IntroductionWelcome| 00:05 | Hi! I'm Anne-Marie Concepcion and this is
InDesign CS4 to EPUB, Kindle, and the iPad.
| | 00:11 | This course covers the complete
ebook workflow for getting your InDesign
| | 00:15 | contents into a number of
devices and EPUB reading software.
| | 00:19 | From determining which format you're
planning on using, then setting up the
| | 00:23 | original InDesign file to make it EPUB
friendly, to tinkering with the final
| | 00:27 | EPUB in a variety of utilities like
Sigil and Oxygen Author, to putting the
| | 00:33 | final file out there for publication
through Amazon's Kindle, Apple's iBookstore,
| | 00:37 | Barnes & Noble's Nook, and
plenty of third-party sites and options.
| | 00:42 | I'll show you some specifics like
setting up the images and other graphics for
| | 00:46 | best presentation in an EPUB, adding
and editing metadata to your files, and
| | 00:50 | even building custom TOCs and
covers for your final presentation.
| | 00:55 | Ebook publishing is a great way to
get your work to your waiting audience.
| | 00:59 | So let's get started with
InDesign CS4 to EPUB, Kindle and iPad.
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | If you are a premium member of the
lynda.com Online Training Library or if
| | 00:05 | you're watching this tutorial on a DVD
ROM, then you have access to the Exercise
| | 00:09 | Files used throughout this title.
| | 00:11 | So sometimes the exercise
files are just an InDesign file.
| | 00:15 | Just open that up in InDesign.
| | 00:16 | A lot of times the files that we are
using are EPUB files and they are opening
| | 00:21 | up in my default EPUB Reader, which
is Adobe Digital Editions, probably the
| | 00:25 | same thing for you.
| | 00:26 | During the title I'll be letting you
know where to download all these different
| | 00:29 | utilities that we will be using.
| | 00:30 | And when we actually get into editing
the contents of EPUB files, then you'll
| | 00:36 | see that we're dealing with a lot of
text files like XHTML files and XML files.
| | 00:42 | And you can use any kind text editor
that you'd like and I bounce around between
| | 00:47 | a few of my favorite ones.
| | 00:48 | If you don't have access to the
Exercise Files, you can follow along from
| | 00:52 | scratch or with your own assets.
| | 00:54 | Let's get started.
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1. Overview of ebooksWhat is an ebook?| 00:00 | What is an ebook exactly and is
an ebook the same thing as an EPUB?
| | 00:06 | I want to actually talk about the
different formats or meanings of the word
| | 00:10 | "ebook," so that we can narrow it down
a little bit, because I think a lot of
| | 00:14 | people are kind of unclear on the concept.
| | 00:16 | And in this video title it's
not about ebooks in general.
| | 00:20 | It's specifically about certain kinds of ebooks.
| | 00:24 | To me an ebook is the same
thing as, say, a digital book.
| | 00:27 | It is a book that is an electronic
file that can be attached to an email, for
| | 00:32 | example, and sent to somebody
or that can exist on a website.
| | 00:37 | A book can even be a website.
| | 00:38 | That would be an ebook as well.
| | 00:40 | But I think when people think about
ebooks, they are thinking of certain
| | 00:43 | formats and the three main
formats I have up here on the screen.
| | 00:48 | It's the same book, Alice's Adventures
in Wonderland, which is in the public
| | 00:52 | domain now, and it's actually existing
here on screen in three different ebook types:
| | 00:58 | as an EPUB, as a PDF and as a MOBI file.
| | 01:03 | And MOBI file might be more
familiar to you as a Kindle file.
| | 01:08 | This is the Kindle format.
| | 01:09 | PDF I am sure is very familiar to
you what a PDF is, and an EPUB might be
| | 01:14 | unfamiliar but it's actually the
main thrust of this video title.
| | 01:17 | An EPUB is an open source ebook format.
| | 01:21 | We are going to talk about all three right
now first, just so you can see the difference.
| | 01:25 | If I open up this PDF, it opens up in a
Reader on this computer, and the PDF is
| | 01:31 | a digital version of this book.
| | 01:34 | With a PDF if you resize the screen,
the type doesn't rewrap or anything like that.
| | 01:40 | You can get the type to be smaller.
| | 01:42 | If we come up here and press the big
old minus sign, the type can get smaller
| | 01:46 | and it can get larger, but basically
what's happening is the whole page is
| | 01:50 | getting small and getting large.
| | 01:52 | So it's kind of like the
layout is frozen into position.
| | 01:56 | The layout looks beautiful.
| | 01:57 | It's got great looking titles and
great looking images and wraps some things
| | 02:01 | like that, but essentially,
a PDF is like a frozen page.
| | 02:04 | Now, let's come back
here and talk about an EPUB.
| | 02:08 | An EPUB I happen to have
open in Barnes & Noble ereader.
| | 02:14 | So if you have like say a Nook, this
might be how Alice in Wonderland would look.
| | 02:19 | Now an EPUB is a re-flowable format.
| | 02:22 | If I make the screen smaller or larger,
look at the line endings. They are changing.
| | 02:28 | The type isn't changing.
| | 02:29 | The size of the type isn't changing,
but the line endings are changing.
| | 02:33 | What that means is that an EPUB is a
format that can be reflowed depending on
| | 02:39 | the size of the screen of the
device in which it's being read and it's
| | 02:42 | critically important.
| | 02:43 | If you try to read that big old
PDF on a little iPhone, it might be
| | 02:48 | impossible, because the type to be too
small to read, or you would constantly
| | 02:51 | be scrolling from line to line.
| | 02:54 | I can have this ebook open on an iPhone.
| | 02:56 | We are going to have it
open on a Kindle previewer.
| | 02:59 | This is a Kindle for iPhone Previewer,
so this happens to be the MOBI file,
| | 03:03 | because it's the Kindle format, and if I go
from page to page, you can see that this
| | 03:08 | is what the ebook would look like on an iPhone.
| | 03:12 | So, it has reflowed. Tthe line endings
are much shorter but you can read it.
| | 03:15 | You can read it very easily.
| | 03:17 | You can still change the
size of the type if you want.
| | 03:20 | You can make it larger or smaller, but
the fact it is a MOBI format, which is
| | 03:26 | very similar to the EPUB format,
means that it's re-flowable.
| | 03:29 | Those are the kind of ebooks we're
going to be talking about in this title.
| | 03:33 | Is how to make this re-flowable format.
| | 03:35 | It is the wave of the future.
| | 03:37 | Now, don't get me wrong.
| | 03:38 | I love PDFs and I would love for a way
for us to be able to get this kind of
| | 03:43 | reflowable text out of
a PDF and still look good.
| | 03:47 | Unfortunately, we're not there yet.
| | 03:49 | So it seems at this point PDFs will be
for one type of digital ebook but the
| | 03:53 | vast majority of actual books that are
being sold like on the Apple iBookstore
| | 03:58 | and on the Kindle are going
to be this re-flowable format.
| | 04:02 | Here I have Kindle reader for the
Macintosh, and here I can make it as large or
| | 04:09 | small as I want and you can see how it reflows.
| | 04:11 | So I don't know how often people will
be reading an EPUB on their computer,
| | 04:16 | but you can. Which brings me to something
else that people ask me about all the time.
| | 04:21 | All right so that's what a digital book
is and that's what an EPUB or Kindle is,
| | 04:25 | that it's reflowable book,
but where do you read them?
| | 04:28 | You can read EPUBs and Kindle
books in lots of different places.
| | 04:32 | You can read them and dedicated devices,
like a Kindle or like a Nook or a Sony
| | 04:36 | Reader or an Apple iPad. You can read them on
the computer as well and you can mix and match.
| | 04:42 | If you're on the computer especially,
if you have the Creative Suite installed,
| | 04:46 | you're probably going to be looking
at EPUBs in Adobe Digital Editions.
| | 04:50 | This is the free utility, kind of like
Adobe Reader is for PDFs, Adobe Digital
| | 04:56 | Editions, or ADE, is for EPUB files,
and we will be using Adobe Digital
| | 05:01 | Editions a lot during this title as a
quick proofer for the EPUBs that we are
| | 05:05 | exporting out of InDesign.
| | 05:08 | Digital Editions can open EPUB
files and it can open PDF files.
| | 05:12 | We will mainly be working with EPUB files.
| | 05:15 | Now, if you want to read EPUBs on
some sort of external device, you could
| | 05:20 | download some software. Like for
example, Stanza is a very well-known EPUB
| | 05:24 | reader for lots of different
devices that you can download and install.
| | 05:27 | It doesn't run on the desktop. Or if
you have an Android phone, you could
| | 05:32 | download this ereader, which is very
popular. So you just install this software
| | 05:36 | and then you can open up any kind of EPUB.
| | 05:38 | You can even read an EPUB in your browser.
| | 05:41 | So anywhere that you have a browser
on your computer or on an iPad or an
| | 05:45 | Android, you can go to ibisreader.com and
you can actually open an EPUB directly in here.
| | 05:50 | You can even organize your
library of EPUBs this way.
| | 05:54 | If you go to Amazon.com, now Amazon.com
uses a different format for re-flowable
| | 06:00 | ebooks called the MOBI format.
| | 06:02 | So we are going to be talking about the
EPUB format and the MOBI format in this title.
| | 06:07 | If you want to purchase an ebook from
the Amazon Kindle store, it's going to be
| | 06:11 | downloaded in MOBI format.
| | 06:12 | So how do you read that?
| | 06:13 | Well, Adobe Digital Editions can't open
that, neither can Stanza, but luckily Amazon
| | 06:19 | has created all sorts of
free Kindle reading apps.
| | 06:22 | So if you go to Amazon.com and in the
Kindle file menu, you choose Free Kindle
| | 06:26 | Reading Apps, you'll see that you don't
even need a Kindle to read the digital
| | 06:30 | books that you purchase on Amazon.com.
| | 06:32 | You can install the Kindle Reader app
on your iPhone, on your PC, your Mac,
| | 06:37 | Blackberry and so on.
| | 06:38 | Another easy way to access
EPUBs are directly in your browser.
| | 06:43 | Firefox has a plug-in that lets you
open up the EPUBs directly in the browser.
| | 06:47 | And so you can see it's still reflowable,
I can resize the window and the text
| | 06:51 | reflows, but I can still access the
chapters and so on, just as though I were
| | 06:57 | reading it on an external device.
| | 06:59 | So hope you have a better
idea of what an EPUB is.
| | 07:01 | We are not going to be
talking about PDFs, so you go away.
| | 07:05 | We are going to be mainly talking
about EPUBs, which is the default almost I
| | 07:10 | guess you could say generic open
source format for re-flowable ebooks, and the
| | 07:17 | MOBI format is very closely related to that.
| | 07:20 | We are going to be talking about the
MOBI or the Kindle format in its own
| | 07:23 | chapter later on, but as you learn,
once you create a really good EPUB, then it's
| | 07:27 | not that difficult to convert it
to the Kindle or the MOBI format.
| | 07:31 | So we are going to be really
concentrating on working with EPUBs out of InDesign.
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| Where do I find and sell ebooks?| 00:00 | The entire ebook marketplaces
like a bizarre from the olden days.
| | 00:04 | There are all sorts of places.
| | 00:06 | There are huge established entities
where you can peruse and download and
| | 00:10 | purchase ebooks, and then there are
young upstarts and everything in between.
| | 00:15 | So let's talk about where you find ebooks and
how you can sell your ebooks. Just an overview.
| | 00:21 | Of course, we're going to be devoting
a lot more time later on this video to
| | 00:24 | exactly how do you get
your ebooks up here for sale.
| | 00:27 | First of all, if you just want to start
downloading some EPUBs, here is a really
| | 00:31 | good place to try is epubbooks.com.
| | 00:34 | You can see, they have a tone of free
books that you can download and there
| | 00:37 | is also places where you, as an author, can
search for ebooks and you can buy ebooks as well.
| | 00:42 | Another big one is feedbooks.
| | 00:44 | A lot of EPUB readers that you can
download like Stanza, they have a
| | 00:49 | links directly to feedbooks, so
that you can go ahead and search for
| | 00:53 | EPUBs and download them.
| | 00:55 | A lot of free ones and a lot of ones for sale.
| | 00:58 | And Project Gutenberg is probably the
most famous source for locating free books
| | 01:03 | that are in the public domain, and
most of the books on Project Gutenberg are
| | 01:07 | being converted to the EPUB format.
| | 01:09 | A lot of them already available as HTML,
but slowly but surely they're becoming
| | 01:13 | EPUBs, so you can download them to
Adobe Digital Editions or Stanza or any of
| | 01:18 | the other ereaders that can read an EPUB.
| | 01:20 | Of course, one of the big kahunas in
the marketplace is Amazon.com and this
| | 01:25 | where people download a ton of ebooks.
| | 01:28 | But anything you download from
Amazon.com, remember, cannot be opened in any
| | 01:33 | device that doesn't read MOBI files or in
any software that doesn't read MOBI files.
| | 01:38 | So you can't get any book from the
Kindle store and open it up say in Adobe
| | 01:42 | Digital Editions or Stanza. You'd
have to use one of Amazon's own Kindle
| | 01:47 | ereaders, but it's not that difficult
to get your book into the Kindle store at all,
| | 01:51 | as you'll find out later on in this title.
| | 01:55 | Here is another place the people are
getting EPUBs from. This is the Sony Reader Store.
| | 01:59 | So a lot of device manufacturers, like
Sony, which has a line of really nice
| | 02:03 | ebook readers, have their own bookstore
that people can purchase books from and
| | 02:07 | that you, as an author or publisher,
can get your books listed here.
| | 02:10 | Such as Barnes & Noble.
| | 02:11 | They are called NOOKbooks for the Nook
ereader an ereader device that they sell.
| | 02:18 | And how about Google ebooks?
| | 02:20 | They just started up a couple months
ago. Google books has been around for a
| | 02:24 | while where you know you could see
scans of books, but they are starting
| | 02:27 | their own ebook store.
| | 02:29 | So if you go to books.google.com/ebooks,
you can see all these ebooks. A lot of
| | 02:34 | them are for sale and then there's a
lot of free ones and they are all in there
| | 02:37 | re-flowable EPUB format.
| | 02:39 | You don't have to be a big
store or a big organization.
| | 02:43 | You could just have your
own little publishing company.
| | 02:45 | Like my friend Adam Engst and his wife
Tony run "Take Control Ebooks," which is a
| | 02:50 | series of really great books that
are not too large, not too small.
| | 02:54 | And they help you out a lot if you're
working on anything on the Macintosh
| | 02:57 | or with publishing.
| | 02:59 | They started out as PDFs, but they're
also converting all their ebooks to EPUB as well,
| | 03:04 | so you could download them to
like a small device and Android or iPhone
| | 03:08 | and read them on that little screen as well.
| | 03:10 | So when you think she work on and find
an EPUB, there is a huge number of places
| | 03:15 | where you can find EPUBs.
| | 03:16 | That means that there is a huge
opportunity for authors and publishers to get
| | 03:20 | your digital ebooks in front of readers' faces.
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2. EPUB Production BasicsUnderstanding the EPUB file format| 00:00 | Now that you've finished your
whirlwind tour of the ebook and EPUB
| | 00:04 | ecosystem, how you find them, how you
read them, I think it's time that we
| | 00:08 | take a look under the hood.
| | 00:10 | It's important especially since you
are going to be a person converting your
| | 00:14 | InDesign documents to EPUB, to understand
really what is an EPUB, what's inside an EPUB.
| | 00:20 | I think I mentioned an EPUB is
essentially like a little website, then ereader
| | 00:25 | read that little website, but what do I
mean exactly? And that's what I want to
| | 00:28 | show you in this video.
| | 00:30 | I'm just going to go over it briefly.
| | 00:32 | Definitely later on in the title we're
going to take a very close look at the
| | 00:36 | contents of an EPUB file.
| | 00:38 | But I think it's good to know this
up front, so we know, "know thy enemy."
| | 00:41 | Know what we're dealing with.
| | 00:42 | So here we have a couple of EPUBs in this
exercise folder and I have one running here.
| | 00:47 | This is the Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland that we looked at in the last chapter.
| | 00:51 | So there is image and there's text
and so on, right. Not that big a deal.
| | 00:57 | But actually this EPUB here-- EPUB is
a compressed collection of files kind
| | 01:03 | of like a zip file.
| | 01:05 | In fact, you can change the extension
from EPUB to ZIP and then decompress the
| | 01:11 | ZIP into its component files.
| | 01:13 | I've done that here in
this folder called z-opened.
| | 01:16 | So I actually renamed EPUB to
ZIP and then I decompressed it.
| | 01:21 | Now if you're on a Mac it's a crapshoot
whether or not it's going to work if you
| | 01:25 | just double-click it.
| | 01:26 | I've noticed that in later versions
of the OS, it doesn't work and you need
| | 01:30 | to use like StuffIt Expander to do that,
to actually unzip it, but on a PC, it's a no-brainer.
| | 01:36 | This is actually how you get into the EPUBs.
| | 01:38 | So anyway, you don't have to worry about
that because I already expanded it for you.
| | 01:43 | So inside the folder, this is
the contents of that EPUB file.
| | 01:47 | We have this strange little XML file
and we have a folder with another XML file
| | 01:53 | and then we have this strangely
named folder OEBPS, which actually stand
| | 01:58 | for something significant that you
don't need to worry about, along with a
| | 02:01 | couple other strange little files and
then a folder called content with a
| | 02:06 | series of XML files.
| | 02:08 | Now, each one of these XML files is
actually a chapter in the EPUB book and
| | 02:15 | then inside data, we have a
series of JPEGs and PNG files.
| | 02:19 | So if you select one of these, you can see
that these are the images inside the EPUB file.
| | 02:26 | So, when you ask an EPUB reader, like
Adobe Digital Editions or Barnes & Noble
| | 02:31 | NOOK reader or Apple iBooks, to open
up an EPUB, what it's doing is it's
| | 02:36 | loading these XML files with the contents of
the book and then it's showing it to you as text.
| | 02:44 | And when the book calls for an
image, it's showing you an image.
| | 02:48 | Just as how a web site is a text file,
the HTML file is a text file that links to
| | 02:53 | images, and that's how images
appear within the web page browser.
| | 02:56 | I did the same thing to this other
EPUB that I have in this folder called
| | 03:02 | SFHistory, and you can see it right here.
| | 03:05 | So this is San Francisco History.
| | 03:07 | It's just an EPUB that we will be working
with quite a bit in this title, a very simple one.
| | 03:12 | When I expand it, you can see
that it has a same sort of structure as
| | 03:18 | Alice's. It looks slightly different
inside the OEBPS folder, and because this is
| | 03:25 | how InDesign exports EPUB files.
| | 03:28 | It creates XHTML files for every
chapter and then it puts the images into a
| | 03:33 | separate images folder and
exports them as JPEGs or as GIFs.
| | 03:38 | And this is what we're going to be
spending a lot of time on in this title is
| | 03:40 | exactly how it does this and
how to optimize what it exports.
| | 03:44 | But this is essentially what an EPUB is, is
that each one of these files is like a web page.
| | 03:49 | Let's go ahead and take a
quick look at this in Safari.
| | 03:52 | So this is the Contents page with links.
| | 03:54 | Let's take another look.
| | 03:55 | Let's just grab this guy.
| | 04:00 | Okay, so this is like a chapter
inside the EPUB and it's actually just a
| | 04:04 | standalone XHTML file.
| | 04:07 | So I'd hope that you can see that
EPUB readers are kind of like little web
| | 04:11 | browsers and then what it is that
you're creating out of InDesign is like a
| | 04:14 | little miniature web site.
| | 04:16 | So, if you're starting with an InDesign
document that's been designed for print
| | 04:20 | and you're trying to create
a little web site out of it,
| | 04:23 | that is a challenge in creating a
good-looking EPUB out of InDesign.
