.

[Jennifer Carson]

Nope--"purging" didn't work.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

See DM. I'd prefer to take parts of this offline.

[Jennifer Carson]

Fine with me, but I don't see a DM from you?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I only type so fast, and there was a lot to cover. 🙂

Basically, I think you need to start over with a fresh copy of the book text and a fresh ID file, and  follow a few better practices for page breaks and anchoring images. That's secondary, though, to my judgment that the current file is just not salvagable. You could put a ton of work into trying to clean/fix it up and not get a satisfactory result, since the bizarre faults don't seem to have any obvious cause. Less work to start fresh and avoid the layout faults that might have contributed to the problems.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I am... baffled. Your file is doing things in export I've never seen before, and none of my quick fixes and changes are affecting those. For some reason, your file is making the export process create graphic page images (in PNG format), which I've never seen in reflowable export; it's a hallmark of fixed-page export. (No such page images or composite images are usually produced in reflowable export.)

A conversion to IDML fixed nothing. Changes to relevant export settings fixed nothing.

Besides the two anomalous pages — which are being exported as page images, duplicating the original material — many pages such as your copyright page and the publisher info page are being exported as images, although they're inserted in the correct places.

Most bizarrely, Thorium Reader seems to have your page flow backwards: clicking on the left pageflicker advances the pages, clicking on the right pages backwards.

The good news is it's not you — I can't even think of any common mistakes you might have made to put things in this condition.

The bad news is that I am more baffled than I have been by any problem in this area in a long time, and have no idea what might be causing it. (My first suspicion: InDesign v20.x, which I have not fully wrung out on new export projects. Are you using v20 or 20.1?) But this is major Twilight Zone weirdness.

The okay news is I will be happy to help you straighten this out, just from personal and professional curiosity. I will probably need the whole book package to do so, though.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I just threw a few known-good projects through export using v20.1 and they don't have any problems I can spot at a glance. So it's probably not ID, at least, not the new version.

[Jennifer Carson]

I am using InDesign 2025--20.0

I 've packaged it and thank you so much for your help!

Here is the link to the package:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/11BIEG-XdIdIsxz93YX8UgTu_92h799wy?usp=drive_link

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Okay, starting a fresh sub-thread here, I have found at least part of the cause of the strange results. A number of text and graphic frames have been independently set to "Rasterize Container" — which means that on export, ID won't write them out based on content, but turn the whole frame into an image file. This is not a normal setting except for certain combinations of words and text that need to retain their appearance, such as a map with some text overlays added in InDesign. Among the frames so tagged are, yep, the title pages of those two chapters.

There is, to the best of my knowledge, no central list or indicator of these object settings. The only fix would be to select every frame in the document, right-click, Object Export Settings... and set the parameters to something more normal for a text EPUB export.

I am not sure if this is something you did deliberately (the choices of frame and content seem random), or if perhaps you cut and pasted a frame that had that setting and used it for multiple purposes. But that's one large-ish mystery solved.

I maintain that a fresh start on the whole project, fixing this oddity and addressing the other format issues I noted in DM, would be the most productive path.

[helen_72]

James, thanks for the new sub-thread. I had the exact same problem and I had inadvertently set a couple of my frames to rasterize container (I had been working with images on these pages.) I really appreciate you taking the time to explain some of the results you got, if you hadn't, I'm not sure how long I would have been here trying to figure it out!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Glad to help. On top of all the subtle aspects of creating a solid EPUB export, the many ways InDesign affects the result just add to the fun. 🙂

————

┋┊ InDesign to Kindle (& EPUB): A Professional Guide, v3.1 ┊ (Amazon) ┊┋

[helen_72]

I don't suppose you know how to change the spacing between normal text and a bullet point? See my image for an example of what I mean.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Well, short answer is "but of course!" 🙂 but the problem is that you can't do it from within InDesign. You have to use CSS statements to modify the output.

Bullet spacing in EPUB (which is basically HTML/CSS like a web page) is controlled by padding; for reasons that passeth understanding, InDesign does not export padding values at all. So there are a number of text modifications that simply can't be done with any ID setting or workaround.

If you're not up to speed on writing CSS code and attaching it to an EPUB export project.... it's not something that can be squeezed in here very well. I suggest, with all due humility, that you might find my book, noted in the sig line above, to be a useful overall guide and introduction. But a simple approach is:

• Create a text file named something like MYCSS.css (text file, plain ASCII, not in Word etc.)
• Put the code below in the file.
• Attach this file to your export, under HTML & CSS, Additional CSS.

Now, the contents of this file will be applied to your export, modifying the styles just as CSS does on web pages.

The simple code for bullet spacing adjustment is:

li.BULLET {
padding-left: 10px;
}

Substitute your bullet style name for BULLET (and use dashes for any spaces, along with EXACT spelling and capitalization — such as Brochure-bullet or BODY-bullets or whatever). Adjust the '10px' value to get the bullet spacing you want. (Pixel values for export are very small increments, so you might want to adjust in units of 10 until you're close.)

It's usually necessary to add other statements to tweak the bullet paragraph margins, but you can do some of that using ID settings.

Happy to clarify and help further, but the jump into using CSS is both powerful and a bit involved. A comprehensive approach is a lot more productive than spot fixes.

[helen_72]

Thanks for getting back to me. I do know how to do CSS. Can you please advise if this is for the margins (left) or is this for the spacing above the bullet?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

The left padding controls the bullet to text spacing.

[helen_72]

Thanks, I must be doing something wrong, it's not made any changes.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Yeah, I was afraid of that. (Side note: it might be better to start a fresh topic on all of this.)

Lists are one of the most complex things in ID to EPUB export, partly because there are so many 'moving parts' and partly because InDesign does a wonky job with the export settings. Besides the 'not exporting padding' issue  —with padding being a crucial part of list layout — ID doesn't export any values for the ol/ul list wrapper, leaving it to the defaults of each reader. It's a pro move to add a CSS definition for that, even if it's just:

ol, ul {
margin:0;
}

...to null out any default spacing, especially on the left. This gets tricky when you have nested lists, though.

No simple answers, but one reason you might not be getting any added distance for your bullets is that the list isn't spaced far enough over, so add some left spacing:

li.BULLET {
padding-left: 10px;
margin-left: 20px;
}

 ....to see if that gives 'elbow room' for the bullets to move.

And, of course, much of this is dependent on the EPUB reader. They all handle lists a bit differently. What reader are you using for proofing your exports?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

And — I'm a dummy, here. This tutorial will probably help a bit —

• https://www.nitrosyncretic.com/DPR/dpr_lists.php

[helen_72 · Accepted solution]

Thanks for your help, I got it to work by inserting this CSS code:

ul {
margin-top: 0 !important;
}

ul {

margin-bottom: 0 !important;
}