Maintaining formatting when exporting to EPUB

[Kerry26599992ma43]

Hello, I know this has been discussed before but there were terms like CC and HTML used as solutions. I am not a techie. The link that I found and that Adobe Virtual Asistant sent me (which has been and continues to be completely useless) is not of assistance. It talks about metadate and javascript. A video I found said all I had to do was export it as an EPUB (Fixed Layout) which I did. No italics. I know there can be italics in Ebooks cause I've read them. 

I am not a techie person so anything that requires programming will be far beyond what I can do. I created a pdf and uploaded the print version, but for the electronic book I am completely lost. 

I am 3 hours into a Virtual Assistant chat and am absolutely nowhere. Sorry to gripe, but it takes a lot of effort and talent to be as useless as the 7 (YES SEVEN!!) people I have been transferred to have been.

Is there a link or Youtube video which provides a step-by-step review of how to maintain the formatting? 

I don't have access to Adobe except through the library system so I don't know if I will have access to this site when I head home. 

[BobLevine]

Are your fonts all OpenType? What EPUB reader are you using to check the EPUB?

[Kerry26599992ma43]

Thank you for getting back to me.

Not certain what OpenType is. Am new to InDesign and all this electronic stuff. 🙂

I checked the formatting on the "Adobe Digital Editions" which automatically opened when the export was done. 

[Derek Cross]

You might be better off sticking with PDF for this use. They are easy to produce from your InDesign document, they can be read on any device and anyone can open such a document – your readers will have to download an ePub reader for your FXL ePub and they may be reluctant to do so.

[BobLevine]

If you're on a Mac, check it with the Books app. If you're on Windows, download and install Thorium Reader.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

In theory, an export to fixed-page EPUB (FXL) should create a nearly print-like version of the document, much like PDF. In practice, trying to get fonts to export correctly and be used in precise mimicry of the layout can be a frustrating experience.

As noted, if what you want is an exact print-like ebook, PDF is a much better choice. It generally replicates pages as if they were printed, with no significant variations from the document pages.

Fixed-page EPUB is an obsolete and problematic format as well. If you want "print" pages, use PDF; if you want an EPUB or ebook, respect the fluidity of the medium and export to reflowable EPUB... and accept that it will have a very different look and feel from a printed page.

PDF is simple to the point of being trivial. EPUB is either easy... or very, very involved.

[Kerry26599992ma43]

Thanks James and Derek. I tried uploading to Amazon the pdf that I used for the hard copy of the book and it was unreadable. There were pages where lines of text overlapped and repeated and it capitalized letters in the middle of words. I don't know that Amazon allows you to just use the pdf for electronic, but will explore that further -- I might have missed something. I know maintaining italics might seem trivial, but mine is a research reference book and I lose all credibility if I can't correctly format the titles of newspapers and books. The removal bold formatting I don't care about because the spacing identifies them as section titles, and I can adjust the places where the kerning is a mess, it's the italics which is killing me.

I will try it with the reflowable EPUB.

As for not knowing what I am doing, I went from barely knowing how to create a new document to designing, formatting and publishing a printed book. So, I have some knowledge of InDesign and am capable of learning more. There are no problems with the print version of the book I created and it's waiting on Amazon for me to release it. The problem is exporting to a format which maintains the italics in EPUB and which Amazon won't mess about with when I upload it to their ebooks platform.

Thanks to everyone for your help; it is appreciated. I will soldier on, but maybe the solution is trying something other than InDesign.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Uploading PDF for Kindle is not a good workflow. It works sometimes, but the conversion is not as straightforward as it might seem it should be, and good results are hard to obtain. That you got very poor results indicates there are other flaws with your document, probably at the font mapping level. As for the tool, InDesign does have some quirks in getting books to EPUB, but simple things like failing to maintain italics is not an app flaw.

Learning and mastering reflowable export is really the right way to go with EPUB. Fixed-page EPUB is an outdated approach and increasingly hard to bring to successful results, except for graphics-based layouts like children's books and graphic novels. And even then, getting a good result can be a headache.

Give reflowable a shot, without embedding (or specifying) fonts.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

And just on review: using InDesign as a simple visual page formatter and exporting to PDF for print is a deceptively simple process. You can have many flaws in a document's structure and layout and still get an acceptable printout or PDF.

When you get to more complex output and exports, though, the structure and format of the document becomes more and more critical. You can't just "hack and slash" it together the way you can in, say, Word, or for that simple "get what you see" printing.

A successful EPUB of either kind requires meticulous document structuring and organization, starting with very controlled use of styles and some aspects of styles that don't show up in plain print.

So another tool is not likely what you need... it's a full understanding of how you format and export an EPUB document, including everything the source doc has to have in place.

[rayek.elfin]

As the others have pointed out the missing italics could be caused by a number of things.

- Did you create a character style for your italicized words/text and consistently assign that style?

- Which font (family) did you use to format the text -- and which one for the italics character style?

But to assist you better it would be useful to have access to a working example. Would you be able to share perhaps a 1-page version here? Save a new version, delete all pages except for 1 or 2 pages that demonstrate the problem. Test the epub export if the problem persists. If so, package that InDesign document, double-check that all fonts are included, zip it, and share it here. 

[Kerry26599992ma43]

Thanks for reaching out and apologies for the delay in responding. Day job got in the way and I didn't get access to the terminal with InDesign until today. 

I think the problem is more complicated than first thought. I switched to EPUB (reflowable) and it preserved the italics (etc.) but not the correct order of the pages. I have uploaded two pages which have a sample of headers/regular text/italics/bold. I used Minion Varialble Concept (16) as it allowed me to do things like bold and italicize. 