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| How does an INDD file become an EPUB file?| 00:00 | So the InDesign to EPUB workflow
is a series of iterative steps
| | 00:05 | and there are some edits you do in InDesign,
some edits you do in an EPUB editor, and you're
| | 00:10 | always checking to make sure
that it's working along the way.
| | 00:12 | So let me give you an overview of how
this works and rest assured that we're
| | 00:16 | going to be examining each of these
steps in detail throughout this title.
| | 00:20 | So first of all we're
starting with an InDesign file.
| | 00:23 | By the way, EPUBs can be created from
Microsoft Word files, from HTML files, but
| | 00:27 | of course we're starting
with the pinnacle InDesign.
| | 00:31 | I'm going to talk about some things in
the InDesign file that translate already
| | 00:35 | EPUB and some things that don't and the
best ways to prepare your InDesign file for
| | 00:39 | an optimum EPUB export.
| | 00:41 | So there is some tweaking that you're
going to need to do to that InDesign file
| | 00:45 | In fact you probably find yourself if
you've designed it for print doing a Save As,
| | 00:49 | and then really tweaking
it heavily for your EPUB export.
| | 00:53 | Then inside InDesign there is a command
to Export to EPUB format, depending on
| | 00:58 | the version that you have, it might be
called Export for Digital Editions, which
| | 01:02 | is the name of the default utility that
Adobe ships with for viewing EPUBs and
| | 01:07 | I showed that in the previous video.
Or might be called Export for EPUB, but
| | 01:10 | even then the dialog box still says
Digital Editions Export Options, so
| | 01:15 | they're synonymous.
| | 01:16 | You end up with an EPUB file that opens
up in your default EPUB Previewer, which
| | 01:20 | as I said is probably Adobe Digital
Editions, and you use that as a rough proof.
| | 01:25 | Because ADE, Adobe Digital Editions,
really isn't a 100% accurate previewer of
| | 01:30 | what it's going to look like
say on iBooks or on a Nook.
| | 01:34 | The situation is similar to
web browsers and web sites.
| | 01:37 | You create a web site and it looks one
way in Firefox and quite different in
| | 01:41 | Internet Explorer for example.
| | 01:43 | That's what happens with
ereaders when they open up these files.
| | 01:47 | So we use ADE as a rough proof to make
sure that all your images came in and all
| | 01:51 | your text came in and that they are
in the right order as a rough proof.
| | 01:55 | At this point you probably want to
validate it and validating is an important step.
| | 02:00 | It's a free service that I'll be
talking about in a video, that checks your EPUB
| | 02:04 | file to make sure that it adheres to the
standards set forth for all EPUB files,
| | 02:09 | that the links are working like, that
the required files are there, and so on.
| | 02:13 | It's important because when you are
ready to sale this, when you are ready to
| | 02:17 | distribute it to the Barnes & Noble
store, the Sony Reader Store, the Apple
| | 02:20 | iBookstore, they will not
accept your EPUB unless it validates.
| | 02:23 | So it's a good idea to start now to
make sure that what got exported from
| | 02:27 | InDesign will validate and then
when we go on to the next step, which is
| | 02:30 | editing the innards of the EPUB file,
you'll know that if it doesn't validate
| | 02:34 | in the future it wasn't something from
InDesign. Yu know, you probably forgot to
| | 02:37 | close a tag or something.
| | 02:39 | So that's the next step, is that we are
going to open up the EPUB file and edit it.
| | 02:42 | And I showed what an EPUB file
looks like inside in the previous video.
| | 02:46 | So we're going to do some simple or
maybe complex editing of the XHTML files and
| | 02:51 | the CSS files. I'll be talking about
different ways to do that and some common
| | 02:55 | fixes that you might want to do.
You add metadata to the files and so on.
| | 02:58 | It's actually kind of interesting.
| | 03:00 | And then of course you want
to prove and validate again.
| | 03:04 | So it's like I said.
| | 03:05 | It's a series of iterative steps, but
at this point when you're proofing,
| | 03:08 | you probably want to go beyond Adobe
Digital Editions and actually get it say onto
| | 03:12 | your iPad and proof it in
iBooks or put it on a Nook.
| | 03:16 | In other words you want to preview it in
something closer to what your customers
| | 03:19 | are going to be looking at to
make sure it works there as well.
| | 03:22 | Finally when you're happy with how it
looks, you do a final validation, which
| | 03:26 | again is important, because it's just
going to be kicked back to you if it
| | 03:29 | doesn't validate, and then you upload it.
| | 03:31 | You upload it to your web site if you're
going to sell it by yourself on your own web site.
| | 03:35 | You upload it to the Apple iBookstore
or to a third-party aggregator who is
| | 03:39 | helping you distribute this EPUB in the
different venues that we will be talking
| | 03:43 | about later on in this title.
| | 03:44 | And if you're going to be selling it on
the Amazon Kindle Store, you can upload
| | 03:49 | that EPUB directly to the Kindle
Store and they'll convert it to the Kindle
| | 03:52 | format for you, because Amazon uses a
slightly different format. They don't use
| | 03:56 | EPUB; they use something called MOBI.
| | 03:58 | Now I have a chapter in this title all
about converting to MOBI files, because I
| | 04:02 | really think it's better if you
convert it yourself on your Desktop and then
| | 04:05 | preview it in the Kindle Previewer, and
even put it on a Kindle and see what it
| | 04:09 | looks like before you upload it.
| | 04:10 | But we'll get to that.
| | 04:11 | The main thing is that we start with a
valid EPUB, and then at the very end we
| | 04:16 | upload it to the reseller, and that
in a nutshell is the basic InDesign to ebook workflow.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| What can and can't be converted from INDD to EPUB| 00:01 | So knowing that the InDesign format
is so different from the EPUB format,
| | 00:06 | it's always good idea to get to know
what kinds of things in an InDesign
| | 00:09 | document will actually make it through
the EPUB export process, will actually
| | 00:14 | end up in your EPUB.
| | 00:16 | And which things will never end up
in the EPUB and which things will
| | 00:19 | partially end up in the EPUB.
| | 00:21 | So in fact, a really good exercise is
to open up any kind of InDesign document
| | 00:26 | that was meant for print.
| | 00:27 | Perhaps the one that you are
actually considering converting to EPUB.
| | 00:30 | And just go ahead and make a straight
out export to EPUB and see what it looks
| | 00:34 | like in an EPUB reader
without doing anything special.
| | 00:36 | Now I have here a document that's
in the exercise folder called "A Brief
| | 00:40 | History of San Francisco."
| | 00:41 | A beautifully designed history of San
Francisco done by a friend of mine, Nigel
| | 00:47 | French, who is a great designer,
and also a lynda.com author.
| | 00:51 | And he has created like something like
a guide to San Francisco with typical
| | 00:57 | text frames that are threaded.
| | 00:58 | Let's go ahead and turn on Show Text
Threads. With a story that's threaded
| | 01:02 | throughout the document.
| | 01:04 | A number of sidebars, some stuff on the
pasteboard, a table, pictures, and so on.
| | 01:09 | So it's beautiful. Nothing
spectacularly complex about it.
| | 01:14 | And there is a cover.
| | 01:15 | Let's just go ahead and export it to EPUB.
| | 01:17 | So in InDesign CS4, go to File and
choose Export for Digital Editions.
| | 01:24 | Now I've gone ahead and assigned a keyboard
shortcut Command+E or that would be Ctrl+E on a PC.
| | 01:29 | Because I do this constantly throughout
this title, I went ahead and assigned a
| | 01:33 | special keyboard shortcut to it.
| | 01:35 | Just go ahead and choose it.
| | 01:36 | It's going to say where do you want to save it?
| | 01:39 | Go ahead and save it like maybe on
your desktop or something like that.
| | 01:42 | And then you're going to go through
all these dialog boxes, which I'll be
| | 01:45 | covering in detail later.
| | 01:47 | For now, just accept the
defaults and click Export.
| | 01:50 | Now I've already done that and I have
it open in Adobe Digital Editions, which
| | 01:54 | is my default EPUB utility on my Macintosh.
| | 01:58 | And it probably is on yours as well,
either if you have a Mac or if you have a PC.
| | 02:03 | If you don't have Adobe Digital
Editions, you can go ahead and download it
| | 02:07 | from Adobe web site.
| | 02:08 | So it doesn't look very much like
the InDesign document, does it?
| | 02:12 | Now there is the cover, and then we
have contents, and then there is text.
| | 02:18 | All right, with the text
here, I can see paragraphs.
| | 02:21 | I can see the colored subheads.
| | 02:22 | That's good. Where are all the images?
| | 02:25 | Well, if you keep going down, they're there
down there, and this was a table I guess.
| | 02:29 | By the end of this course, you'll be able to
create an EPUB from this document that looks great.
| | 02:35 | But let's go back to InDesign and let
me just give you an idea, an overview, of
| | 02:39 | what items inside an InDesign document
will export to the EPUB format, which ones
| | 02:44 | won't, and which ones will partially export.
| | 02:47 | Rule of thumb number 1 is that all text
and all images that fall within the live
| | 02:52 | page area will be included in the EPUB export.
| | 02:55 | Now if the item though comes from the
master page, like down here we have a
| | 03:01 | page number and we have a running footer.
| | 03:03 | If the item is on a master page and is
not been overridden on the document page,
| | 03:08 | in other words it's not editable on
the document page, it will not be included
| | 03:12 | in the EPUB export, which is a good thing.
| | 03:14 | Usually we don't want running headers
and footers and folios, because when the
| | 03:18 | EPUB is opened up on an EPUB Reader
the device manufacturer usually comes up
| | 03:23 | and their software goes ahead and adds
the running headers or running footers.
| | 03:26 | And page numbers in an EPUB reader
make no logical sense, because there is no
| | 03:31 | concept of pages since it's all re-flowable.
| | 03:34 | So that's a good thing.
| | 03:35 | Now if you do happen to have editable
headers and footers and page numbers on
| | 03:39 | your document, you'll probably want
to get rid of those before you do the
| | 03:41 | export, because that will be a
lot of work in cleaning that up.
| | 03:44 | And let's take a closer look.
| | 03:46 | Whenever you have text, in general
all the text in the stories will be
| | 03:50 | included in the export.
| | 03:52 | If the story is threaded among
multiple frames, it will appear in one long
| | 03:57 | scrolling story and most of the
formatting will be intact, especially if you
| | 04:02 | have applied character
styles and paragraph styles.
| | 04:05 | Now sometimes what print design
and what InDesign supports in a style
| | 04:09 | definition, such as keeps settings,
Keep with Next Paragraph, is not supported
| | 04:14 | or cannot be supported in
CSS, cascading style sheets.
| | 04:17 | And that's what your print design
styles, your paragraph and character styles
| | 04:21 | will be converted to CSS styles.
| | 04:23 | And we'll be talking about working with
CSS and editing CSS for your EPUBs later on.
| | 04:27 | So perhaps your subhead style has
like a Keep with Next Paragraph setting.
| | 04:31 | When you exported to EPUB, that text will
still be styled with something called subhead.
| | 04:36 | And in your CSS document, you'll still
be able to add specifications for the
| | 04:41 | subheads style, but the keep setting will
not be there and you will be able to add it.
| | 04:44 | And images will also get exported to
EPUB and optionally you'll be able to
| | 04:50 | retain the formatting of images.
| | 04:53 | That means that if you have brought in
an image and scaled it and rotated it
| | 04:57 | and cropped it, when you export to
EPUB it will maintain the same scaling,
| | 05:02 | rotation, and cropping, which is pretty cool.
| | 05:05 | In addition with an image frame, if you
have applied any kind of effect to the
| | 05:09 | frame itself, let's put it that way,
| | 05:11 | you've applied a stroke, you've applied
a drop shadow, that kind of thing,
| | 05:14 | that can also be exported to EPUB.
| | 05:16 | That will be included in that image.
| | 05:18 | Now that is not true for text frames.
| | 05:20 | If you've applied a stroke to a text
frame or drop shadow to a text frame, that
| | 05:24 | will be ignored, because basically
text frames are not exported. Only the
| | 05:28 | contents of the text frames are
exported, because the EPUB reader itself,
| | 05:32 | the screen, is like one big text frame.
| | 05:35 | And that will become clearer later on,
but if you are thinking well, I want to
| | 05:39 | maintain my two column text frames in the EPUB,
| | 05:41 | that ain't going to happen, because
multiple columns are not supported.
| | 05:45 | Now if you have images or text that are
outside on the pasteboard, now I think I
| | 05:50 | have a picture of my doggy here,
anything that's completely on the pasteboard is
| | 05:54 | not included in the export, which is good,
because that's a way for you to stash
| | 05:58 | things that maybe you want in the
printer PDF version, but you don't want in the
| | 06:01 | EPUB, so you can just
drag them off to this side.
| | 06:04 | Now if they're partially overlapping
like this here or if you have text that's
| | 06:07 | partially overlapping, then it will be
exported and included in its entirety.
| | 06:12 | You won't see any crops.
| | 06:13 | There is no such thing as a page bleed
or anything like that. The whole image or
| | 06:17 | none of the image, if it's
completely off the pasteboard.
| | 06:20 | And similarly if we have, let me zoom
into this text frame, the sidebar here,
| | 06:25 | if you have overset text like this,
the entire story gets exported.
| | 06:30 | Not just the visible story,
but the entire story gets exported.
| | 06:34 | Some things that aren't included at
all are things like this lovely little
| | 06:38 | illustration that I did with the
InDesign Pen tool and a stroke.
| | 06:43 | Any kind of artwork that you create
in InDesign with InDesign tools, in
| | 06:47 | other words strokes or frames with
no text or image content, those are
| | 06:52 | completely ignored.
| | 06:53 | So if you've created say a lovely
illustration with callouts and arrows and
| | 06:59 | circles that you've created in
InDesign, those callouts and arrows and
| | 07:02 | circles are ignored.
| | 07:04 | If they were surrounding text frames or
they were lying on top of an image,
| | 07:08 | the text in those frames will be exported
and the image will be exported, but none
| | 07:12 | of your lovely artwork.
| | 07:13 | And I have a video later on that
covers how to deal with that and how to make
| | 07:17 | sure that your artwork remains intact
when you export to EPUB. But without doing
| | 07:22 | anything special it will be ignored.
| | 07:23 | And you know what else is kind of interesting, I think?
| | 07:25 | Do you know how you can
create a table of contents automatically
| | 07:29 | by going to Layout > Table of Contents and
setting that up, you can just go ahead and lay it out
| | 07:34 | and this text has been generated
automatically? Well, that's completely ignored.
| | 07:38 | When you export to EPUB automatically
generated tables of contents are ignored
| | 07:43 | in the export. The text itself is ignored.
| | 07:46 | And so don't think that is broken.
I did, throughout the first month that I
| | 07:49 | was working with this.
| | 07:50 | And same thing is true also for indices.
| | 07:52 | Automatically generated indices are ignored.
| | 07:55 | If you want to actually include this
contents you have to retype it yourself or
| | 07:59 | you can export to RTF and bring it
back in, or you can open it up in Story
| | 08:03 | Editor, create all the links and things.
| | 08:05 | I'll talk about that in another video.
But generally, automatically generated
| | 08:09 | text from InDesign is ignored.
| | 08:11 | And you have to keep in mind that the
whole concept of pages are ignored, so it
| | 08:15 | makes no difference. I've been asked
before, should I set my document up as a
| | 08:19 | single page rather than
facing page or spreadsheet?
| | 08:21 | Should I resize my document
page to match the size of the iPad?
| | 08:25 | You could if you want, but it
is going to make no difference.
| | 08:27 | The entire concept of pages is
ignored, page size is ignored, facing or
| | 08:31 | single page is ignored.
| | 08:33 | Seriously, just the text and the
images in whatever order they appear is
| | 08:37 | exported in one fell swoop.
| | 08:39 | And that is basically what the next few
chapters are all about, is how to manage
| | 08:43 | that and how to control it so
you end up with what you want.
| | 08:45 | So I hope now you have a better idea of
what is supported when you export to EPUB
| | 08:49 | and what is not, and what
might take a little bit of work.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Preparing an InDesign CS4 Publication for EPUB ExportUsing the Book feature to create chapters| 00:00 | One of the first things that you
will want to do when preparing your CS4
| | 00:04 | InDesign file for export to EPUB is to
set it up in such a way that after you
| | 00:09 | export to EPUB it creates chapter breaks.
| | 00:13 | So for example, here is an EPUB made
from this file that we've been working with,
| | 00:17 | "A Brief History of San Francisco."
You can see on the left in the
| | 00:21 | navigational table of contents, it gets
created automatically when you set it
| | 00:25 | up right in InDesign.
| | 00:27 | I can click on different links and it
jumps right to that page and so these are
| | 00:32 | actually separate chapters.
In fact if we open up this document,
| | 00:38 | SFHistory.good.epub, in this neat
little utility I've called Springy--
| | 00:43 | Springy lets you examine the contents
of compressed ZIP files and EPUB files
| | 00:48 | without having to extract them first.
| | 00:50 | This is something you can do pretty
easily on a PC but on a Mac it's difficult
| | 00:54 | so I need this Mac utility.
| | 00:56 | Inside the book folder, and we'll get to
know this much better later on, there is
| | 01:00 | a folder called Text and each one of
these XHTML files, if you can of see it here,
| | 01:06 | is an actual chapter. When I exported
the file from InDesign it automatically
| | 01:11 | chunked up the document
into these separate chapters.
| | 01:14 | So how can you make that happen and why
would you want to make that happen?
| | 01:18 | Well if you would want to make that
happen first of all, because it's nice.
| | 01:21 | It's just like a regular book, right,
with links to chapters like a table of contents.
| | 01:26 | The other reason is because if your
document is really long, if you have one
| | 01:31 | single InDesign file and you export it to XHTML,
| | 01:35 | if the XHTML document ends up to be
more than 300 K-- see this one only 5 K
| | 01:40 | because it's very simple-- but if
it's long and ends up being more than 300 K
| | 01:45 | then it won't validate as an EPUB.
| | 01:47 | So that is one of the restrictions is that each
individual XHTML file needs to be under 300 K.
| | 01:52 | All right so let's close up that
compressed file and jump over to InDesign and
| | 01:59 | we'll start with a real simple text file.
| | 02:01 | All right, so we have just one story
and if I press that Command+A or Ctrl+A
| | 02:06 | to select all, you can see there's one
threaded story and it's a lot of text
| | 02:10 | from that big brochure.
| | 02:12 | Now if we export this to EPUB-- and we're
just going to go down to File and choose
| | 02:18 | Export for Digital Editions and
we'll save it out on the desktop.
| | 02:22 | We will call it history text file.
Let's see what that looks like.
| | 02:28 | Whenever you export by the way of
Digital Editions to EPUB, the options that I
| | 02:32 | almost always choose during this
training are never Include Embeddable Fonts,
| | 02:37 | because hardly anything supports it
and sometimes you can make ereaders crash.
| | 02:41 | And I always try and remember to
turn on View eBook after Exporting.
| | 02:45 | Everything else you can leave at the
default settings. In this final Contents panel
| | 02:50 | turn off Table of
Contents and then choose Export.
| | 02:54 | So this is what happens with just
like a bald export of one single InDesign
| | 02:58 | document, is that the name of the
InDesign document becomes the chapter name and
| | 03:02 | it is one long file. There no individual
chapters. So let's go back to InDesign.
| | 03:09 | So you might think well, you know to
you need to do to make those separate
| | 03:12 | chapters is you need to make breaks in
the stories. So here is the same story
| | 03:18 | with break characters inside. So I've
turned on invisibles and this little tiny
| | 03:23 | character was created by going to Type
> Insert Break Character > Frame Break or
| | 03:28 | Page Break. But even if you do that
it's not going to change anything.
| | 03:34 | If we go Export for Digital
Editions, we'll save the same settings as
| | 03:39 | before, click Export, same thing.
And now you might even try okay fine what
| | 03:45 | about if instead of being one long story with
breaks, we break it up into separate frames?
| | 03:50 | So here's "Early History" as one
chapter, here is the "San Francisco Peninsula"
| | 03:55 | as another chapter, and so on.
| | 03:57 | Let's export this one. Let's go ahead
and do this and check everything that's fine.
| | 04:02 | Export. Same story!
| | 04:04 | All right, so exporting for EPUB what is
not transferred, and I mentioned this in
| | 04:11 | the previous video, are break
characters. So Frame Break, Page Break,
| | 04:15 | that's ignored and if you have multiple
separate stand-alone frames, whether they're on
| | 04:20 | the same page or they are on
separate pages, those are also ignored.
| | 04:23 | They are all concatenated into one long file.
| | 04:26 | Now you can get sort of close.
