Problems with fixed-layout epub in Adobe Digital Editions

Forum|Forum|5 months ago
October 24, 2025
1 reply
585 views

Hi all. I am having a problem with some fixed layout epubs exported from Indesign when they are opened in Adobe Digital Editions. These are displaying fine (in fact v good) in Apple Books and Kindle Previewer but for some reason in ADE, when the reader advances the page, the new page usually (not always, but usually) doesn’t display, and won’t until you click a three of four times on where it should be.

This is the same with both fixed layouts that contain images (eg facsimiles of historical documents) and fixed layouts generated from text (eg poetry). I tried png as well as jpeg in the “conversion settings” tab in Indesign export dialogue but it doesn’t seem to help. ADE is used in the catalogue booksellers look at, so we have no choice but to make the file work with it.

Happy to edit the epub in sigil if anyone knows what edit is needed! Any advice very very much appreciated. Thanks!

(ps ADE is also ignoring the TOC and not showing the front cover in the library, but these are relatively minor issues!)

C

CATHERINE23932742a7zzAuthor

Participating Frequently

UPDATE: this is only a problem in Adobe digital editons for MAC - on Windows ADE the file works fine, and the TOC displays too (though it still ignores the cover image)

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi @CATHERINE23932742a7zz,

Thanks for sharing these details. Since the issue seems to appear only on macOS, could you please confirm the version of InDesign you're using? It would also be helpful if you could share a screenshot showing how the EPUB displays in Adobe Digital Editions on Mac compared to how it looks on Windows, so we can visually compare the behavior.

Looking forward to hearing back.

Abhishek

C

CATHERINE23932742a7zzAuthor

Participating Frequently

Abhishek! HI! Thanks! Yes!

I'm currently on cc and my indesign version is 20.5.

It's kind of hard to show the problem in screenshots becasue the problem is what's not there, but here goes:

So like, you open the ebook, the first page displays,

but if you click through to subsequent pages it is mostly just blank (occasionally a single page will load, but 95% don't)

But then if you click a few times on the blank space (it doesn't seem to be a consistent number of times, sometimes three, sometimes four, sometimes more) the page appears! If you do not click it never appears!

Once it appears it looks normal though

Sometines it gets stuck and won't let you chnage the page also! It is very strange behaviour and any hep appreciated

(I did figure out to get the TOC to work btw that was a different problem, but the invisible pages I can't seem to fix)

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