I have watched some of the videos recommended on the Linked in service (thanks for the reference) and will watch the rest today. But, what I think I might have to do is use Indesign for the print version, then reformat the Word file and use Vellum or Atticus. I've seen both of them work and creating an EPUB is effortless. Yes, I understand they're different software, but they've cashed in on a market that Abode seems to want to shun. I know I can hire someone, and for this book it might have been an adequate, but not great, ROI, but I want to put out small reference books (100 pages or less) that will be priced between $5 and $10. It's not good ROI to pay $200-$300 to create a book that I am only going to get a couple of dollars royalty on. I thought InDesign would be the solution because Vellum can't handle non-fiction formatting.

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

Ah. I don't believe variable or adaptable fonts work in EPUB.

Switch to a font with four fixed faces (regular, italic, bold, bolditalic). Most EPUB readers will not use any other weights or variants anyway.

You really (really) don't need to use a different workflow for EPUB; at most you might need to maintain two variant InDesign documents. But with a little effort a 'dual format' document for both editions (meaning that edits etc. are always in step) is quite possible.

Different tools won't get around the variable font issue, which is almost certainly the source of your problems.

ETA: Don't embed fonts, either. Let the EPUB reader manage the document's display.

[rayek.elfin]

This answer is not quite correct: variable fonts are converted to standard fonts by InDesign and embedded in the epub.

That said: I do agree it is a bad idea to enforce a specific font family in reflowable epub books: that ought to be left to the device's and reader's preferences.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Thanks for the input, Rayek. I suspect you're right in that variable fonts will be mapped to the base set EPUB uses, but I'd bet two wooden nickels that this is the root cause of the OP's italics problem and other font issues.

That is, I suspect what should be is not necessarily what is... at least, not consistently. I'd have to experiment and tear apart a few EPUB files to confirm. But in any case, switching the source doc to a font with four fixed faces and weights is likely to bypass most of the faults that are occurring.

I'm not even sure I have any variable fonts installed for testing. I've always kind of seen them as for office/amateur use rather than for pro layout. 🙂

[J E L]

One thing you must do is download the free Kindle Previewer desktop application so you can preview what your document will look like on Kindle devices before you upload it there. Scroll down on this page and look for the yellow Download Now buttons for Windows and Mac. I hope that's helpful.

https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Previewer/b?ie=UTF8&node=21381691011

ETA: Thank you for the correction, @James Gifford—NitroPress! Yes, I meant Kindle Previewer (and the link is to that software). I think there was a Kindle Create at one point? And yes, it wasn't good at all!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Not Kindle Create, which is a very limited tool for lego-style preparation of relatively simple books. I don't recommend it for any level of user; it's like most other Amazon software over the years, which is not a compliment.

What should be on hand is Kindle Previewer, which is both the essential Kindle preflight/proofing tool and a fairly good (if skewed) EPUB checker.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I think Kindle Create is still up, and it's like too much of what Amazon has offered: limited, lacking some obvious features, buggy and likely to simply disappear or be deprecated without warning.

My feeling is that the entire time for "EPUB builder" tools is long past. Books in EPUB and Kindle should no more be "built" as arbitrary constructs than, say, authors should have ever had to set their own lead type. The processes for writing and formatting publications are universal, and to set those aside to "weld up your own book from blueprints" is an outdated and wrong-focused approach.

Thanks for taking the time to correct the reference!

[J E L]

You are right again about Amazon offerings. I think with Kindle Create, you had to manually build the TOC. There was some obscure window where you had to TYPE the chapter name in, no pasting, and if you messed up on numbering or spelling, there was no way to go back and edit. You had to start all over from the beginning. I also agree with you on ePub builders. One could dream of a day when we have at the click of one button: InDesign to upload-ready files as .pdf, .epub, .kpf, and, oepub. What, me go off-topic?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I think this is collateral to the topic, if not ID-focused.

You may remember that there was a Kindle export plug in... back when ID was built from sticks and rocks and ran on steam. It just sort of aged out in perpetual, half-working beta.

I don't think the general user base needs anything more than the export to EPUB, but EPUB really-really-really needs to evolve to a wholly new level (EPUB 4), and the bodies/committees are stuck a decade's worth of reality back, and obsessed with micro-evolution of EPUB 3, especially every detail of accessibility. EPUB is smack at the same crossroads as HTML4/XHTML and all that conflicting, patched-up mess, and desperately needs a wholesale revision along the lines of HTML5/CSS3.

And the e-publishing community is even more stuck on the methods developed long, long ago, where "e books" are some completely separate universe of publishing and (must! be!) done like assembling a tinkertoy model instead of a modern publishing flow. So there's no real market/community/industry pressure to drag the committees away from fixing one nit at a time and looking instead at the big picture.

So I will growl at suggestions that the "solution" to all EPUB problems is go to back to stone age tools and processes, because those are all a certain level of 'expert' knows. But now we really are getting off topic...

[Test Screen Name]

You really don't want to be calling Adobe for "how do I use this software" type questions, as you've found. They aren't experts on using the software, even though they might try to find something in a help file for you. Here in these forums you find people who actually use the software day in, day out, as a hobby or to make a living. 

CC, by the way, is Creative Cloud. This isn't techny stuff, it's just the name of the products you are paying for.You should understand though that Adobe's tools are top-of-the-line professional tools. Expect to need to pay for professional training to use them effectively, you won't just muddle through like you might with (for example) Microsoft Word. 

[Derek Cross]

I think that Kerry is out of her depth, that's why I suggested s/he chose PDF for the format (I wasn't suggesting s/he used it as the basis for converting it into an ePub). If s/he wants to create a decent Reflowable ePub I suggest s/he takes the excellent online video tutorial on LinkedIn Learning "InDesign CC to EPUB" by Anne-Marie Concepción (with 30-days free access!).