If you just have a very simple InDesign
| | 04:30 | document and you'd like to have links
on the left, but it's not so long that
| | 04:35 | you actually need it to be chunked into
separate chapters, here is something you can do.
| | 04:39 | Is you can go to the Layout menu and
create a Table of Contents Style. I'm going
| | 04:44 | to create a new style called EPUB and I
know that this heading right here, "Early History,"
| | 04:51 | that's the subhead heading.
So I'm going to down here under Subhead,
| | 04:54 | click Add, and that's all. I'm just
going to say OK, so I've saved a table of
| | 04:59 | contents style to use especially for EPUBs.
| | 05:01 | Now if you're not familiar with
creating a table of contents, there are many other
| | 05:05 | videos on lynda.com about InDesign
essentials, so it's pretty simple. I'll just
| | 05:10 | click OK here and now when we export
to EPUB we'll replace the existing one.
| | 05:18 | In the Contents panel turn on Include
InDesign TOC entries and then remember to
| | 05:23 | choose your TOC style, EPUB.
| | 05:26 | Once that's turned on, you can say I
don't want to see the name of the document
| | 05:29 | to be an entry there in that
navigational table of contents. And now click Export.
| | 05:35 | And now looks a little better doesn't it?
| | 05:37 | Okay, so it has taken those TOC
entries and turn them into clickable table of
| | 05:42 | contents on the left.
| | 05:44 | However it is still one long document.
This might be enough for you and you know,
| | 05:50 | you might think "Well, wait
a minute. Look at that spacing."
| | 05:51 | Well this is something you can fix in the
CSS with space above and things like that.
| | 05:55 | We'll talk about that later, but I
would say the vast majority of people who
| | 05:58 | are creating EPUBs really want separate
chapters like that first one that I showed you.
| | 06:02 | So how do you that with InDesign?
| | 06:05 | Well there is only one way do that
and that is to create an InDesign book.
| | 06:09 | In the sample files here I have that I
created I have a folder called History book
| | 06:15 | and I've split apart each one of
those chapters into their own standalone
| | 06:19 | document and then I created the
history text, the actual book file.
| | 06:25 | So you do this by going in InDesign,
you go to File > New and choose Book
| | 06:30 | and then you save it.
| | 06:31 | Call it something else, save this on a
Desktop, and just say test book and then
| | 06:36 | you have a dialog box for you add
individual InDesign files and again this is
| | 06:40 | covered very thoroughly and other
lynda.com videos about how to use InDesign.
| | 06:45 | But as I said I've already created this
in the sample files, so if I go to File
| | 06:49 | > Open and there's my book and its INDB.
| | 06:54 | So I already have these and if I double-
click these files, you can see that here
| | 06:57 | it's just the "Early History." Let's
close all these other documents and I don't
| | 07:01 | need to save any changes in the
other ones, just to keep thing straight.
| | 07:05 | Okay, there is "Early History" and the
"San Francisco Peninsula." So it's just one
| | 07:10 | document with only that chapter and now
I can go ahead and export this to EPUB.
| | 07:16 | So if I go to the Book panel menu, you
can see that there's an Export Book for
| | 07:21 | Digital Editions, and I'll call History
book, save it on the desktop, and turn off
| | 07:29 | Embeddable Fonts, turn on View eBook
After Exporting, leave everything as is, and
| | 07:34 | I think we have the TOC saved here.
I'll click Export and now we do have separate
| | 07:39 | chapters, as you can see.
| | 07:41 | However, they've been named according
to the name of the InDesign document.
| | 07:45 | So we're almost there. Not quite.
| | 07:48 | So we're back in InDesign. What I'm
going to do is use that same table of
| | 07:51 | contents of style trick with my book.
So you take the master document, which is
| | 07:56 | the one the little with the little icon here,
this little one that all the elements sync to.
| | 07:59 | Make sure it's open and then in that
master document do the same thing we did before.
| | 08:03 | Create a table of contents
style, call it EPUB, and so if you have
| | 08:09 | headings that you want it to be the
links on the left of the EPUB, make that into
| | 08:13 | the table contents and you can add
multiple ones and have a multiple levels of
| | 08:17 | table of contents and so on, but
we're just going to have one level. We will
| | 08:20 | say OK and now we're going to
export this again. History book2.
| | 08:30 | View eBook. Turn off Embeddable
Fonts. Down here in Contents we want to
| | 08:35 | use the TOC entry called EPUB. We want to
Suppress Automatic Entries for Documents.
| | 08:40 | Click Export and there we go.
| | 08:42 | Now we have multiple chapters and they are
named according to those headings in our TOC.
| | 08:47 | So unless you doing a very simple
InDesign document, you know just a one-page
| | 08:53 | short thing, you are most likely in
InDesign CS4 going to want to split up your
| | 08:58 | books into chapters. And I would bet
that a lot of them already split up into
| | 09:02 | chapters and you're using the book
feature. And in that case all you need to do
| | 09:06 | is remember to add a TOC style to your
master document, so that you have nice
| | 09:10 | links like this on the left.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Managing the reading order in the layout| 00:00 | So in the last video we were working
with a very simple text file that either
| | 00:05 | was broken up into multiple chapters
in a book or it was one long text file.
| | 00:09 | But probably we're not going to be able
to get away with that you know in the
| | 00:11 | real world and we're going to have
slightly more complicated layouts.
| | 00:15 | So I want to talk about how InDesign
CS4 handles reading order when you have
| | 00:20 | more than one text frame or
more than one story, to put it that way.
| | 00:24 | So here is a bizarre little layout
that I created just as a proof of concept
| | 00:28 | to demonstrate this.
| | 00:29 | This is my dog Zoey.
Her name is not really Carol.
| | 00:32 | Let's just take a look.
We have a bunch of frames.
| | 00:34 | I'm going to zoom in a bit. We have
a text frame, and a byline, the body
| | 00:38 | copy, a little rotated text, and then the
picture of Zoey and the caption are grouped.
| | 00:44 | Now the story, as it says, is continued on page 2.
| | 00:47 | Let's turn on Show Text Threads and zoom out.
| | 00:50 | So the story is continued down here
underneath this large picture, and then
| | 00:55 | there's just some overset text, okay.
| | 00:57 | Let's go ahead and export this
to EPUB and see what happens.
| | 01:01 | So I'll go to File > Export for
Digital Editions and we'll save it right on
| | 01:07 | the desktop, call it layout order, and
the settings that we want are. You can just
| | 01:11 | leave everything at these defaults,
turn off fonts, turn on view after
| | 01:15 | exporting, images leave as is,
contents, we don't need any table of contents,
| | 01:20 | and then click Export.
| | 01:21 | Let me make this a little larger.
| | 01:25 | So what happened here? Now don't worry
about this thing on the left. We're not
| | 01:29 | talking about chapter breaks right now.
| | 01:31 | But it starts out with "My favorite
dog" and then it has the byline and then
| | 01:35 | it has the headline, then it has the
story and then down here at the end of
| | 01:40 | the story, very end, it says continued on page
2, then Zoey's picture and then her caption.
| | 01:46 | So how the heck did it decide that this
should be the order when this was the layout?
| | 01:51 | Well it's because InDesign is just software.
| | 01:54 | It's just a computer. It can't read your mind.
| | 01:56 | What it does is it looks at each
page individually and starting from the
| | 02:00 | left-hand side, it exports
the first thing that it finds.
| | 02:03 | So the first thing that it found was this text.
| | 02:06 | If you remember from a previous
video, rotated text is not supported in
| | 02:09 | the Export to EPUB.
| | 02:10 | It's just going turn it right back,
reading left to right, so that came first.
| | 02:15 | The next thing that it found was this
byline, so left to right, it found this
| | 02:20 | byline, "by Joe Schmoe."
| | 02:21 | So we'll come back here.
"My favorite dog by Joe Schmoe."
| | 02:26 | Then it found "My Dog, Carol."
| | 02:28 | Now you might think "Wait,
| | 02:29 | this looks like it's a little
further left than this text frame."
| | 02:32 | Well, in addition to going left to
right, it also goes top to bottom.
| | 02:36 | So it doesn't just march through the
entire page going left to right, left to
| | 02:39 | right, left to right, and then
start top to bottom, top to bottom.
| | 02:41 | It does both at the same time.
| | 02:43 | So it did export "My dog, Carol," because
that was above the main story, and then
| | 02:49 | it exported the entire
story all the way to the end.
| | 02:53 | It does not interrupt itself with
pictures or continued pages. When it finds
| | 02:58 | a frame, it exports everything that's in
that frame or that is threaded to that frame.
| | 03:03 | Then when it was done with that, the
next thing that it found was "continued on
| | 03:07 | page 2" and the picture of Zoey.
| | 03:09 | So it is going top to bottom right from
this and then it went left to right and
| | 03:13 | found the picture of Zoey,
and then it found that caption.
| | 03:16 | Now why did the caption appear in the
EPUB below this while over here it's above
| | 03:21 | this because it's grouped?
| | 03:22 | Well, group arrangements are not paid
any attention to when you export to EPUB.
| | 03:27 | It does not care that the
caption is grouped above it.
| | 03:30 | It's looking at left to right, top to bottom,
picture of Zoey comes first, then this.
| | 03:35 | The only thing that it pays
attention to with groups is the upper left
| | 03:39 | bounding box of the group.
| | 03:40 | So the first item that's in that
bounding box will get exported.
| | 03:44 | So if you want to adjust the reading
order without having to actually get in
| | 03:48 | there and edit the XHTML files, which you
really don't want to do and you have to
| | 03:52 | like cut-and-paste paragraphs around,
you want to arrange your layout knowing
| | 03:56 | that this is how InDesign is going to do it.
| | 03:58 | You can either arrange them in the
proper left to right order, or you could make
| | 04:02 | it into one long text flow
which I'll get to in a second.
| | 04:05 | But if we wanted for example to export
this in a way that makes a little bit
| | 04:09 | more sense, first of all we can just
move this guy off to the pasteboard.
| | 04:13 | If you remember, things on
the pasteboard are ignored.
| | 04:16 | Then we want the headline to go
first and then my "by Joe Schmoe" and then
| | 04:23 | this text over here.
| | 04:25 | Then we will get rid of the "continued"
because that makes no sense because we're
| | 04:29 | not having page breaks in the final document.
| | 04:32 | Let's export this one to EPUB.
| | 04:34 | So we'll go under File >
Export for Digital Editions.
| | 04:38 | We'll replace the existing one.
| | 04:40 | It's remembering our settings. Export.
| | 04:43 | That's a little better, isn't it?
| | 04:45 | "My Dog, Carol," byline, story, and then
this picture and caption at the bottom but
| | 04:51 | I think you get the general idea is
that you're going to have to take your
| | 04:54 | InDesign document and think like
InDesign, left to right, top to bottom and it
| | 04:59 | goes page-by-page, not spread-by-spread.
| | 05:02 | So if there is something that's on top
on the right-hand side, it's not going to
| | 05:06 | get to that page on the right-hand
side if you have facing pages until it's
| | 05:09 | completely done exporting
everything on this page.
| | 05:12 | Also remember that it exports the
entire story, not just the visible part of
| | 05:16 | the story on this page.
| | 05:18 | So let's take a document that is maybe a
little bit more common among books, and
| | 05:23 | this is a Gutenberg book called Stories
of California that we'll be using as a
| | 05:28 | sample as well during this title.
And just a brief run-through of how this is
| | 05:33 | constructed. It's facing pages.
| | 05:35 | We have one standalone text frame for
the title page with this little flourish
| | 05:39 | that's actually a graphic that's
just sitting right there in the middle.
| | 05:42 | Then on the next spread we have a
standalone text frame that's a foreword, and
| | 05:47 | then we have a threaded story.
| | 05:49 | Let's again turn on Show Text Threads so
we can see what's happening and zoom out.
| | 05:52 | It's not very long, just a few pages.
| | 05:56 | We have some running headers and
footers, and then we have an image that is I
| | 06:01 | believe yeah, it's grouped with a
caption, and it's got a Text Wrap.
| | 06:04 | So it's just sitting here and pushing the
text around. We have another one down here.
| | 06:09 | So let's export this, call it California
Normal, to EPUB. Export for Digital Editions.
| | 06:16 | We'll go right on the desktop, and
turn off fonts, turn on view, Contents.
| | 06:21 | That's fine, Export.
| | 06:23 | So here's what happened. Don't worry about this.
| | 06:25 | Again, we're not really
concerned with chapter breaks.
| | 06:27 | Here is the title page, so it's the
first thing that found on in the document,
| | 06:31 | and then the flourish is over here.
| | 06:33 | That's because remember this is one
text frame and then on that page it was
| | 06:37 | reading left to right.
| | 06:38 | The next thing it found after it
exported the text frame was this graphic.
| | 06:42 | So that's where it appeared.
| | 06:43 | Then foreword and then headlines.
| | 06:46 | I mean, again we're not considering
with chapter breaks and then at the very
| | 06:49 | bottom are the pictures and the captions.
| | 06:52 | I think you know why that happened.
Because it found this text frame and as you
| | 06:55 | know it exported all the text at once.
| | 06:58 | Then it was still here as far as it was
concerned, and it said, what else is on this page?
| | 07:01 | Top to bottom, all we have this picture.
| | 07:03 | So that's why the picture
appeared at the very end of the story.
| | 07:07 | So the point of this lesson is that
if you want your images to appear at a
| | 07:11 | certain point in the text, you have to
make them part of the text glow and you
| | 07:16 | do that simply by anchoring
the image into the text flow.
| | 07:19 | It's not that difficult.
| | 07:20 | You create an empty carriage return.
| | 07:22 | I'm going to click right between these
two paragraphs and then hit Return, and
| | 07:27 | then it's best if you create a
character style for your anchored images.
| | 07:30 | And again if you've never created an
anchored image or an anchored object, watch one
| | 07:34 | of the other InDesign Essential Training videos.
| | 07:37 | There are some ins and outs that you
might want to know, but I'm assuming that
| | 07:40 | you've done this before.
| | 07:41 | So I'll just review it quickly.
| | 07:43 | I've already created a paragraph
style for this that I'm calling
| | 07:45 | inline_image_centered, and it has auto
leading so that it will automatically
| | 07:51 | expand based on the height of the image.
| | 07:54 | I'm only going to put the image in here.
| | 07:56 | I'm going to ungroup it with the Command+
Shift+G or Ctrl+Shift+G. I'm just going
| | 08:00 | to take this guy out and cut it to
the clipboard and then switch to my Type tool,
| | 08:07 | click in front of
this paragraph, and paste.
| | 08:10 | So now it's pasted in here.
| | 08:13 | Then I am going to hit Return and
I'm going to add the caption here.
| | 08:16 | So I'm going to change the paragraph
style to Caption, take this caption, copy
| | 08:21 | it and paste it just as
regular text. Here we go.
| | 08:26 | Then you would do the same thing
with the other pictures and other text.
| | 08:28 | So you need to go through your
document chapter-by-chapter and anchor all
| | 08:33 | graphics, captions, sidebars, margin
notes, that kind of thing, within the text.
| | 08:39 | So that's why I said earlier in a
different chapter, you might want to do a Save
| | 08:42 | As to your documents, and then in the
copy you are just basically going to rip
| | 08:46 | it apart and really change it so
that it exports to EPUB correctly.
| | 08:50 | Let's actually do the same
thing to that flourish up here.
| | 08:52 | I'll cut it to the clipboard and then
it already is the inline image paragraph,
| | 09:02 | and then switch to the Type tool and paste.
| | 09:05 | Now, let's export this to EPUB.
| | 09:07 | We'll overwrite the existing one.
| | 09:11 | Make sure that all the
settings are the same as before.
| | 09:15 | So the flourish now
appears in the correct place.
| | 09:19 | The image and its caption
appear in the correct place.
| | 09:23 | Of course we have to fix the problem
with the chapters by breaking this up
| | 09:25 | into multiple documents.
| | 09:26 | But I think you get the drift is that
this is the challenge in exporting from
| | 09:32 | InDesign to EPUB, is that InDesign just
takes what it finds on each page left to
| | 09:37 | right, top to bottom, and exports it at once.
| | 09:39 | For the ultimate amount of control,
especially with text heavy documents, with
| | 09:43 | occasional images, you definitely
want to anchor those images and their
| | 09:47 | captions within the text flow.
| | 09:49 | That way, when you export to EPUB the
reading order is correct and is what you
| | 09:54 | expected to see and then
you can continue working.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Following best practices for file naming| 00:00 | A final step to consider in prepping
your InDesign file EPUB work is file naming.
| | 00:07 | Remember that we are exporting to
EPUB and EPUB is essentially a miniature
| | 00:11 | web site that the EPUB readers open up
and can understand, sort of like how a
| | 00:16 | browser understand HTML pages, and if
you have ever created a website then you
| | 00:21 | know that there are very strict
naming conventions, like for example,
| | 00:25 | no spaces, no funny characters, no
quote marks or things like that.
| | 00:30 | All alphanumeric characters,
underscores, and hyphens and that is it.
| | 00:34 | And a lot people will stick with
everything all lowercase because it's case
| | 00:38 | sensitive and that way they don't have
to worry about, was this an upper cap or not.
| | 00:41 | You know everything was always lowercase.
| | 00:43 | That's not how we work though in
InDesign for print, is it? We really don't care.
| | 00:47 | Now let me show you when it might
cause a problem, when you might consider
| | 00:52 | renaming InDesign files, image files, and
even style names to adhere to XHTML standards.
| | 00:58 | We are looking at a document that was
created from an InDesign book and each
| | 01:03 | document, each standalone InDesign
document in the book, was named like this,
| | 01:07 | Early History.indd, Arrival of Early
Settlers.indd, and that's how they ended up
| | 01:13 | being links on left. So chapter breaks.
| | 01:16 | It could have been done with table of
content styles, as I talked about in an
| | 01:19 | earlier video, but in this case the
person just named the different InDesign
| | 01:23 | documents according to their content.
| | 01:25 | And that is normally not a big deal,
but I want to take a look at something.
| | 01:28 | Did you see that link here? So the person
in InDesign had this document open, Climate,
| | 01:34 | and created a cross-reference, which
is a feature in InDesign CS4, to another
| | 01:39 | document. This is a link to Arrival of
Europeans in Early Settlement. This was
| | 01:44 | the name of the document
here, Arrival of Early Settlers.
| | 01:47 | So you click here and it brings you
to that chapter, which is cool, and
| | 01:50 | remember links to get exported to
EPUB. But let's take a look at what's
| | 01:55 | happening internally.
| | 01:56 | In exercise files I have already
extracted the contents of this EPUB, and
| | 02:02 | remember all of the XHTML files are in
this folder and these are the different
| | 02:07 | chapters and notice how InDesign
automatically named these XHTML files, exactly
| | 02:13 | as the InDesign files were named.
Which is normally not a good thing. If you're
| | 02:17 | a web designer you're probably
cringing looking at these things.
| | 02:22 | I've opened these files in TextWrangler, one
of my favorite text eEditors, and we'll be
| | 02:27 | talking more about this in another chapter.
| | 02:30 | But here is that XHTML file, San
Francisco Climate, and this is kind of like a
| | 02:35 | web code. Don't worry about it if you
don't understand all this gibberish.
| | 02:37 | Here is the actual content. "San
Francisco's known for its mild?" and so on.
| | 02:42 | Down here is the link. This is a link to...
and then there is look at this. There's empty spaces.
| | 02:49 | Now depending on how you have set this
up you might see empty spaces in your
| | 02:52 | links or they might be escaped properly.
| | 02:55 | Escaped means they have been converted
to UNIX ease, which has a percentage sign
| | 03:00 | followed by 20, %20.
| | 03:02 | But either way there are a number
of ereaders who will freeze when they
| | 03:06 | encounter something like this and not
know what to do. The link won't work or the
| | 03:10 | chapter won't even open or
it won't validate and so on.
| | 03:14 | So one thing to consider is name your
InDesign files, at least don't use spaces.
| | 03:19 | If you want to use upper and
lowercase that's fine, but use underscores and
| | 03:23 | hyphens to separate words and don't
use any other funky looking characters.
| | 03:28 | So alphanumeric just to review is
A through Z and the number 039 and don't
| | 03:33 | use any white space.
| | 03:34 | When you make a book cover image, which
is a very important part of an EPUB and
| | 03:38 | we will be talking about that and
upcoming video, again give it a name that is
| | 03:43 | alphanumeric and no spaces, because
it's referred to in many different places
| | 03:48 | within the ebook file.
| | 03:50 | You might also consider using these
file naming guidelines for all images and
| | 03:55 | even style names, if reasonably possible.
| | 03:58 | If you already have InDesign document
with 500 images placed, it would be kind
| | 04:03 | a nightmare to rename all of those
images and then you will have to re-link to them,
| | 04:07 | but I have heard instances-- not
everybody. It's not a hard and fast rule.
| | 04:10 | I have heard anecdotally, put it that way,
about sometimes images that have spaces
| | 04:15 | in their filenames or you know unusual
characters will cause problems in the EPUB file.
| | 04:20 | In the style names as well. Your
paragraph character and table style names come
| | 04:25 | through in the EPUB. Take a look.
