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By Anne-Marie Concepción | Thursday, May 21, 2015

Which EPUB Format Should You Use: Reflowable or Fixed-Layout?

Screen Shot 2015-05-21 at 11.29.58 AM

Want to turn your publication into an ebook and sell it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or the Apple’s iBooks Store? You need to convert it to EPUB.

But which EPUB format should you choose? Reflowable or fixed-layout?

In this short video, I talk about your options, and the pros and cons of each format.

By Anne-Marie Concepción | Friday, February 27, 2015

InDesign Secrets: Tips for Naming EPUB Files

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One of the things that will get your EPUBs rejected by ebook retailers? File names with spaces and other reserved punctuation marks and special characters.

Although InDesign will allow you to export EPUBs with these characters, publishers won’t accept them, because they cause issues with the HTML and CSS.

To keep your EPUBs healthy, I’ve assembled some tips on fixing any naming errors in your EPUB files before exporting.

By Anne-Marie Concepción | Monday, November 24, 2014

Goodbye, DPS Single Edition. Hello, Fixed-Layout EPUB!

2014_11_24_EPUBhero

Ask InDesign users how they can use the program to create a mobile-friendly interactive digital publication, and chances are they’ll answer “DPS” (Digital Publishing Suite). Just create a few .folios with the free DPS panels in InDesign and  you’re off to a good start—with a browser window logged in to a lynda.com DPS tutorial, of course.

But today’s announcement that Adobe is retiring DPS Single Edition—the DPS service that came free with every Creative Cloud subscription—will make those InDesign users think again. Especially since in the same breath, Adobe suggests that designers create interactive Fixed-Layout EPUBs (FXL) instead, using InDesign CC 2014.

By Anne-Marie Concepción | Thursday, October 16, 2014

Make a Pop-Up Footnote for Your eBook — in InDesign

2014_10_16_InDeSecFootnote

Footnotes transition easily to the EPUB format and now, with InDesign CC, you can make your footnotes stand out—or pop out—even more.

Learn how to transform regular footnotes into pop-ups using the EPUB Export Options dialog, in this short, fun episode of InDesign Secrets.

By Anne-Marie Concepción | Thursday, August 8, 2013

Convert footnotes to endnotes with one easy script: InDesign Secrets

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Explore this course at lynda.com.

Adobe InDesign does footnotes well. Endnotes? Not so well—not at all, in fact. Anne-Marie Concepción has the solution for you in this week’s InDesign Secrets: a free script that converts footnotes to endnotes. It actually changes footnotes to styled cross-references at the end of your story, and reflows the text. The links to the cross-referenced destinations stay active when you export to the PDF and EPUB formats, too. (Be aware that these endnotes do not renumber when you add new entries, so it’s best to run the script after you have entered all of your footnotes.) Find out where to download the free script in this week’s free video.

By Anne-Marie Concepción | Friday, July 6, 2012

InDesign Secrets: Keeping a graphic in place with an invisible paragraph

In this week’s freeInDesign Secrets episode, Anne-Marie Concepcion reveals how to use a paragraph that’s invisible to the naked eye in order to create a design that holds your graphic where you want it when your document is exported as a single-column EPUB.

Let’s say for print you wanted to place a bio image out in the margin, to the left of your text, as seen in the example below:

InDesign document with image aligned to the left of text within the margin.

Graphics placed in the margin, to the left of your text, work fine for print.

When you export this same document as a single-column EPUB the image is automatically placed at the top of your text because the EPUB exports by document order and the first thing in the layout, reading left to right, is your bio image in the left margin.

InDesign document exported as single-column EPUB with margin image at top of column.

Any images in the left margin of your InDesign document will appear at the top of your column in your EPUB export.

So, what if you want your EPUB image to appear in the text-flow, between paragraph one and paragraph two, but you don’t have the luxury of using the margin (since it’s a single-column EPUB), and you don’t want to overset your text by making the image float between two paragraphs?

The trick is to anchor the graphic—in this example, David Blatner’s head shot—to the text via a paragraph carriage return that’s so small (.1 points) that it can’t be seen by a normal person. Then, when the document is converted to EPUB, your tiny paragraph carriage return automatically becomes a fully legitimate paragraph, and thus David’s head ends up properly placed in its own paragraph within the text, between your desired paragraphs. Making an “invisible” carriage return is a simple, quick solution that has a bunch of potential uses for fixing layout challenges.

EPUB document with graphic placed within text-flow using a tiny paragraph carriage return.

Using a tiny paragraph carriage return allows you to place your graphic within the text flow, without having to float your image and overset your text.

Meanwhile on lynda.com, Anne-Marie’s partner in InDesign secrecy, David Blatner, has a member-exclusive tutorial this week called how to use the baseline grid to align similar text in which he shows you how to use the baseline grid to align text in the same place vertically on multiple pages.

Have you ever employed stealth characters or paragraph in your work to make text or graphics behave in a special way? Do you have any tricks for aligning text across multiple InDesign pages? We’d love to hear your stealth tricks in the comments section below!

Interested in more? • The entire InDesign Secrets bi-weekly series • Courses by David Blatner and Anne-Marie Concepcion on lynda.com • All lynda.com InDesign courses

Suggested courses to watch next:• InDesign CS6 New FeaturesInDesign CS6 Essential Training • InDesign Styles in Depth

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