I've opened up the CSS file here.
| | 04:30 | Your names get converted directly to CSS styles.
| | 04:34 | So if you have a really long name
with lots of spaces, that's going to be
| | 04:39 | repeated right here and then those names
are called on right inside the XHTML file.
| | 04:45 | So when you name your styles, your
paragraph and your character styles, it's
| | 04:49 | really okay to add spaces if you want.
Here I didn't, but it's not that big of a
| | 04:53 | deal for spaces in style names because
you are not really linking to style names
| | 04:57 | themselves. Not like you're linking to
InDesign filenames in a book or images
| | 05:03 | that you have placed. Those are
links, but not the style names.
| | 05:06 | Still it's a good idea to
at least to keep them short.
| | 05:09 | So those are just a few simple rules
for how you should be naming your files in
| | 05:14 | your InDesign documents and your
images when they're going to be exported to
| | 05:17 | EPUB, if you want to avoid those
kinds of nasty linking problems.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Modifying Text and Images for EPUB ExportCleaning up the text flow| 00:00 | If you are converting an existing
InDesign file for optimal EPUB output or even
| | 00:06 | if you're creating an EPUB from scratch
in InDesign, you need to be aware of the
| | 00:10 | consequences of using some very common
print and PDF layout techniques to create
| | 00:16 | white space in your documents.
| | 00:18 | Like for example, take a look
at this title page for this book.
| | 00:21 | Just like I do for very many of my other
InDesign jobs, I have spaced out text on
| | 00:27 | this page by putting things into
separate text frames and if we look at this in
| | 00:31 | Preview mode, it looks great.
| | 00:33 | Maybe I say I want to move it a little
closer so I will just tap my up arrow
| | 00:37 | few times and so on.
| | 00:39 | Let's export this to EPUB from InDesign.
| | 00:42 | I will use my keyboard shortcut to get to
the EPUB dialog box. Export it to the desktop.
| | 00:48 | We want to make sure that Embeddable
Fonts is turned off and we want to view the
| | 00:53 | eBook after exporting.
| | 00:55 | Images can stay as is and
Contents is fine. We will export it.
| | 01:02 | Yikes! What happened here?
| | 01:04 | The space in between these text
frames was ignored when you export to EPUB.
| | 01:09 | It just concatenates them
all into one big text frame.
| | 01:14 | So if you want to have control over the
spacing here, you need to first of all
| | 01:17 | do the concatenating yourself, so you
need to thread all these together and
| | 01:21 | here's a quick way to it by the way.
| | 01:23 | First, make sure that the last
character in every frame is a carriage return
| | 01:29 | and then we are going to use our Arrow
key to select the out-port of the first
| | 01:35 | frame and then we are just going to
hold down the Option or Alt key and click
| | 01:39 | here and here and here.
| | 01:42 | And now they are all threaded together
and we can select these frames, we don't
| | 01:47 | need them anymore, and then drag this down.
| | 01:51 | There we go, there is a tip.
| | 01:54 | So now that we have it set up
this way, we can hit Return.
| | 01:58 | There we go and we can really space
things out this way and let's export this
| | 02:03 | one to EPUB and see what happens.
| | 02:05 | We will use the keyboard shortcut.
| | 02:07 | We will overwrite our
existing one. That's no problem.
| | 02:10 | It's going to remember our settings from
the last time we exported. Take a look.
| | 02:14 | Now things are different.
| | 02:16 | Well if you remember from a previous
video where I said you know what things get
| | 02:19 | included in the export and what things
don't, space runs do not get included.
| | 02:24 | Runs of carriage returns, runs of
spaces, runs of tabs, they get reduced to
| | 02:28 | just a single return, a single space, and a
tab gets converted to a single space as well.
| | 02:34 | So the only solution is to actually
first concatenate all your text into this frame
| | 02:38 | and then use space above and
space below, preferably part of your styles,
| | 02:43 | right, not as a local override.
| | 02:45 | I have already done it to this document
right here, California-titlepage-after.
| | 02:49 | So for example, if I click inside the
author name and we look in paragraph
| | 02:53 | styles and we go to Indents and
Spacing, we can see that it has 2 picas of
| | 02:58 | space above and 8 picas below and the
other paragraphs have similar kinds of
| | 03:03 | settings applied to them.
| | 03:04 | So we will export this one to
EPUB and check our settings.
| | 03:09 | Everything is fine. There we go.
| | 03:11 | So seriously that is the only way that
you are going to be able to control the
| | 03:16 | amount of white space in between
paragraphs is by setting space above and below.
| | 03:20 | So what that means then is that
you are going to have to go through
| | 03:22 | your existing documents--
| | 03:25 | I have here calif-normal.indd with a few
more pages. And watch out for this kind of thing.
| | 03:32 | So here this is very common for people
to separate chapter titles or headings
| | 03:36 | or subheads with a series of Returns.
And then there are other things that don't
| | 03:41 | come through it either, like over here
on the left-hand side we have a space
| | 03:44 | run and up here after the word "and."
I don't know if you can see it. Let me zoom in a bit.
| | 03:48 | We have a soft return,
because somebody for some reason wanted the
| | 03:51 | line to break there.
| | 03:52 | And soft returns do go through, and they
look kind of stupid when they are in an
| | 03:56 | ereader and there is a line that stops
after a certain word even though there
| | 04:00 | is plenty of room for it.
| | 04:01 | So you really want to clean all this
stuff up and the best way to do something
| | 04:06 | like that is with Find/Change.
| | 04:08 | So I am not going to go through
exactly how to use Find/Change. I just want to
| | 04:11 | remind you that it does exist and that
you can search for things in a row like
| | 04:16 | three paragraphs in a row and
replace with one empty return and so on.
| | 04:19 | Because what do you want to do is you
want to clean it up here and then see
| | 04:22 | where the problem children are and then
replace it with space above or below or
| | 04:26 | first-line indent and things like that.
| | 04:28 | Now there is a much faster
way to do Find/Change though.
| | 04:31 | There is a script that's built into InDesign.
| | 04:34 | If you go under the Window menu, go
down to Automation > Scripts, inside the
| | 04:39 | Application folder there is a Samples
folder, and JavaScript is bi-platform.
| | 04:46 | So whether you are on a Mac or PC you
will see this. There is a script called
| | 04:49 | FindChangeByList.jsx for JavaScript and
that's a really neat script that I think
| | 04:55 | David has talked about,
| | 04:56 | David Blatner, in one of
his InDesign videos here.
| | 04:59 | So you should check it out because
he goes into a lot of detail about it.
| | 05:02 | But the power of the script is that it
can do a string of Find/Changes all at
| | 05:06 | once on a story or an entire document
and it uses FindChangeBySupport, this text
| | 05:14 | file right here, as a guide to what it
should find and what it should change to.
| | 05:22 | So there are explanations written at the top.
| | 05:24 | But basically this one Find/Change
script will do things like find all double
| | 05:29 | spaces and replace with a single space,
find all returns followed by space
| | 05:33 | replace with a single return, find runs of
returns, runs of tabs, and so on and fix them all.
| | 05:38 | In addition, when you are working with
EPUB you want to do things like find soft
| | 05:42 | line breaks and replace with a
space and a few other changes.
| | 05:46 | So what I created for you, as a special
present, is I created a version of the
| | 05:53 | Find/Change script that you can drag
and drop into your Scripts folder with a
| | 06:01 | few extra things just for EPUBs added to it,
and I will let you discover that on your own.
| | 06:06 | But I have already
installed it here in my EPUB folder.
| | 06:11 | I made a folder in my Scripts
folder just for my EPUB related scripts.
| | 06:15 | And again if you've never installed a
script, easy as pie, and there are a number
| | 06:19 | of InDesign videos here that
will show you how to do that.
| | 06:22 | Just do a search on
lynda.com for InDesign script.
| | 06:25 | But let's take a look down here.
| | 06:26 | I am going to want to zoom in and
we are just going to run the script.
| | 06:29 | I will double-click it.
| | 06:30 | We will FindChangeByList the
entire document. Let's do that.
| | 06:36 | Well how long did that take?
| | 06:38 | Did you blink a couple of times?
And look it how nice and clean it is.
| | 06:41 | So now I know that I have to come in
here and in this paragraph style set the
| | 06:44 | first-line indent so that
that comes through in the EPUB.
| | 06:47 | I don't have to guess about did
somebody use spaces or tabs or whatever.
| | 06:51 | So that is a simple kind of work
that you need to do to go through your
| | 06:54 | InDesign documents and fix the
problems that, you know, were perfectly fine
| | 06:59 | in creating white space for print and for PDF,
but really won't work when you export to EPUB.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Applying paragraph and character styles| 00:00 | When you export your InDesign
document to EPUB format, InDesign will
| | 00:04 | automatically convert all of your
styles that you have created and applied,
| | 00:08 | the paragraph and character styles,
to a web sort of styles called CSS or
| | 00:13 | cascading style sheet.
| | 00:15 | So we are looking at a very simple
document, just a few pages long, and if I
| | 00:19 | click inside a paragraph and click
inside different paragraphs and watch what's
| | 00:24 | happening in paragraph styles, you can see that
yes indeed paragraph styles have been applied.
| | 00:30 | Let's zoom in a little bit more so
we can see what is happening here.
| | 00:34 | We also have some random instances of bold
and italic and small caps and a drop cap.
| | 00:40 | So let's see what happens when
we export this to EPUB as is.
| | 00:44 | I will use my keyboard shortcut
to export to Digital Editions.
| | 00:47 | We will export this to the Desktop and
in my options here I want to make sure
| | 00:53 | that Defined Styles is chosen for CSS Styles.
| | 00:56 | I am going to turn off
Embeddable Fonts. Turn on View eBook.
| | 01:00 | Under Contents we will just leave
everything as is and choose Export.
| | 01:03 | So as you can see some of
the formatting came through.
| | 01:10 | We do have the orange subhead.
| | 01:12 | We have the first paragraph and then
other body paragraphs. The body paragraphs
| | 01:17 | have a first line indent. This one doesn't.
| | 01:19 | But we have lost the drop-cap and
more significantly, we've lost all of
| | 01:23 | the bolds and italics.
| | 01:25 | Now the reason is because we
applied that as local formatting.
| | 01:29 | So if I click inside this first
instance of bold italic text and open up
| | 01:33 | Paragraph Styles, you can see that
there is a plus symbol next to it which
| | 01:37 | indicates that somebody has manually
applied this formatting on top of the
| | 01:41 | character formatting
defined by the paragraph style.
| | 01:44 | And this is very common to do and you can
see that's what's happening here as well.
| | 01:48 | There's a body+.
| | 01:49 | Now if you click in something that
doesn't have any local formatting, then you
| | 01:52 | don't see a plus symbol.
| | 01:54 | That's InDesign 101.
| | 01:56 | Well there is an option to retain local
formatting when you export to Digital Editions.
| | 02:01 | I use my keyboard shortcut again and
we will overwrite the existing file.
| | 02:06 | Under Base for CSS Styles you can choose
Local Formatting and we will just leave
| | 02:11 | everything else as is and see
what that looks like. Yikes!
| | 02:16 | There are two problems with trying
to maintain your local formatting.
| | 02:20 | One of them is that you often see a
surprise, because it's kind of weird how the
| | 02:25 | conversion process ends up.
| | 02:26 | I don't know why this
appears to be orange as well.
| | 02:30 | Maybe it's from that drop-cap.
| | 02:32 | We've lost the drop-cap completely.
| | 02:34 | We do have some of the other local overrides.
| | 02:36 | We have the italic here, the bold here.
| | 02:38 | We have lost the small caps.
| | 02:41 | That's the first problem is that it's a
surprise and you can't really count on it.
| | 02:45 | The second problem happens to the file itself.
| | 02:48 | So here on the Desktop is
the EPUB that we just exported.
| | 02:52 | I am going to open this up in
TextWrangler, which has the ability to open up
| | 02:56 | an archive and let you peek inside, and
there are other programs that do this as well.
| | 03:01 | And on a PC you should be able do this
with an existing ZIP file, is to peek
| | 03:04 | inside the ZIP file.
| | 03:06 | Take a look. I am going to select
the folder containing the book files.
| | 03:11 | Here is the history text.
| | 03:13 | This is the actual chapter that exported.
| | 03:17 | The names of the styles that
have been applied, generated-style,
| | 03:19 | generated-style-2, generated-style-3,
| | 03:24 | this is InDesign making up style tags
on-the-fly because it always has to use
| | 03:29 | some sort of CSS style to
apply formatting to the EPUB.
| | 03:34 | So then if we go to the CSS document
that defines the specifications for each style,
| | 03:39 | we have a whole bunch of
craziness happening down here especially toward
| | 03:43 | the bottom down here.
| | 03:45 | So here is the bold and italic,
here is the bold, here is the italic.
| | 03:49 | Generated-style-3, generated-style-4
and if you ever need to do a Find/Change
| | 03:53 | across all the different XHTML files
that make up a single EPUB, this is a lot
| | 03:57 | to keep straight and it's just prone to error.
| | 04:00 | So in other words, don't do this.
| | 04:01 | Don't choose that option. Let's go back.
| | 04:04 | I am going to close this in TextWrangler.
I am going to come back here to the InDesign file.
| | 04:08 | In other words, the best thing to
do is don't use local overrides.
| | 04:11 | Instead always use character styles.
| | 04:13 | Character styles are great because they
come through into the CSS just exactly
| | 04:18 | as you name them in the Character
Style panel and they are easy to deal with,
| | 04:21 | they are easy to edit in the CSS file,
to do search and replaces for in the
| | 04:25 | XHTML file and there's no
surprises when you export to EPUB.
| | 04:30 | So how do you quickly create
character styles out of your local formatting?
| | 04:34 | There is a difficult manual way and
then there is an easy automated way.
| | 04:38 | Let me show you the tedious-- I guess
not difficult-- tedious manual way and
| | 04:42 | that is to use Find/Change.
| | 04:45 | Go to the Find/Change panel.
| | 04:46 | I am just clicking the little
trashcan icons to clear out any existing
| | 04:51 | formatting and leave Find what/Change
to alone, but under Find Format you want
| | 04:57 | to find anything that is italic.
| | 05:00 | For example, Basic Character Format,
Italic, just type that in and then
| | 05:07 | under Change you are going to apply the
italic character style to the text that it finds.
| | 05:14 | And I know what you are thinking.
| | 05:16 | You forgot to create the character style.
| | 05:18 | This is a feature in CS4 that most of
the panels where you are supposed to
| | 05:22 | choose a character style or
paragraph style, you will get an option to
| | 05:25 | create one on the fly.
| | 05:26 | I love that new feature in CS4.
| | 05:28 | So we will choose New Character Style
and we will make one called italic and all
| | 05:34 | we are going to do is say that this applies
the Italic character style. Nothing else.
| | 05:40 | You should only see None +
Italic down here,. Click OK.
| | 05:45 | So it's going to find manual
formatting for italic and apply the actual
| | 05:49 | character style italic.
| | 05:50 | We will say Find. It found that one. Change.
| | 05:55 | Find Next, found that one, Change,
and we will just leave it as is.
| | 06:00 | As you can see, in the Character Styles
panel it created a character style called
| | 06:03 | italic and then it's been applied here,
so that in the Paragraph Style panel we
| | 06:08 | don't see a plus symbol anymore.
| | 06:09 | There is nothing being overridden.
| | 06:12 | So that is the tedious way.
| | 06:13 | You would do that for bold and bold-
italic and your small caps and so on.
| | 06:17 | The fast automated way is to use
this excellent script that I found.
| | 06:20 | There are a few variations
of this kind of a script.
| | 06:23 | First let me revert this file so we can get
back to where we started from. Zoom in a bit.
| | 06:30 | The script is called preptext.jsx
meaning that it's cross-platform.
| | 06:37 | It's JavaScript and we will put up a
little banner on the screen showing where
| | 06:41 | to download that or learn more about it.
| | 06:43 | It's actually written by somebody who
contributes a lot to blog that I co-host
| | 06:46 | on indesignsecrets.com. He is a great guy.
| | 06:49 | What this does is it goes through
your document and any time that it locates
| | 06:54 | bold, italic, bold-italic, small caps,
subscript or superscript, it will create
| | 06:59 | the style on the fly and apply it.
| | 07:01 | Isn't that wonderful?
| | 07:02 | It's like having a little
intern who is very fast.
| | 07:04 | So I am just going to go ahead.
| | 07:06 | All you need to do is double-click it and
there it goes the end. Wouldn't that fun?
| | 07:12 | Take a look at the Character
Styles panel. Look at this.
| | 07:15 | So there is the Bold, there is the Italic.
| | 07:19 | There is the Small Caps and so on.
| | 07:22 | So now let's export this to
EPUB and see if it helped.
| | 07:26 | We will export to the desktop again.
| | 07:30 | Replace the existing one.
| | 07:32 | Defined Styles is the one that you want.
| | 07:34 | We don't want fonts.
| | 07:35 | We want to view the eBook
after exporting. Export.
| | 07:39 | Much, much better.
| | 07:41 | Now that you have the character
styles applied properly, all that local
| | 07:44 | formatting is coming through. Oops!
| | 07:46 | Not all, right? We are missing the small
caps and if you scroll down a bit there
| | 07:52 | is a couple of other problems.
| | 07:53 | So even though you have gone
through the trouble of applying character styles,
| | 07:57 | we are just running into a couple
small additional problems I want you to know about.
| | 08:01 | One of them is really not InDesign's fault--
| | 08:04 | Well, I guess I will put it up
InDesign's fault. Is that it's not really
| | 08:08 | translating the drop-caps properly.
| | 08:10 | It's not translating the small caps properly.
| | 08:13 | But if we look at this file, at
the actual XHTML I'm opening up in
| | 08:20 | TextWrangler again. Can you see that?
| | 08:23 | Let me turn Text Wrap.
| | 08:26 | You see that it actually did apply a
class, a span class called bold with an L.
| | 08:31 | So at least it has specified L and we
can edit this to actually turn this into a
| | 08:36 | drop-cap and in the CSS file we can
also edit some of these styles as well to
| | 08:44 | change it exactly how we want.
| | 08:46 | The problem with that large paragraph
that didn't get formatted at all properly
| | 08:51 | here-- let me show you what that's about.
| | 08:54 | This is something you can add to your list
of things to check to in the InDesign document.
| | 08:58 | So I am clicking in this text to show
you that in the Paragraph Styles panel,
| | 09:03 | it's got Basic Paragraph
with local formatting applied.
| | 09:06 | Somehow-- and this often
happens in the throws of production--
| | 09:10 | the actual style didn't get
applied to this paragraph.
| | 09:13 | It's hard to tell because somebody
manually made it look like the other
| | 09:16 | paragraphs, the body style, but it's not.
| | 09:19 | So the tip here is to go to the Edit
menu and open up your main stories at least
| | 09:25 | in the Story Editor.
| | 09:26 | Because the Story Editor has this
wonderful little feature that not a lot of
| | 09:30 | people know about. Over on the left-hand
side all of the paragraph styles are called out.
| | 09:35 | Now it doesn't tell you if anything
has been overridden or if there's any
| | 09:38 | character styles applied, but what you
are looking for is anything that says
| | 09:42 | Basic Paragraph, because that is probably a
no-no. Or No Paragraph Style is also a no-no.
| | 09:49 | And that will cause you problems.
| | 09:51 | So I am clicking. Basic Paragraph.
| | 09:54 | So if you find something that says
Basic Paragraph, select it in the Story
| | 09:57 | Editor, close it, your cursor will be
blinking in the same paragraph in the
| | 10:03 | layout and then you can actually
apply the correct style to it and that
| | 10:06 | should fix that problem.
| | 10:07 | All right, so it's very important that
your InDesign file be formatted 100% if
| | 10:13 | at all possible with
paragraph styles and character styles.
| | 10:17 | No overridden manually applied
formatting and be sure and use the feature of the
| | 10:22 | Story Editor and also this cool
script to help you get that done.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Modifying nested, GREP, and line styles| 00:00 | One of my favorite features in
InDesign is the ability to automatically
| | 00:04 | apply a character style to certain bits of
text whenever you apply a paragraph style.
| | 00:09 | And in CS4 we have three
different ways to do that.
| | 00:12 | We can do it as a nested style, as
a GREP style, and as a line style.
| | 00:17 | And all these beautiful
applications of character styles demo that.
| | 00:21 | For example, why is San Francisco
appearing red all over the place?
| | 00:26 | Well if you look at the paragraph style
definition for body, I'll double-click
| | 00:30 | it and go down to GREP Style, you
can see that I have set up a very simple
| | 00:35 | literal GREP style and that any time
when I write the word San Francisco is
| | 00:39 | included and I apply the style body,
it's going to apply the Red bold character
| | 00:45 | style to that phrase.
| | 00:46 | And if you want to learn more about
GREP styles, and the other kind of nested
| | 00:50 | styles, and so on you should take a look
at some of the other lynda.com training
| | 00:54 | videos on InDesign CS4.
| | 00:56 | Another style that we have
going on here is down here.
| | 00:59 | This is something probably a little bit
more typical than calling something out in red.
| | 01:03 | This is a nested style.
| | 01:05 | So in the paragraph style called facts,
if I double-click and look here, you can
| | 01:11 | see that it's automatically going to
apply the character style called Bold
| | 01:15 | through the first colon.
| | 01:16 | So if I said, we're here for example,
July 1946, 1947: But not 1948: and so on,
| | 01:26 | so when it encounters the first colon,
then it turned off that character style.
| | 01:32 | And then oh, the last one is up here.
| | 01:33 | This is a line style and this will
automatically apply, near here it's under
| | 01:40 | Drop Caps and Nested Styles.
| | 01:42 | It'll apply the character
style called green for 1 line.
| | 01:45 | So even as I edit this, "on or about,"
it's automatically only applying it to the
| | 01:52 | first line and not to the second line.
| | 01:54 | The problem here is that when you
export to EPUB, the conversion process
| | 02:01 | completely gets amnesia
about these character styles.
| | 02:04 | If they're part of a paragraph style,
if they were applied because they were
| | 02:08 | nested, or GREP, or line style,
| | 02:11 | they get completely ignored.
| | 02:12 | Watch, we'll check that out.
| | 02:14 | I am going to export to Digital
Editions with my keyboard shortcut.
| | 02:18 | Save it to the Desktop. Choose Defined Styles.
| | 02:22 | We don't want embed any fonts.
| | 02:24 | We want to view the ebook after exporting.
| | 02:26 | Everything else here is fine.
| | 02:28 | Export, and you see all that got ignored.
| | 02:32 | So what you need to do is you
need to actually apply them.
| | 02:35 | So if you look in the Character Styles
panel for example and you click in one
| | 02:39 | of these red San Francisco words,
you can see down at the bottom of the
| | 02:43 | Character Styles panel that it knows
there is a character style applied here.
| | 02:46 | But that paragraph symbol, which is
called the pilcrow by the way, it was applied
| | 02:51 | because of the paragraph style.
| | 02:52 | If we had actually applied Red bold to
a word, then you would see it up here.
| | 02:58 | But you don't see it there. It says None.
| | 03:02 | So the trick is you need to go
through this document and actually literally
| | 03:06 | apply that character style to those words.
| | 03:09 | That doesn't mean that you need to edit
the paragraph style to turn off nested
| | 03:12 | styles, or anything like that.
| | 03:13 | It's actually pretty simple,
just a little bit tedious.
| | 03:16 | So you could do this with Find/Change,
you can also do it with a script.
| | 03:19 | Let me show you a Find/Change first.
| | 03:21 | I am going to clear out any existing
settings I have here by clicking the little
| | 03:25 | Trashcan icons and you simply want to,
with nothing selected in Find what and
| | 03:29 | Change to and the Text tab selected,
click the little magnifying glass.
| | 03:35 | You want to find the character style, say
Red bold, and you want to apply, guess what?
| | 03:41 | That same character style.
| | 03:43 | That does it, right.
| | 03:44 | So you just do that.
| | 03:45 | Let's try it, say Find.
| | 03:47 | So it can find it and
we'll say Change, Find Next.
| | 03:52 | and you would continue throughout
the document in the same manner.
| | 03:55 | You could do the same thing for your
other character styles, for the green
| | 03:58 | and the bold leadin.
| | 04:00 | But I find it a lot faster to use a script.
| | 04:03 | So I am just going to click Done
and I've already installed the script.
| | 04:07 | I am going to go to
Window > Automation > Scripts.
| | 04:10 | It's a free script written by a good
friend of mine called Harbs and he has a
| | 04:13 | great InDesign plug-in company called In-Tools.
| | 04:16 | And we'll put in a little link on the
screen to show you where you can download it,
| | 04:18 | ApplyNestedStyles.jsx.
| | 04:22 | JSX means its JavaScript, so it'll work in
both Mac and Windows versions of InDesign.
| | 04:27 | If you double-click it, it will go
through the entire document and apply the
| | 04:31 | nested styles, including
line styles and GREP styles.
| | 04:36 | So I double-clicked it and it's done.
| | 04:37 | I don't know if you saw that.
| | 04:39 | But I just double-clicked it.
| | 04:40 | You can check by clicking inside
anything that has been applied as a nested,
| | 04:46 | line or GREP style and make sure that the
name of the character style appears at the top.
| | 04:50 | So you see it didn't remove or
edit your paragraph styles at all.
| | 04:53 | I really liked that about this.
| | 04:55 | But it did go ahead and apply on top of
it the actual literal character style.
| | 05:02 | So now when we export this to EPUB, I'll
export to the Desktop and replace the existing one.
| | 05:09 | Define Styles, everything else is the same.
| | 05:14 | Remembered our lovely coding and of
course line styles, you know EPUB doesn't
| | 05:18 | know from a line style.
| | 05:20 | So I wouldn't even use line styles
but it did retain it, which is the point
| | 05:24 | of this whole thing.
| | 05:25 | Let's check out the Bolds down
here, and that worked as well.
| | 05:30 | So whether you use Find/Change or a
script you have to remember to actually
| | 05:35 | apply the character styles to any
automatically applied character styles in
| | 05:39 | InDesign before you export to EPUB.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Modifying tables| 00:00 | If your InDesign document has a
table that you formatted and edited in
| | 00:04 | InDesign, the contents of that table
will be included in the export to EPUB,
| | 00:10 | but the table formatting won't.
| | 00:12 | So that's a problem.
| | 00:13 | The good news is, sort of good
news, there is a couple ways to get a
| | 00:16 | nice looking table into your EPUB but
either one comes with its own set of trade-offs.
| | 00:21 | So first, let's look at one way, which is
to actually edit the table in the CSS code.
| | 00:27 | In other words, what you do is you just
make your table and you then export it to EPUB.
| | 00:32 | So we're going to go ahead and export to
Digital Editions and I'll export it to
| | 00:38 | the Desktop, history table.epub.
| | 00:41 | And the settings that we want
are as usual Defined Styles.
| | 00:44 | We don't want to include fonts.
| | 00:46 | We want to view the ebook after exporting.
| | 00:48 | Everything else is fine. Export.
| | 00:52 | So here we are and here's our beautiful table.
| | 00:55 | Now because we used paragraph styles,
the coloring did come across and this
| | 01:00 | actually is a table.
| | 01:02 | It's just that we're not
seeing any of the formatting.
| | 01:03 | We're not seeing any cell
strokes or alternating fill color.
| | 01:07 | Now let's take a look at this EPUB,
| | 01:09 | at the actual XHTML file and the CSS file.
| | 01:13 | I'll take the EPUB file and I'll open
it up in one of my favorite utilities,
| | 01:17 | TextWrangler, which lets us take a peek at the
innards without having to actually unzip it.
| | 01:23 | And if we go to the actual XHTML file,
let me soft wrap the text, you can see
| | 01:31 | if you have done any kind of web
formatting at all, that the table tags
| | 01:35 | actually did come through.
| | 01:36 | So it knows the table starts here and
that we are dealing with table body and
| | 01:40 | that table row starts, and here's the
first table cell. td means table data.
| | 01:45 | That's what a cell is, and inside
that first cell is the word "Degree."
| | 01:49 | Now this is all of InDesign's
horrible extra stuff that it adds whenever it
| | 01:55 | applies a paragraph style to text.
| | 01:57 | We'll be dealing with that in a different video.
| | 01:59 | But as you can see it did
create separate cells, separate rows.
| | 02:04 | tr starts a new row, and so on.
| | 02:07 | Now I'll select the template.css file
and what you would need to do would be to
| | 02:12 | include the td and tr and so on
as actual styles in your CSS file.
| | 02:19 | And if you had applied a table
style to that table, those usually come
| | 02:23 | through, not all the time.
| | 02:25 | I am not quite sure what the internal
logic is there but if you apply a table
| | 02:29 | style and cell styles then those
should appear already in your CSS file.
| | 02:33 | And then you could just edit their settings.
| | 02:35 | I think it is good news in general that
the table structure comes through, and
| | 02:40 | it will just need some finessing from you.
| | 02:42 | Now the other way, let's close this up,
to get the table to appear is to turn it
| | 02:47 | into a picture and just embed it as a picture.
| | 02:49 | And that might be the fastest
way for you to go if you want.
| | 02:53 | A couple cautions though, especially
like if this is going to be shown on a
| | 02:56 | Kindle. Amazon has very specific
precautions about text and graphics.
| | 03:01 | They need to be at least six pixels tall,
the lowercase a. And I'll be talking
| | 03:06 | more about converting your
documents for Kindle in another chapter.
| | 03:10 | But this comes into effect especially
with things like turning any kind of
| | 03:14 | tables and charts into graphics.
| | 03:16 | You have to be careful about what the
final type size is going to be, and you
| | 03:19 | might actually want to reformat this to
make the type larger, split it up into
| | 03:24 | multiple tables, and so on.
| | 03:25 | But we'll assume that this table is
fine for our purposes, so we're going to
| | 03:29 | turn this into a graphic in this way.
| | 03:31 | First, I am going to turn on Hidden
Characters so we can see where all of our
| | 03:34 | paragraph returns are.
| | 03:36 | And if you recall your InDesign
classes, a table is an inline object.
| | 03:41 | It's sitting inside its own paragraph.
| | 03:44 | I am going to select it and then choose Edit >
Cut and there's the paragraph that it was in.
| | 03:50 | And then I am going to just
paste it over here on the side.
| | 03:53 | I'll drag out a frame, and
paste, and there is our table.
| | 03:57 | What I am going to do is select
this and then export it to a JPEG.
| | 04:00 | You could export to JPEG or EPS.
| | 04:02 | I just like JPEGs better. Go to File.
| | 04:05 | Choose Export. Under
Format we'll export to JPEG.
| | 04:11 | I'll save it out on the Desktop, and then
when you click Save you have some options.
| | 04:17 | And one of the options is
export just the selection.
| | 04:19 | Don't forget to do that.
| | 04:21 | Otherwise you're going
to export the entire page.
| | 04:23 | Let me export this selection
and then what quality do you want.
| | 04:26 | And I am going to say let's do High
Quality and Resolution, I am going to
| | 04:31 | actually bring it up to 300 ppi.
| | 04:33 | Now if the tables are a very important
part of your book you'll probably want
| | 04:37 | to do a couple tests to see what resolution
and which quality works best for your purposes.
| | 04:42 | I am just going to export that one,
and then deselect and we'll place that
| | 04:47 | right back in here. So I press Command+
D or Ctrl+D, select the JPEG, turn off
| | 04:53 | Replace Selected Item.
| | 04:54 | Let's zoom out a bit, not that much.
| | 04:58 | And click, and there's our table.
| | 05:01 | If I right-click and go down to Display
Performance > High Quality Display,
| | 05:05 | it looks a little bit better but
it should look okay in the JPEG.
| | 05:07 | I am going to crop it.
| | 05:09 | I guess we've got some of that white area there.
| | 05:12 | Now what you need to do is you
need to anchor it in a text flow.
| | 05:15 | If you remember from our previous
video about managing the reading order with
| | 05:18 | the layout, we're going to need to embed
the graphic in the flow of text just as
| | 05:23 | how the actual table was embedded.
| | 05:25 | So to do that I'll cut it to the
clipboard, then I'll switch to my Type Tool.
| | 05:32 | Let me select this paragraph symbol and
see if I have created an image, there it is.
| | 05:37 | We have created a paragraph style just for
embedded images and then I'll choose Paste.
| | 05:42 | And you might need to actually do it little
bit more setting with space below and so on.
| | 05:49 | But let's just go ahead and export
this, and see what it looks like.
| | 05:51 | So export to history table, replacing the
existing one, with the same exact settings. Export.
| | 06:01 | And there's your table.
| | 06:02 | So it looks pretty good in the final EPUB.
| | 06:05 | So those are your two choices
when you're working with tables.
| | 06:07 | You either export them as live text and
then apply table formatting via CSS, or
| | 06:13 | you convert it to an image,
| | 06:14 | place the image, anchor it in
text flow, and then export that.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Converting InDesign graphics| 00:00 | As you've learned by now when you
export from InDesign to Digital Editions,
| | 00:05 | all text and images that are on your
pages get included in the export.
| | 00:10 | But sometimes what is an image isn't
quite so black-and-white. Like for example
| | 00:15 | let's take a look at this document,
My Dog, Carol, this lovely weird little
| | 00:21 | publication that I created
with the picture of my dog Zoey.
| | 00:24 | Now this is an image.
| | 00:25 | It's Zoey herself, but what about these
graphics here, that I created in InDesign?
| | 00:30 | Let's see what happens
when I export this to eBook.
| | 00:35 | So I'll use my keyboard shortcut and we
will switch to the Desktop. indesign art.epub.
| | 00:39 | We want Defined Styles, turn off fonts,
View eBook after Exporting, Contents are
| | 00:46 | fine, Images at the default, Export.
| | 00:50 | So we have the title, the byline, the text.
| | 00:53 | We have a couple of little callout text
blocks that are centered and the picture
| | 00:58 | is on the left and really our little
diagram just completely fell apart.
| | 01:02 | So what's the deal here?
| | 01:05 | Well, one thing that's not included,
and this was covered in my earlier video
| | 01:08 | about what gets transferred and what
doesn't get transferred, is any artwork that
| | 01:12 | you create in InDesign.
| | 01:13 | So anything that you create with the
Frame tool or the Pen tool that does not
| | 01:17 | include text or a linked image just gets
ignored and that's how these guys were created.
| | 01:24 | This little bar and the ellipse, all
right, those were created directly in InDesign.
| | 01:30 | I guess you could say if you look at
your Links panel, anything in the Links
| | 01:34 | panel gets exported.
| | 01:35 | If it's not there, it's
not going to get exported.
| | 01:36 | So if you place a PDF file, an
Illustrator file, a layered PSD file, even
| | 01:42 | another InDesign document, as long as
they appear here in the Links panel,
| | 01:46 | InDesign says, "Oh yeah!
| | 01:47 | That's an image" and that
will get exported to the EPUB.
| | 01:50 | And obviously this InDesign created
artwork is not linked to anything external.
| | 01:54 | It doesn't appear here.
| | 01:55 | So it gets ignored in the output.
| | 01:57 | I bet that you know how
to get it in there, right?
| | 01:59 | Right, you are absolutely right.
| | 02:00 | You have to turn it into
a graphic and link to it.
| | 02:02 | So there is a couple of
different ways to do that.
| | 02:04 | One is the manual way that I already
demoed with, for example turning a table
| | 02:08 | into your graphic in a previous
video is that you make a selection.
| | 02:12 | It doesn't have to be grouped.
| | 02:13 | This one happens to be grouped.
Make a selection, export it to JPEG, and
| | 02:17 | then paste that in.
| | 02:18 | So we'll select this, go to File >
Export, and I'll switch to the Desktop,
| | 02:25 | save it out as a JPEG.
| | 02:26 | I always like to save it at
a high-res. Already High.
| | 02:29 | I want to make sure that it just says
Selection; otherwise you are going to end
| | 02:34 | up exporting the entire page. And export that.
| | 02:36 | Then you want to move this graphic
off to the pasteboard, so it doesn't
| | 02:40 | get included, but at least it's
there to be editable in case you need to
| | 02:43 | change something later.
| | 02:44 | Then we will go to File > Place
and bring that JPEG back in. Turn off
| | 02:51 | Replace Selected Item.
| | 02:53 | Here we go and now let's export this to EPUB.
| | 02:59 | We will overwrite our existing one.
| | 03:01 | It is remembering our
previous settings. Here we go.
| | 03:05 | So now we have our InDesign artwork in there.
| | 03:09 | Let me show you, if you have a lot of
these kinds of things and I can see that
| | 03:13 | there are a number of publications that
have diagrams and things that you might
| | 03:16 | have used InDesign's own artwork tools
to a great extent, there's an easier way
| | 03:21 | to do this rather than exporting to JPEG.
| | 03:24 | I want to get rid of that guy.
| | 03:25 | What you do is you use this really neat
script called Layout Zone and it's a free script.
| | 03:32 | Of course the guy wants donations if
you have them and it's just the most
| | 03:35 | spectacular script that I have ever
seen, seriously, for InDesign users.
| | 03:39 | We'll put a little URL here showing you
where you can download it and how to install it.
| | 03:43 | You actually need to restart InDesign
to install it because it adds a new menu
| | 03:47 | item under your Edit menu.
| | 03:49 | So you can't just drop it into
your Scripts panel and then have it
| | 03:52 | automatically appear.
| | 03:54 | What this lets you do is it lets you
select anything in your InDesign document
| | 03:58 | and convert it into a placed InDesign file.
| | 04:01 | Let me show you what I mean.
| | 04:03 | I already have this group selected.
| | 04:04 | Again, it doesn't have to be a group.
| | 04:05 | We could have just made a multiple
selection. Of course it has to all be in one
| | 04:09 | page or one spread and
then you choose Assign Zone.
| | 04:13 | So we are going to give this a name.
| | 04:15 | We will call it zoey diagram and notice
that it's exporting it as an InDesign file.
| | 04:21 | Click Save and you will get a dialog
box that says what would you like to do?
| | 04:25 | I want to save the selection, not the
page, and we have some options down here.
| | 04:31 | We want to replace the selected
objects with the InDesign document.
| | 04:35 | So it's going to get rid of these
editable files and it's going to place the
| | 04:39 | InDesign file that it created there
instead, which means then it's treated like a
| | 04:44 | graphic because it
appears here in the Links panel.
| | 04:47 | Now it's no longer editable.
| | 04:50 | It's like a placed InDesign file, but
if you want to edit it, you know you
| | 04:54 | could just right click on it and choose Edit
Original and it opens up as its own document.
| | 05:00 | So if I said "Ears at low alert"
and closed it and saved it, then it
| | 05:09 | automatically updates right here,
just like editing a placed Photoshop file.
| | 05:13 | It's really miraculous.
| | 05:15 | So let's export this to EPUB,
replacing the existing one, and there you go.
| | 05:25 | So it's the same thing as you know
replacing with a JPEG except it's a little I
| | 05:28 | think smoother and slicker and easier to edit.
| | 05:31 | Whichever way you want to do it, you
have to turn your InDesign artwork into
| | 05:35 | some sort of graphic and then place
that graphic into the InDesign document in
| | 05:39 | order to keep those graphics in your EPUB.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Manually optimizing images| 00:00 | All imported artwork in your InDesign
pages will get exported to the EPUB file
| | 00:06 | and usually by default they'll be
converted to an EPUB-friendly format.
| | 00:11 | The default setting is to optimize all
the images, and what that means is to
| | 00:17 | downsample them to 72 ppi.
| | 00:20 | Now if you choose not to, then
you might get unexpected results.
| | 00:24 | So let's take a look at what I am talking about.
| | 00:26 | We have here an image that I've placed
and it's just a regular high res image.
| | 00:30 | If I select it and go to the Links
panel, you can see down here in Link Info
| | 00:34 | that the Actual PPI was 180, and
because I scaled it down, it's 517
| | 00:40 | Effective Pixels Per Inch.
| | 00:42 | If your rulers are in inches or picas,
you might want to take this opportunity
| | 00:48 | to change them to points.
| | 00:49 | I am just going to right-
click here and choose Points.
| | 00:52 | You can do this in your Preferences as
well, because there are 72 points to an
| | 00:56 | inch and there are 72 pixels to an inch as well.
| | 01:00 | So this will help you get a good idea
about how many pixels wide your images are,
| | 01:05 | and that means how many pixels
wide they will be on the ereader device,
| | 01:11 | like the Android or the iPad or
whatever, somebody is using to look at it.
| | 01:16 | In fact, I've set up this whole
document to help me preview what this will
| | 01:19 | look like on an iPad.
| | 01:21 | It's actually 600 pixels wide by 800
pixels tall. Well, not iPad I guess. Maybe
| | 01:26 | a generic ereader device.
| | 01:28 | A larger one, because
iPads are slightly taller.
| | 01:31 | But just looking at it like this, I
can tell that this image should be about
| | 01:36 | half of the width of the page.
| | 01:38 | In fact, when I select it, I can look up
here and see that the width is 285 points.
| | 01:43 | If I am talking about a 600 pixel
widescreen, 285 pixels/points is about half.
| | 01:50 | Let's see what this looks like when
you export it to Digital Editions.
| | 01:54 | I use my keyboard shortcut to export
image.epub to the Desktop, click Save, and
| | 02:00 | turn off Include Embeddable
Fonts and View eBook after Exporting.
| | 02:04 | This is just a good habit to get into.
| | 02:06 | Under Images though, notice how
it says Copy Images: Optimized.
| | 02:11 | This means that it's going to
downsample them to 72 ppi for your device.
| | 02:16 | So keep it at that setting and
then also keep Formatting turned on.
| | 02:21 | Formatting means that it's going to
match your crops, match your scale, and if
| | 02:26 | you've rotated or applied some sort of
stroke to the image frame, that's all
| | 02:30 | going to be maintained.
| | 02:31 | Leave everything else as is,
and then just choose Export.
| | 02:37 | Make this fill the screen. So there
is our image in Adobe Digital Editions.
| | 02:41 | If I switch back to InDesign and change
the scale to 100% and then when we flip back,
| | 02:48 | I think you can see that
the image is the exact same size.
| | 02:52 | So that is normally what you want to do
when you export to Digital Editions is
| | 02:56 | you want to choose Optimized and Formatted.
| | 02:59 | Now if we choose something else, I'll
overwrite this and Export and then under
| | 03:05 | Images, I'm going to choose Original.
| | 03:08 | It's just going to take the original image
and export that. Let's see what what looks like.
| | 03:15 | Any reader only understands 72 pixels per inch.
| | 03:18 | It took this 180 pixels per
inch image, and stretched it out.
| | 03:22 | So it doesn't do any downsampling or
anything like that. It just gets huge.
| | 03:27 | Let's come back to
InDesign and try something else.
| | 03:29 | This time I am going to rotate the image.
| | 03:32 | We will just go ahead and apply some
sort of rotation like 30 degrees and then I'll
| | 03:37 | play a drop shadow to it and now
we're going to export to EPUB or going to
| | 03:43 | overwrite the existing one, and under
Images I am going to switch back to
| | 03:47 | Optimized with Formatting turned on
and choose Export and you can see that it
| | 03:52 | did maintain a rotation that drop
shadow would had some issues with.
| | 03:56 | So you're going to have to test any
kind of special effects that you apply to
| | 04:00 | this image. And I think this might
look especially horrible for review in
| | 04:03 | grayscale like in the current crop of Kindles.
| | 04:06 | So keep that in mind, but that's what
formatting means that it matches the
| | 04:09 | rotation, any kind of effects
that you apply to it in InDesign.
| | 04:13 | Couple other things to keep in mind.
| | 04:14 | I made a page of tests.
| | 04:16 | If somebody asked me, "Well if InDesign
is going to automatically downsample it
| | 04:20 | to 72 ppi when I export it, then
wouldn't I get better results if I did that
| | 04:25 | myself in Photoshop and that way I
could play sharpening and things like that?"
| | 04:28 | I say you know, that's an excellent question.
| | 04:31 | So what I have done here, while I took
the opportunity, I also tried something
| | 04:34 | else for myself, which is to create an
actual image that should be exported as
| | 04:40 | a GIF and an image that should be exported
as a JPEG to see what InDesign does with them.
| | 04:45 | So down here on page 2, what we had,
one image called Hi Res and in the Links
| | 04:50 | panel you can see that it was 300 pip. So I
did scale it down a little bit. So it's 319 ppi.
| | 04:57 | Let's zoom in so we can see it a little
bit better. And then below there is the
| | 05:01 | same image that in Photoshop I
downsampled to 72 and then export edit as a JPEG.
| | 05:07 | So this is an image I shot myself. And
then the Image Tests up here are-- I took
| | 05:11 | something that should always be a GIF.
| | 05:13 | A GIF is the format that you
want to use for solid colors.
| | 05:16 | JPEGs are for photographs.
| | 05:18 | So logos and background, dingbats and
things like that should be GIFs and I made
| | 05:23 | a Hi Res GIF, which is almost an
oxymoron, but this is just a square
| | 05:27 | with the black bar in it and that's
300 and then I made a low res one then I
| | 05:32 | actually saved out as a GIF.
| | 05:34 | Now we're going to export this to
EPUB and see what InDesign does with
| | 05:39 | these files. If in Images we say
Optimized, Formatted, and under Image
| | 05:45 | Conversion Automatic.
| | 05:47 | So this means that InDesign is going to
take a look at each of your images and
| | 05:50 | if they're PSD or an INDD or PDF or
TIFF or whatever they are, it's going to
| | 05:55 | think, "Huh, should this be a
JPEG or should this be a GIF?"
| | 05:59 | And you would think that, it would
make intelligent decisions and actually it
| | 06:02 | doesn't. Actually in my experience
it exports almost everything as a JPEG.
| | 06:07 | So we are just going to leave it at Automatic.
| | 06:09 | To me that's why it's really
pointless to choose anything in GIF Options
| | 06:12 | because it's not going to export a
GIF, but I would just say just leave
| | 06:15 | everything as is too.
| | 06:17 | Adaptive (no dither) is fine.
| | 06:18 | Interlacing is pointless really for an ereader.
| | 06:21 | Under JPEG Options, you might
want to change the settings.
| | 06:24 | I think the last time I
did this I used Maximum.
| | 06:26 | I believe the default is Medium and I
usually keep JPEGs High, and then the
| | 06:31 | Format Method really makes no difference.
| | 06:33 | Progressive is more for a web site,
so I just leave it at Baseline.
| | 06:36 | I think that actually Adobe reused
these options from their Export to
| | 06:41 | Dreamweaver dialog box.
| | 06:42 | Now let's see what happens with our test.
| | 06:44 | Let me make sure that we are
going to view the ebook, yeah, good.
| | 06:46 | So here's the image test for the GIF
and they looked to me how they did in
| | 06:53 | InDesign, that we have slightly different
coloring for this one. Because GIFs are
| | 06:56 | mapped to a specific color table,
| | 06:58 | this is a GIF down here, then the
color is slightly different than up here.
| | 07:03 | But take a look at the JPEGs.
| | 07:05 | I see a marked difference between these two.
| | 07:07 | The downsampling that it did here,
look at the window frames. It looks horrible,
| | 07:11 | but when I downsampled it myself in
Photoshop, it did a much better job.
| | 07:15 | So in other words to me the lesson here
is if the images are critical to you,
| | 07:20 | you should spend some time in Photoshop
creating EPUB-ready images and replace
| | 07:25 | your hi res ones with
those to get the best results.
| | 07:28 | The other thing I want to show you is
what about the automatic conversion?
| | 07:32 | In the Exercise Files, I took that
image tests.epub and I unzipped it so that
| | 07:37 | you could see inside the OEBPS folder
there is an images folder, and look. It should
| | 07:42 | be a GIF image, as a JPEG.
| | 07:45 | It exports everything as a JPEG,
except for things that start out as a GIF.
| | 07:49 | Then it leaves it as a GIF.
| | 07:50 | One final tip I want to tell you about
with images for your EPUBS and that is
| | 07:54 | over here in full-half.
| | 07:56 | If you are specifically creating an
EPUB to be seen on an iPad like in iBooks,
| | 08:02 | then many people have discovered that
there is a magic size that will force a
| | 08:07 | page break, and that magic
size is this one right here.
| | 08:11 | If I select it, we look at the settings
up here, and now we have to switch this
| | 08:15 | to Points, there we go.
600 pixels across by 802 tall.
| | 08:21 | That will take up an entire page,
which effectively makes a page break or
| | 08:26 | chapter break when this
EPUB is viewed in iBooks.
| | 08:30 | Similarly, if you take those
dimensions and change into exactly half, so that
| | 08:35 | 600 pixels across by 430 pixels from
top to bottom, that's a sweet half page.
| | 08:41 | So how would you do that?
| | 08:42 | Let me come back over here.
| | 08:44 | Let's switch this. Say that you wanted to
create something like that from this image.
| | 08:49 | I will take the drop shadow off.
| | 08:52 | What you do is you come up to Width and
Height and you actually enter 600x800.
| | 09:01 | With that object selected, so that just
changed the frame, not the contents, go
| | 09:05 | to Fitting and choose Fit Content
Proportionately and that will fill the
| | 09:10 | screen as much as possible, but if
you're trying to resize an image to fit
| | 09:14 | exactly 600x860, make the frame
600x860 and then scale the image to fit
| | 09:20 | appropriately inside.
| | 09:22 | Now I've exported this to EPUB and
then I put it on my iPad and took
| | 09:27 | screenshots, so you can see what it looks like.
| | 09:29 | So here we are looking at page 1 with
my iPad in portrait orientation, and then
| | 09:34 | when I switch to page 2, there is our
magic sized image that is taking up the
| | 09:39 | entire page, and then page 3 and page 4,
| | 09:42 | there's the half size image.
| | 09:44 | Even if I turn the EPUB landscape so that
it does facing pages, there's page 1, page 2
| | 09:49 | and 3, doesn't it look great?
| | 09:51 | So even if somebody is looking at
it in landscape orientation that magic
| | 09:55 | size of 600x860 will always take up a full-
page and in effect act like a chapter break.
| | 10:01 | Here is that half page image.
| | 10:02 | So when you are working with your
images in InDesign, make sure and change the
| | 10:06 | rulers to points so you can better
gauge what the final size is going to be
| | 10:11 | like in your EPUBs and then remember
all these tips and techniques I showed you
| | 10:15 | to get the best results.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a cover image| 00:00 | When one of your potential readers is
looking at the Apple iBook store, or they
| | 00:05 | are on the Amazon Kindle Store, or
they are at Barnes & Noble Nook store,
| | 00:10 | they're looking at a bunch of books with
descriptions, but what is next to the description?
| | 00:15 | The cover, of course the cover.
| | 00:17 | So even in this digital age where
content is king and they can be reused all
| | 00:21 | over the place, a lot of people still
rely on the cover to decide whether or not
| | 00:26 | to see if it's something they're interested in.
| | 00:27 | So, in other words, the cover is
important still even for your ebooks.
| | 00:31 | And how do you create a cover image?
| | 00:33 | Well if you have created a cover in
your actual InDesign files, you can see
| | 00:37 | here this is the Stories of
California. Let me zoom in a little bit.
| | 00:41 | You're going to need to do
a little extra work to it.
| | 00:44 | Let's take a look at what happens to
this cover image when I export to EPUB
| | 00:48 | as-is, and just to orient you this is
text in a the frame and text in a frame,
| | 00:55 | and this is an image with a drop shadow
and this is a box that I created in InDesign.
| | 01:00 | So we're going to export this to
EPUB with their keyboard shortcut.
| | 01:04 | We'll go right to the
desktop, California Stories.EPUB.
| | 01:06 | We want to Defind Styles, turn off the
fonts, view the ebook, we'll choose
| | 01:12 | Optimize Formatted, let's do high
quality, Content is fine, and choose Export.
| | 01:19 | And what the heck happened here?
| | 01:22 | We have the title and then the author
and then the image and then the title again.
| | 01:28 | Well, that's from the title page.
| | 01:30 | In other words, if you've been
watching my previous videos in this chapter,
| | 01:33 | I think you already know the problem.
The problem is that when you export to EPUB,
| | 01:36 | any kind of text formatting or effects
that have been applied to text such as
| | 01:41 | drop shadow is ignored, and what we
really need to do is turn this whole thing
| | 01:45 | into one single file and then
replace the individual text frames and image
| | 01:50 | frames with that one single linked image.
| | 01:54 | So there's two ways to do this.
We can export the selection as a JPEG or we
| | 01:59 | could use the script that I talked
about before called Layout Zone. Let's just
| | 02:03 | export this as a JPEG.
| | 02:04 | I've selected all of the elements and
then I'm going to go to the File menu and
| | 02:08 | choose Export and we'll just
save it right out to the desktop,
| | 02:11 | California-Stories.jpg, and click Save.
| | 02:14 | And then in the Export JPEG dialog box
make sure you choose Selection, because
| | 02:19 | there may be some other things on
this page that you don't want included.
| | 02:22 | And we will leave it at 300 PPI and
high-resolution and then choose Export.
| | 02:27 | And then I'm going to move this over to
the side. Make sure nothing is touching
| | 02:30 | the page or doesn't get included in the
Export and then I'm going to replace it
| | 02:34 | by just placing or importing that JPEG.
| | 02:37 | Let me move it down a little bit.
| | 02:41 | It actually makes no difference how I
center it here because the whole graphic
| | 02:45 | is going to appear.
| | 02:46 | Now let's go ahead and export this to
EPUB again. We'll replace the existing
| | 02:51 | one, keep all of our settings as before,
export, and there we go, there is our
| | 02:56 | cover and it's kind of hard to see
here because the resolution that we're
| | 03:00 | looking at in this on my monitor is not
conducive to portrait book covers, but
| | 03:05 | basically you see that it came
out exactly how we wanted it.
| | 03:08 | And I know that some of
you're thinking, well, wait,
| | 03:10 | look at the thumbnails.
It's really weird over here.
| | 03:12 | Well, that's kind of a problem with
Adobe Digital Editions and this would be
| | 03:16 | something you could fix inside the CSS
to change its size to 100% or something
| | 03:20 | like that. We'll be talking about
that more in the CSS and XHTML videos.
| | 03:24 | But when viewed in just about any other
ereader device or ereader software,
| | 03:30 | the thumbnail looks great
and the cover looks great.
| | 03:32 | There are a number of resellers who
would like you to point to the actual
| | 03:36 | stand-alone JPEG cover image, like when
you are submitting a book for Kindle or
| | 03:42 | for the Apple iBookstore.
| | 03:43 | They want to know where is the JPEG of
the cover, so keep your hands on that
| | 03:47 | JPEG that you've just created.
| | 03:49 | I know some other people who have asked
me, "Well, what if I want to make a cover
| | 03:52 | that just works perfectly with a
certain device? I mean, how I find out what is
| | 03:56 | the resolution of the
screen size of those devices?"
| | 03:59 | Well, I do have some really great
resources here for you and you might want to
| | 04:03 | just bookmark these for later, but
mobileread.com, which is a fantastic resource
| | 04:08 | that I'll be talking about in my Next
Steps video at the end, has a Wiki, which
| | 04:13 | is a user-contributed knowledge based,
and they have three incredible tables here.
| | 04:18 | They go through every single
ereader device with all of their specs.
| | 04:21 | So quite now we're looking at the one
of our Web tablets, so here are all the
| | 04:25 | Web tablets, like here's the iPad as it
is today, along with the dimensions,
| | 04:29 | the display, what kind of resolution you
have, what kind of connectors it has, what
| | 04:34 | kind of files and supports,
and so on. How much it costs?
| | 04:38 | They also have one for LCD ebooks, and
they have one for e-Inc ebooks, like the
| | 04:44 | Kindle and many others.
| | 04:46 | So if you're ever looking for what
are the exact dimensions and what are
| | 04:48 | the exact pixel resolutions, then it's one of
these three pages that you want to check out.
| | 04:53 | But I would say don't even bother trying
to make a specific image for a specific device,
| | 04:58 | other than that any trick
that I told you earlier about creating a
| | 05:01 | full-page image for Apple iBook by
sizing it to 860 tall by 600 wide.
| | 05:07 | In general if you keep your cover
images at 800x600, then they'll be perfectly
| | 05:13 | usable for a wide variety of ereader devices.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding a custom TOC as the first page of an EPUB file| 00:00 | Whenever I'm reading a digital book and
I'm scrolling through it and I'm deeply
| | 00:04 | into the book, you know it's always nice
as to be able to quickly get to a table
| | 00:09 | of contents to see, did I hit that
section in the collection of short stories,
| | 00:13 | did I read that short story?
| | 00:14 | So I'm constantly using the
Navigational table of contents.
| | 00:18 | And I talked earlier about how to create this.
| | 00:21 | But a lot of times you don't always see
this all the time, like here in Digital
| | 00:24 | Editions, I can come up to his Reading
menu and Hide the Navigation pane, and so
| | 00:29 | I'm just looking at this.
| | 00:30 | And what I really appreciate when some
producers do is, when they actually add
| | 00:35 | an Inline or content, table of contents.
| | 00:39 | So here if I want to quickly jump to
certain section, I can just click right on
| | 00:42 | that link, and also, if you've ever
used any kind of ereader like a Kindle or
| | 00:46 | something, it's often very hard to
remember, how do you get back to that,
| | 00:50 | navigational table of contents.
| | 00:51 | You know there is a little icon hiding
in a little corner, you got to press a
| | 00:54 | certain secret button to show and
hide it, but it's very simple, usually to
| | 00:59 | figure out how to get to the
beginning of the book, right?
| | 01:00 | You just slide to the very beginning,
or like here, I can just drag right up to
| | 01:04 | the very beginning, and I
know that the TOC is right there.
| | 01:07 | So how do you create one of these?
| | 01:09 | Well, you actually have to put it right in
InDesign, so let's talk about how to do that.
| | 01:13 | Let me show the Navigation pane again,
so back here in InDesign, I have created
| | 01:18 | a book called California History, so
each individual document is one of the
| | 01:23 | pages, so this is just foreword and
then here's a chapter called California's
| | 01:28 | Name and Early History and so on.
| | 01:30 | And in my contents page I have an
actual existing table of contents, by that I
| | 01:36 | mean I use the built-in feature to create this.
| | 01:40 | Let me show you I'm going to delete
this for now and I'm just going to go right
| | 01:43 | up to the Layout menu, choose table
of contents, you can see I've already
| | 01:47 | created the TOC style where I want, in
the entire book Include Book Documents.
| | 01:52 | So it shows me all the styles here and
I've set this up, and then I click OK
| | 01:55 | and it loads up my cursor with the table of
contents text and then I can click and place it.
| | 02:00 | And the problem is as I've explained,
what gets transferred, what doesn't get
| | 02:04 | transferred, that automatically
generates Tables of Contents, don't get
| | 02:08 | exported, they get ignored.
| | 02:10 | So you can't really even use this as a
starting point to create your own table of contents.
| | 02:14 | If you are looking at a framing and not
sure was it automatically generated or
| | 02:18 | not, and I really wish Adobe would add
some sort of dingleberry or icon to these
| | 02:23 | frames to let us know.
| | 02:24 | But here's a tip is that if you select
that frame and go to Edit > Edit in Story
| | 02:29 | Editor, you'll see these links all over
the place and that is a tipoff, this was
| | 02:33 | an automatically generated TOC.
| | 02:35 | So you can't really use this even
though it is editable, you could select this
| | 02:40 | text you can't really use it
because it's going to be ignored.
| | 02:42 | What you can do is you can retype it or
you can export this to RTF and place a
| | 02:48 | RTF that clears it out as well.
| | 02:50 | That is something that I've already
done, as you can see on the pasteboard I
| | 02:53 | have a duplicate of that.
| | 02:54 | So you don't use an actual TOC, they
are pretty much useless, when you're
| | 02:57 | going to export to EPUB.
| | 02:59 | And so this was actually hand-built, so
if we open this in Story Editor, we're
| | 03:04 | not seeing any of those word link things.
| | 03:06 | So how do you make a link?
| | 03:07 | Well, you use cross-references in InDesign CS4.
| | 03:11 | If you're linking from one document
to another, you have to have those
| | 03:14 | other documents opened.
| | 03:15 | Now I am not going to go very deeply
into Cross-References at all, but if you
| | 03:19 | watch on my new features in InDesign
CS4 videos on Lynda.com, I have a whole
| | 03:24 | chapter I'm working with Cross-
References, and I'm sure that covered in other
| | 03:27 | InDesign titles as well.
| | 03:28 | But the actual panel is under the
Window menu, go to Interactive, choose
| | 03:33 | Hyperlinks, which has Cross-
References at the bottom and say that I want to
| | 03:38 | make a link from Foreward to the
Foreward section, I want to make sure it's
| | 03:41 | open, which already has been, and then
I click New Cross-Reference the bottom
| | 03:46 | of the Hyperlinks panel.
| | 03:47 | I want to link to the
Foreword to INDD file and it's called
| | 03:51 | Title-special Foreword.
| | 03:52 | I've already created a Cross-Reference
format that contains the Full Paragraph,
| | 03:57 | in other words, the full entry of that
style with no quotes, because I don't
| | 04:01 | like the quotes around it, and I want
to make in Appearance it is Invisible
| | 04:03 | Rectangle, because I don't
want to see that rectangle here.
| | 04:06 | When you export to EPUB, most
ereaders and devices will add their own blue
| | 04:12 | line or make it into a link, so it
looks like an obvious link, or you can also
| | 04:16 | edit that in CSS to override what
the link looks like and make it look a
| | 04:20 | little more special.
| | 04:21 | Let's do the same thing for this one,
California's Name and Early History, I'm
| | 04:24 | going to make a Cross-Reference to
the Early History document, and that is
| | 04:30 | chapter title, full paragraph, no
quotes invisible, we will just do those two.
| | 04:35 | And now let's export this book to
EPUB and see what it looks like.
| | 04:38 | So I go to the book panel menu and
choose Export Book for Digital Editions,
| | 04:43 | we'll save it onto the desktop and in
our settings here I want to use, Defined
| | 04:49 | Styles, no fonts, view the e-Book after
exporting, Images are fine, in Contents,
| | 04:56 | I do want to include the TOC entries
for Basic TOC, I don't want the names of
| | 05:01 | these documents to be the
navigational TOC, and so I'll turn on Suppress
| | 05:04 | Automatic Entries and click Export. Okay.
| | 05:06 | So here is our navigational table of
contents and if I click Contents, there is
| | 05:11 | the contents with the links.
| | 05:12 | I click Foreword, it jumps to
foreword, and let's go back.
| | 05:15 | California's Name and History.
| | 05:17 | I can hide the Navigation pane and
still be able to use my built-in table of
| | 05:22 | contents with all my links or I could
create a list of illustrations in the book
| | 05:28 | or a list of recipes.
| | 05:30 | Really, whatever you want to do.
| | 05:31 | Just use the Cross-Reference
in the InDesign book feature.
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| Adding metadata to the InDesign file or book| 00:00 | Metadata is information about a file
that isn't actually content within the file.
| | 00:07 | For example, when you open up an EPUB,
the metadata that you see in Adobe
| | 00:10 | Digital Editions is up here in the left:
the title of the document and the author.
| | 00:16 | Now this title and the author came
through, because I added the metadata in
| | 00:20 | InDesign and there are number of
metadata fields that you can add in InDesign
| | 00:24 | that will be included when you export to EPUB.
| | 00:27 | Now there are many others that can't be
added in InDesign and we'll be talking
| | 00:31 | about it in later videos. And then there
are even more fields that you prompted
| | 00:35 | to fill out whenever you submit
your EPUB to a reseller like the Kindle
| | 00:39 | bookstore, because metadata is really
the heart of the entire ebook ecosystem.
| | 00:44 | When you go to the Apple iBookstore,
you often go to Search field and you type
| | 00:49 | in a subject or an author or something
like that and so all that metadata needs
| | 00:53 | to be associated with your ebook. So
we're just sort of scratching the surface here
| | 00:57 | but an important surface. Let's talk
about how we add metadata in InDesign.
| | 01:02 | So I'll switch back to InDesign and we
have a version of this file that's mainly
| | 01:07 | just text with some subheads we've
been working with on occasions so far.
| | 01:11 | Let's just go ahead and
export this document as is.
| | 01:14 | So I'm going to use my keyboard
shortcut to export to EPUB or Digital Editions.
| | 01:19 | We'll save it on the desktop.
| | 01:21 | Now notice there is a check box up
here to include document metadata and a
| | 01:27 | field where you can add the name of the
publisher. We're just going to leave it as is for now.
| | 01:30 | Make sure that fonts are not included,
that you want to view the ebook after
| | 01:34 | exporting, and then in Contents turn on
including InDesign TOC entries and with
| | 01:39 | this document I've included a TOC style
called EPUB and I don't want to see the
| | 01:43 | actual name of the document in my
navigational table contents, so I turned that on.
| | 01:47 | Click Export and so the EPUB
itself on the right looks fine, so do the
| | 01:52 | chapter names, but check this out.
| | 01:54 | Instead of the name of the ebook we have
the name of the EPUB document, which is
| | 01:59 | kind of dumb, and my author is unknown.
| | 02:02 | So let's see how we fix that in InDesign.
| | 02:04 | Switch back. All you need to do is open
up the main document. So if it's a single
| | 02:08 | document that you exporting to EPUB
that's a document obviously, but if you're
| | 02:11 | working with a book, which we often are
within InDesign CS4, open up the Content
| | 02:16 | Source Document or the Master Document
in your Book panel and then go to the
| | 02:21 | File menu and choose File Info right down here.
| | 02:25 | Not a lot of people realize that you
can add metadata to InDesign document and
| | 02:29 | this is where it appears.
| | 02:30 | So we'll add the document title
which will be "A Brief History of San
| | 02:36 | Francisco: Sample." By, we'll just call it me,
| | 02:44 | that wrote I it.
We'll pretend. Sorry, Nigel!
| | 02:46 | And then the Author Title
will be? what is my title?
| | 02:49 | Oh I know. That's right.
It is Grand Poobah.
| | 02:51 | And then Description, you could put a
pithy description here if you want.
| | 02:54 | Not all of these will come through
by the way in the final EPUB file, but
| | 02:59 | definitely Title, Author and Keywords
will, so Keywords you'd put subjects or
| | 03:05 | other words that people might use
in a search engine to find this EPUB.
| | 03:08 | So obviously California and then
separate them with commas or semicolon just
| | 03:12 | like the instructions say. San Francisco,
history, that's fine. You can include
| | 03:19 | the copyright status.
| | 03:21 | So this is Copyrighted or Public
Domain . All this content is Public Domain or
| | 03:25 | if it is a Copyrighted choose that, but
here's a tip. Don't include this funky
| | 03:29 | little character here.
| | 03:30 | The copyright symbol. I have heard
because this content is actually sent into
| | 03:34 | your XML files in the EPUB document
and this is kind of weird little glyph
| | 03:38 | that can cause problems.
| | 03:39 | So don't add a copyright symbol. Just
say something like All Rights Reserved.
| | 03:45 | Click OK and now let's export this
again. We'll overwrite our existing one.
| | 03:50 | And so that's what the Include
Document Metadata checkbox is for. It matches this
| | 03:54 | field, but also all that stuff in the
File Info dialog box. Say Acme Publishing.
| | 04:00 | Everything else is the same. Good.
| | 04:02 | Let's see what this looks like and
there you go. At least we see the Title and
| | 04:06 | the Author in this ereader. In other
ereaders, we might see more information
| | 04:10 | that we had filled in and then as
you'll see when we start actually going into
| | 04:13 | the EPUB itself and looking at those
individual files, all of our keywords and
| | 04:18 | our copyright notice also
got included in the metadata.
| | 04:21 | So that's how simple it is. Don't forget,
before you export EPUB go up to the File
| | 04:25 | menu, go down to File Info,
and fill out that information.
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|
|
5. Exporting to EPUBChoosing general EPUB export options| 00:01 | During all the videos so far I've been
really zipping through that Export to
| | 00:05 | Digital Editions dialog box.
| | 00:07 | Now I want to devote a chapter to each
one of those panels, because it behooves
| | 00:11 | us to know exactly what options we've turning
on and what we're turning off and also I
| | 00:15 | wanted to mention that I have assigned
a keyboard shortcut to the command under
| | 00:18 | File > Export for Digital Editions.
I assigned Command+E, which is actually supposed
| | 00:23 | to be the one for Export and
it would be a Ctrl+E on the PC.
| | 00:26 | Only because whenever I'm working
with EPUBs I'm constantly using this,
| | 00:30 | so if you wanted to assign a keyboard
shortcut yourself to it I'll just give
| | 00:34 | you little tip here.
| | 00:35 | Under Keyboard Shortcuts, it's under
the File menu and just look for Export for
| | 00:39 | Digital Editions and assign it right
there. Of course you have to assign it to
| | 00:43 | your own set, not to the default
set, so make your own set first.
| | 00:46 | All right, so I'm going to press that
keyboard shortcut to bring this up/
| | 00:50 | We're not going to actually going to
export this. I'll say OK. Save doesn't
| | 00:54 | really save until we click Export.
| | 00:56 | Now I'm going to Cancel out a here,
which is another little tip. If you just
| | 00:59 | want to check something in the dialog
box but don't want to actually make an
| | 01:02 | EPUB, you can go ahead and tell
InDesign you're going to make an EPUB and then
| | 01:05 | Cancel out here and no file will be created.
| | 01:07 | So here in the General panel we just
have a few easy choices. First you want
| | 01:11 | to Include Document Metadata. That is
actually pulling from two different areas.
| | 01:15 | One is under the File menu in File
Info, which I talked about in the last
| | 01:19 | chapter. You can enter things like
a document title, the author name,
| | 01:23 | copyright status, that kind of thing.
| | 01:24 | If you want to include that metadata
in the EPUB, it is included in one of the
| | 01:28 | files in the EPUB, then you would turn
that on and normally you would always want
| | 01:31 | to turn on document metadata and of
course you can Add Publisher Entry as well.
| | 01:35 | So I'm add Acme Publishing. And there is
one bit of metadata that InDesign does
| | 01:41 | not ask for and that there's really
nowhere to put it in, that will always make
| | 01:45 | your EPUB fail a validation
check and that is publication year.
| | 01:49 | So that something that we're hoping that
at some point InDesign is going to add,
| | 01:53 | but in the meantime you've to add that
by hand inside the EPUB file and I'll be
| | 01:57 | talking about that in the upcoming chapter.
| | 01:59 | Then the Base for CSS Styles section is
actually asking how you want to handle
| | 02:05 | the formatting of the text.
| | 02:07 | It only deals with paragraph,
character, and table styles and it is asking
| | 02:11 | what do you want to include in the CSS
document that always gets created and
| | 02:16 | saved inside the EPUB?
| | 02:17 | The CSS document to review
stands for cascading style sheets.
| | 02:22 | It is the document that has all of the
individual attributes for every style
| | 02:27 | that you have applied to the text.
| | 02:29 | So do you want to include the names of
the styles and their current definitions,
| | 02:32 | whatever it is that InDesign knows how
to convert the CSS? That's usually the
| | 02:37 | default choice that you want. Or you
can say ignore the defined styles and
| | 02:42 | instead make up a new style every time
the formatting changes. Or do you want it
| | 02:46 | to use a local formatting, meaning it's
going to actually make up styles for all
| | 02:51 | of the different formatting
we've applied to the text?
| | 02:54 | It's still going to have a listing in
the cascading style sheet document, but
| | 02:58 | they're not going to be the same style
names and it's going to be very difficult
| | 03:01 | to edit. You really don't want to
choose that option. Or do you want to have
| | 03:05 | something like a skeleton of the CSS
document? And that would be the CSS document
| | 03:10 | with all the names of your styles but
no attributes for the styles, so that you
| | 03:14 | can actually do them by hand and
sometimes that's faster than having to get rid
| | 03:19 | of all the extra stuff that InDesign
adds and we'll be talking about editing the
| | 03:22 | CSS document in a future video.
| | 03:24 | Normally you want to Defined Styles.
Then it wants to know what about those
| | 03:28 | automatic bullet lists and numbered lists,
what would you like me to do with those?
| | 03:32 | Leaving them at the default is usually
what you want. There is a concept in web
| | 03:36 | design and CSS called an unordered
list and an ordered list. It's a well-known
| | 03:41 | element in HTML and XHTML,
like a paragraph is or a heading is.
| | 03:46 | So an unordered list is a list of
bullets and an ordered list is a list of
| | 03:51 | numbers and it's just
going to convert it to that code.
| | 03:53 | Now that's not going to retain any of
those good formatting, like it is not
| | 03:57 | going to have your special glyph for
the bullet or anything like that, but at
| | 04:00 | least this will be easy to add it in
the resulting file or you can choose to
| | 04:04 | have it Convert to Text and then that
way its going to match your existing style
| | 04:08 | for your bulleted list or numbered
list. It's going to have the same in indents
| | 04:11 | and hanging indents and so on.
| | 04:13 | But it will be very difficult to edit
and you will have to keep repeating it
| | 04:17 | over and over again instead of just
calling this whole section an ordered list
| | 04:20 | or an unordered list and being able to
just define one look for it in your CSS.
| | 04:25 | It's just a lot more difficult to deal
with, but if you really need it to match
| | 04:28 | exactly what the print or the PDF
version looks like, it might be what you want
| | 04:32 | to choose. But normally we just leave
these during at their defaults to map to
| | 04:36 | the XHTML equivalent.
| | 04:37 | Now InDesign can include any fonts
that are embeddable, meaning that the font
| | 04:42 | manufacture said they can be embedded
such as in a PDF. But I have to tell you
| | 04:47 | can they be embedded in EPUB? A lot of
the licenses for fonts really didn't
| | 04:51 | consider that, because it is so
easy to extract the font from an EPUB.
| | 04:56 | Now there are many ereaders that will
support your embeddable fonts, that if you
| | 05:00 | have the fonts installed then it will
try to look for it, but the vast majority
| | 05:04 | of them, especially devices like the
Kindle or the Sony Reader or the Apple iPad
| | 05:09 | they come with their own fonts and
they don't really support any additional fonts,
| | 05:12 | or if they do I know sometimes
it's just very difficult to get
| | 05:16 | them to appear correctly.
| | 05:18 | I would say that unless you find that with
experimenting and tweaking, just leave it turned off.
| | 05:23 | Normally you always want to view the
ebook after exporting. Faster to do a quick
| | 05:27 | check to make sure it came out okay.
| | 05:29 | So just a few choices to make but
important choices in the General section of
| | 05:33 | the Digital Editions Export Options.
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| Choosing EPUB export options for images| 00:00 | And on to the second panel in our
tour of the Digital Editions Export
| | 00:05 | Options dialog box: Images.
| | 00:08 | The choices that you make in this
dialog box are critical for the quality of
| | 00:13 | your images in the final EPUB and I do
devote a least a couple of videos in this
| | 00:17 | title to working with images and
optimizing your images for the EPUB.
| | 00:22 | In this dialog box I would say that
the most essential thing is to choose
| | 00:26 | Optimized under Copy Images. In fact
in CS5 they remove the option to choose
| | 00:32 | Original. That's how important it is.
| | 00:34 | So if you choose Optimized, that means
that it's going to downsample your images
| | 00:38 | to 72 PPI, which is what the ereaders
and the ereader devices really need,
| | 00:45 | because they don't have as much RAM as
a regular computer and in fact your EPUB
| | 00:48 | might get rejected if it's too large,
when you try to submit it to our reseller.
| | 00:53 | If you though took a lot of time in
getting your images down to 72 PPI already
| | 00:58 | and making them perfect, then you
might get away with choosing Original, but
| | 01:02 | notice then you don't even get the
option to choose Formatted, and the Formatted
| | 01:06 | option is really useful because
that's the option that matches your scaling,
| | 01:10 | that matches your cropping, that
matches rotation, all that kind of good stuff.
| | 01:13 | So even if you want to take the time
to reduce your images on your own to 72 PPI,
| | 01:19 | which might be worth it
as you saw on a previous video,
| | 01:22 | still choose Optimized, because it
will just pass it along at 72 PPI if needs to,
| | 01:27 | but it'll maintain your formatting.
| | 01:29 | Now assuming that all your images
are something like TIFFs or PSDs or AIs or
| | 01:34 | something like that, InDesign is also
going to convert them to either GIFs or JPEGs.
| | 01:39 | The EPUB format also supports
PNG files, but InDesign doesn't.
| | 01:45 | Not yet at least. And as I showed
in a previous video, seriously the choice
| | 01:50 | here should just be JPEG. I'm going
to convert everything to JPEG, because
| | 01:53 | that's what it does.
| | 01:53 | We even leave at Automatic if you like,
and if you happen to have a folder full
| | 01:58 | of GIFs and then it's going to actually
export a GIF, you can choose one of these palettes.
| | 02:02 | Because a GIF image has a
restricted number of colors that can
| | 02:05 | contain just leave it at
Adaptive. It really makes no difference.
| | 02:09 | What is important is down here under
JPEG. Primarily what is the Image Quality.
| | 02:14 | So the less the image quality the more
compression it can do to the images as
| | 02:19 | opposed to if you have really heavy and
large photos and you're trying to keep file size down,
| | 02:23 | you might want to go with Low or Medium.
| | 02:26 | I normally would always choose High or
Maximum, because I really like to get a
| | 02:29 | lot out of my images.
| | 02:31 | Under the Format Method just leave
it at Baseline. Progressive is really
| | 02:34 | more for web browsers.
| | 02:36 | So just a few choices, but very
important choices. Again make sure that you
| | 02:40 | leave it at Optimized and Formatted
and 90% of times this which you're going
| | 02:45 | to want to do and pay attention to the
JPEG image quality. That's about it for this panel.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Choosing EPUB export options for content| 00:00 | And finally the third panel, Contents
of the Digital Editions Export Options,
| | 00:05 | wants to know what do we want to do
with the contents of the ebook. You know,
| | 00:08 | that trivial thing. Just a
couple choices to make here.
| | 00:11 | First of all which format for EPUB
content, and honestly I have only ever created
| | 00:17 | XHTML EPUBs, meaning that when you
exported to EPUB the chapters will be divided
| | 00:22 | into multiple XHTML files.
| | 00:25 | Which is far as I know is the
default for 99% of the ebooks out there.
| | 00:29 | Now DTBook is actually a special kind
of format for EPUB that is mainly used by
| | 00:35 | people who have visual issues
and it reads the EPUB aloud.
| | 00:39 | So if you're working with those kinds
of audiences, then you probably know a lot
| | 00:43 | more about DTBook than I do, but for
all of the EPUBs that you see on the Barnes
| | 00:47 | & Noble store, the iPad, the Kindle
and so on, they are all in XHTML EPUBs
| | 00:52 | formats, okay. So just leave it at that.
| | 00:54 | A little bit more important is here
under table of contents and this refers to
| | 00:58 | the navigational table of contents that
gets created on the left-hand side of the
| | 01:03 | EPUB, the one that is part and
parcel of every ereader or ereader device.
| | 01:09 | Normally you want to create a TOC
style for your book that pulls the actual
| | 01:15 | paragraph text that you want to use
in the navigational table of contents.
| | 01:19 | Otherwise it's going to use the name
of your documents as the links on the left
| | 01:22 | and there's ways get around that.
You can always edit those later and
| | 01:26 | I'll show you how to edit them in the guts of
the EPUB file, but why not fix it right here?
| | 01:30 | So you create a style, like I've created
one called EPUB that pulls the subhead
| | 01:36 | names and because these are the ones that
I want to be the links in left-hand side.
| | 01:40 | And when you choose that normally, you
also want to Suppress Automatic Entries
| | 01:44 | for documents. This means document
file names. You don't want to see the
| | 01:48 | document file names automatically
appear there as well as your TOC entries, so
| | 01:52 | turn that on and that's it for the
Content section of the Export Options dialog box.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
6. Previewing and Validating EPUB FilesPreviewing EPUB files on your computer and devices| 00:00 | So far we've only been using Adobe
Digital Editions to preview our EPUBs, but
| | 00:05 | that's not the only EPUB reader out there.
| | 00:08 | In fact I would venture to guess that
there are people that hardly ever use
| | 00:12 | ADE to look in EPUBs.
| | 00:13 | What I want to show you in this
video are the different choices that you might have.
| | 00:17 | Now this field is exploding, all
right. So there are always new ereaders
| | 00:21 | coming out on deck.
| | 00:22 | But in preparation for the title I
asked a lot of people who are in the
| | 00:26 | business what they prefer to use to
preview the EPUBs that they're working on
| | 00:31 | for distribution.
| | 00:32 | So let me go through a few.
| | 00:33 | Now Adobe Digital Editions is great for
quick checks, but also a lot of people
| | 00:38 | like to use this program call Calibre.
| | 00:40 | And Calibre is an open source program
also available for Macintosh, Windows,
| | 00:46 | and Linux computers.
| | 00:47 | And when you install Calibre you can
have it set to automatically be your
| | 00:52 | library, your organizer of all of your EPUBs.
| | 00:56 | Not just on your computer but also on
a lot of connected devices like iPads
| | 01:00 | or Android phones.
| | 01:01 | Now Calibre is also used for
converting EPUBs, and PDFs, and MOBI files from
| | 01:08 | one format to another.
| | 01:10 | And in the videos where we talk about
converting, especially like converting to
| | 01:13 | Kindle, we'll be talking about using
Calibre and seeing how that works in
| | 01:17 | converting an EPUB to Kindle format.
| | 01:19 | But Calibre is also just
a wonderful EPUB reader.
| | 01:22 | I've already added by clicking Add
books the Brief History of San Francisco,
| | 01:27 | book that we've been working with before.
| | 01:29 | And if you double-click it, it
opens up into Calibre's E-book Viewer.
| | 01:34 | And you can hide this other
view behind it if you would like.
| | 01:36 | But here you can just click the
Right Arrow and Left Arrow to move
| | 01:40 | from page-to-page.
| | 01:41 | There are also keyboard shortcuts for
all these, and here are the contents and
| | 01:46 | the pages just appear.
| | 01:47 | So this is a really good way to check
to see what your EPUB looks like outside
| | 01:51 | of Adobe Digital Editions.
| | 01:52 | And there are a couple that I'd
like to use that are available online.
| | 01:56 | For example, Ibis Reader is
developed by a Threepress Consulting,
| | 02:00 | the same company who worked on
creating the EPUB Validation Checker, and
| | 02:06 | they're very well-known in the field as EPUB gurus.
| | 02:09 | They have their own online EPUB library
where you can keep your books all in one
| | 02:14 | place and they're stored in a cloud.
| | 02:16 | But you can also download
the books to your computer.
| | 02:19 | So it's not a completely
online way to manage your e-books.
| | 02:24 | Now here I've added A Brief History of
San Francisco, and if you click it, it
| | 02:27 | opens up in the Ibis Reader.
| | 02:29 | And here is our navigational
table of contents on the left.
| | 02:33 | You can click No distractions and it
hides a lot of the chrome from around the
| | 02:38 | browser for you, and click the NEXT
and PREVIOUS to go from page-to-page.
| | 02:41 | I'll go back to the site.
| | 02:44 | And then also Firefox itself has a
plug-in that came out in late 2010
| | 02:50 | called EPUB Reader.
| | 02:51 | And I've installed it in Firefox and
what happens is that if you click on a
| | 02:55 | link to an EPUB in Firefox,
it automatically opens in Firefox.
| | 02:59 | Or if you want to preview what an EPUB
looks like that's on your computer in
| | 03:03 | Firefox, you just go to File
and then choose Open File.
| | 03:07 | And then navigate to where your EPUB is.
| | 03:10 | Select it and choose Open and
it opens directly within Firefox.
| | 03:13 | So anywhere that Firefox runs, including
Firefox Mobile, you can install this plug-in.
| | 03:19 | I don't know if there's any uber-
geeks out there but it also runs in the
| | 03:22 | SeaMonkey suite, which is a new open
source Internet suite developed by the same
| | 03:27 | people who worked on Firefox.
| | 03:29 | So it's called EPUB Reader.
| | 03:30 | It's a free extension.
| | 03:32 | And again here's the navigational table
of contents, and you can save books to
| | 03:36 | your desktop and move from page-to-page.
| | 03:37 | It's got little tips that
pop up when you want it to.
| | 03:41 | It's pretty cool.
| | 03:42 | And then on a mobile device, other than
like using the Nook Reader, or the Kindle
| | 03:47 | Reader, or something like that, or
even the iBooks Reader, the generic EPUB
| | 03:50 | Reader that most people that I know
use on any kind of iPad or iPhone or
| | 03:54 | Android device is called Stanza.
| | 03:57 | You may have heard of it.
| | 03:58 | They've been around for long time.
| | 04:00 | And it's an EPUB reader and also an
EPUB library organizer along the lines of
| | 04:05 | Ibis Reader and Calibre.
| | 04:07 | Unfortunately Stanza
Desktop has been discontinued.
| | 04:10 | So you can only really use Stanza on an
iPad or iPhone or other mobile device.
| | 04:15 | And after you've downloaded it, you
download it and install it through iTunes,
| | 04:19 | here's how you can get your EPUBs on there.
| | 04:20 | Now you can always through Stanza app,
| | 04:23 | it has access to the Feedbooks
library and some other library so you can
| | 04:27 | actually download a lot of free EPUBs
directly into Stanza, or if you have EPUBs
| | 04:32 | on your computer like in this video what
we're talking about developing your own
| | 04:35 | EPUBs, you want to see what it's going
to look like in Stanza, then you would
| | 04:38 | add it to Stanza by hooking up your device.
| | 04:41 | right now I have my iPad hooked up.
| | 04:43 | And then you select the name of your
device, click Apps at the top, and when you
| | 04:47 | scroll down you'll have a list
of apps that let you share files.
| | 04:52 | So I've selected Stanza at the bottom,
and then you click Add, and then it just adds
| | 04:56 | your EPUB, which I've already done.
| | 04:59 | So once this has been added, when you
click Sync then the EPUB is added to
| | 05:03 | your device.
| | 05:04 | Now let's take a look at this
EPUB as seen on Stanza on my iPad.
| | 05:09 | After I double-click it, here is one of
the pages and it's kind of interesting
| | 05:12 | to note the differences.
| | 05:13 | You see how the paragraphs
have lost their first line indent.
| | 05:17 | So these are the kind of things that
you would check when you create the same
| | 05:20 | EPUB that's seen in different
ereaders, so you have an idea of what your
| | 05:24 | readers are going to see.
| | 05:25 | It's kind of like testing a
website on different browsers.
| | 05:29 | And it's nice that the table of contents
still appears and the links still work.
| | 05:33 | Then I click one of the
links and jump to Early History.
| | 05:36 | And Stanza, just like other ereaders,
has its own navigational table of contents.
| | 05:41 | So if I just tap on this button down
here, the table of contents appears.
| | 05:45 | So don't think when you are working
with EPUBs that you are limited to working
| | 05:49 | with the Adobe Digital Editions. There
are a lot of choices out there and you
| | 05:53 | should be running your EPUBs
through a few of them at least.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Previewing for the iBooks app| 00:00 | So it's all well and good that there are
a number of the ereaders available that
| | 00:03 | can open up an EPUB like Adobe Digital
Editions that we're looking at right now,
| | 00:07 | or Stanza, or Ibis Reader.
| | 00:10 | But if you're creating EPUBs for
the Apple iBookstore, which has its own
| | 00:15 | ereader app called iBooks, it is crazy
that Apple has not yet come out with a
| | 00:20 | desktop version of that.
| | 00:22 | There is a desktop version of the Nook
Reader, there is a desktop version of the
| | 00:25 | Kindle Reader, but there's none for iBooks.
| | 00:28 | So if you really want to see what your
EPUB will look like in iBooks before
| | 00:32 | you upload it to the store the only way to
do that is to actually open it up in iBooks.
| | 00:36 | You need to transfer it to an iPad
or an iPhone. Well an iPad preferably
| | 00:40 | because it's larger.
| | 00:42 | So how do you get your EPUB on to an iPad so
you can look at it in iBooks? Let me show you.
| | 00:49 | You need to first hook up your iPad to
the computer, and of course it has to
| | 00:52 | have iBooks installed.
| | 00:54 | I am going to quit out of Digital
Editions. And then you start up iTunes.
| | 00:59 | And it has to be iTunes version 9.1 or later.
| | 01:02 | That's the one that comes with iBooks.
| | 01:03 | Now you have up here your Library
and we also have the iPad down here.
| | 01:08 | Now let me go back up to
my Library and go to Books.
| | 01:12 | On my computer, in my Library I have two books.
| | 01:15 | I want to add the EPUB that I just
created and we'll use that good old Brief
| | 01:20 | History of San Francisco EPUB.
| | 01:21 | So how do you add the EPUB to iTunes?
| | 01:25 | If you can see where it is on your
desktop, you can just drag-and-drop it
| | 01:28 | actually right here onto the Library.
| | 01:29 | And it'll automatically go into Books.
| | 01:32 | Or you can just go to File and
choose Add to Library and navigate to
| | 01:38 | where that file is.
| | 01:39 | There it is, SFHistory.epub,
and it'll go ahead and add it.
| | 01:43 | So there is A Brief History of San Francisco.
| | 01:44 | Now I didn't actually create a separate
cover. We'll be talking about this more
| | 01:48 | when I talk about creating your books
specifically for the iPad, but otherwise
| | 01:52 | we would see it's a little bit of graphic here.
| | 01:54 | Okay, so now you have your iPad hooked
up and you select the iPad and go over
| | 01:59 | to Books, and what you want to
do is you want to sync the Books.
| | 02:03 | So this is showing you the books
that are in your iTunes Library.
| | 02:07 | And you want to sync the selected books.
| | 02:09 | They're all selected.
| | 02:10 | So I'll click Sync.
| | 02:12 | And it is copying. I don't know if you saw that.
| | 02:14 | It appeared they are very briefly at the top.
| | 02:16 | It copied the ebook to your
iBooks Library on your iPad.
| | 02:20 | While the iPad is still hooked up to
your computer, now you can start up the
| | 02:23 | iBooks application, you'll find it
in your Library shelves there, and you can
| | 02:27 | tap it and open it and see what it looks like.
| | 02:29 | So you just tap on the Brief History of
San Francisco and it opens up to the cover.
| | 02:35 | And you can just page through it a couple
times, to the right and to the left, and
| | 02:39 | check out to see if, you know,
the contents is working and did the subheads come
| | 02:43 | out the right color.
| | 02:44 | Now likely you're going to find some
issues, like I can see for example, there's
| | 02:48 | not enough white space between
the subheads and the text below it.
| | 02:53 | So how do you then edit this to fix it?
| | 02:57 | You know well technically what you're
supposed to do is go back to your Library,
| | 03:02 | to the Books section of your
Library, right-click and choose Delete.
| | 03:07 | Delete that book, and then sync that to your
iPad again so that it deletes it off the iPad.
| | 03:13 | You can't simply delete
it off the iPad by itself.
| | 03:15 | You'd always have to sync with your computer.
| | 03:17 | And then you would create a new version of
the EPUB, and then repeat what I just did.
| | 03:23 | Add it to your library and sync it back.
| | 03:25 | Or, you could create a second version
of this book and add that to the Library
| | 03:31 | as well, and you might end
up with 50 different versions.
| | 03:34 | A little shortcut that might make it
easier while you are fiddling along with
| | 03:37 | all of the CSS and the XHTML files,
trying to get it look exactly right on your
| | 03:41 | iPad, is to bypass all that rigamarole.
| | 03:44 | First get it onto your iPad just
like I showed you with adding it to your
| | 03:48 | iTunes Library and syncing, and then get this
really neat little application called Phone Disk.
| | 03:55 | It's available for both Mac and Windows.
| | 03:56 | It's not too expensive, and what it
does is it adds this little icon up here in
| | 04:00 | your title bar or on the PC down here
in the bottom, and when you connect an
| | 04:05 | iPad or an iPhone, or an iPod touch,
it mounts it like a hard drive.
| | 04:09 | Now there are other ereader and tablet
devices that do this automatically, but
| | 04:13 | none of Apple stuff does.
| | 04:15 | This gives you access to the innards of
these devices directly from the Finder
| | 04:19 | or Windows Explorer.
| | 04:20 | Now what's interesting here is take a look.
| | 04:23 | Here is Books, and there are the
EPUBs that this iPad currently has.
| | 04:27 | They are a little obscured, because
apparently they automatically become
| | 04:32 | decompressed once they are synced to the iPad.
| | 04:34 | So you can select each of these folders
and also the names get a little bit obscured.
| | 04:39 | So here's the one that we just added and
I know because I recognize the OEBPS folder.
| | 04:45 | The other EPUBs are using some
other kind of strangely named file.
| | 04:49 | But if you're wondering which of these
weirdly named folders was the EPUB that I
| | 04:53 | just added, you can right-
click on the Books.plist.
| | 04:57 | And just open that up in anything
that'll let you take a peek at it, and you
| | 05:00 | can see that the title appears at the
top and at the bottom is what it appears
| | 05:05 | inside your Finder or Explorer window.
| | 05:08 | So if I am looking for Brief History of San
Francisco, here it is at the bottom. It's the IBFY one.
| | 05:13 | So close that. Don't save any changes.
| | 05:15 | So what you can do now is select this
and then go ahead and open up the CSS file.
| | 05:20 | Edit it, save your changes.
| | 05:23 | It's going to save it directly onto the iPad.
| | 05:25 | And then on your iPad you would just
close the book and then open it up again
| | 05:29 | and you'll see the updated changes.
| | 05:31 | So it's a little faster if you want to
make a series of successive small changes.
| | 05:35 | Now you're probably wondering, okay,
well then how do I get that back on to my
| | 05:38 | computer so I can upload it to the iBookstore?
| | 05:40 | Well then what you do is you sync the
book back to your iTunes Library on
| | 05:44 | your computer, and then you can right-
click on your computer and copy it to
| | 05:48 | the Finder or Explorer and then you have an
intact EPUB you can do something else with.
| | 05:53 | So you do have to jump through some
hoops in order to see what your EPUB is
| | 05:56 | going to look like on the iPad.
| | 05:58 | But I am really hoping that one day
soon Apple is going to come out with an
| | 06:02 | iBooks ereader that we can just
install on our computer and proof our EPUBs that way.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Validating EPUB files| 00:00 | EPUB resellers like the Apple
iBookstore, the Barnes & Noble Nook store or
| | 00:07 | aggregators like Google.com, you know,
even Kindle's own servers that will take
| | 00:11 | an EPUB and convert it to Kindle format for you,
| | 00:13 | they all require that the EPUB
that you submit be validated.
| | 00:18 | Now this may seem like jumping the gun,
because we still have a lot to cover as
| | 00:22 | far as editing EPUB is concerned.
| | 00:24 | But I think it's a good idea to
validate your EPUBs as soon as it basically
| | 00:28 | looks okay, right after you export it
out of InDesign. Because that way after
| | 00:32 | you go in and you start messing around
with the EPUB code, as we'll be covering
| | 00:37 | in upcoming videos,
| | 00:38 | if the EPUB does not validate then you
know it's not something InDesign did,
| | 00:42 | it's something you did, and it
will help you narrow-down the problem.
| | 00:45 | But before we actually get into how
to validate an EPUB, let's talk about
| | 00:49 | what validation is.
| | 00:50 | Validation checks that your EPUB
conforms to the standards defined by this
| | 00:56 | organization that you see on screen,
the International Digital Publishing Forum.
| | 01:01 | This is a group of people, sort of
like the World Wide Web Consortium, who
| | 01:05 | decide on how EPUB should be constructed.
| | 01:08 | And what is acceptable
and what's not acceptable.
| | 01:11 | That makes it much easier for people
who develop EPUB readers or EPUB devices
| | 01:17 | to know what to expect, to know what
their machinery or their code should be
| | 01:21 | able to handle when it comes
to opening up your EPUB book.
| | 01:24 | So if you go to IDPF.org and you click
on Specifications, you can see the actual
| | 01:30 | specifications for all the parts of an
EPUB. Like if I just happen to click on
| | 01:34 | this link, this talks about what
should be in the OPF package and we're
| | 01:39 | actually going to know what this is
talking about in a few videos, but this
| | 01:43 | right here it has to do with the metadata.
| | 01:44 | So like for example, it's saying that
the metadata that you add inside of an EPUB
| | 01:49 | in the subject line, you can have multiple
instances of the subject elements are supported.
| | 01:53 | So you can put in multiple
subjects for your document's metadata.
| | 01:57 | When you validate an EPUB then, there is
an engine that checks to make sure that
| | 02:02 | everything inside the EPUB conforms
to the IDPF standards for EPUB 2.0.
| | 02:08 | That's where we are at right now.
| | 02:09 | EPUB 2.0, they are working on the next
spec, EPUB 3.0, but that shouldn't be
| | 02:13 | out for a few months.
| | 02:14 | And who actually came up with
that engine to check your EPUBs?
| | 02:17 | It's actually an open source
code that's hosted at the Google.
| | 02:22 | It's on of the Google checks.
| | 02:23 | It's something you could download to
your computer and run in your command line.
| | 02:26 | On a PC that would be running in
the Eun service or on a Macintosh,
| | 02:30 | that would be running in Terminal,
but you don't really need to do that.
| | 02:34 | Instead, there's a couple of easier ways to
access the Google code for the EPUB check.
| | 02:40 | One of them is by our friends
at Threepress Consulting.
| | 02:43 | I mentioned Threepress before when I
talked about the online EPUB reader
| | 02:47 | called the Ibis Reader.
| | 02:49 | Threepress Consulting is one of the
luminaries in the field of EPUBs and they
| | 02:53 | have developed a front-end to that Google
EPUB check code that's hosted at their website.
| | 02:59 | So what you can do is after EPUB is
done, go to this website, threepress.org,
| | 03:04 | click Tools, and then on the left there
is the EPUB validator. So you click the
| | 03:09 | Browse button and look for your EPUB.
| | 03:10 | As I click Browse and I'm going to go to
my desktop to the exercise files, where
| | 03:16 | I have created two EPUBs.
| | 03:19 | One then I know for sure is not going
to validate, called History sample-no
| | 03:23 | date.EPUB, and we'll click Open.
| | 03:26 | And then you click Validate. Just click
the button and it's checking it against
| | 03:30 | the code and then if there are errors,
you get this very sad looking red X.
| | 03:34 | That is something you
don't want to see normally.
| | 03:37 | And then it will give you a list of
the problems, the reason that it did
| | 03:40 | not pass validation.
| | 03:42 | The very first one what we're looking
at is saying that in the file called
| | 03:46 | content .OPF, the date
value " is not valid.
| | 03:51 | The date must be in the form Year,
Year-Month or Year-Month-Date, and then it
| | 03:57 | has a URL for more information.
| | 03:59 | So what's that about?
| | 04:01 | This is the one bit of metadata that
InDesign CS5 and CS4 do not insert into
| | 04:07 | the EPUB, and it will
always make it fail validation.
| | 04:10 | Now there is a script that you can
install in InDesign that will prompt you for
| | 04:14 | the publication year.
| | 04:16 | That's what it is asking here for is
the metadata, asking for publication year,
| | 04:20 | and we'll be talking about that in
the video where I talk about metadata.
| | 04:23 | But let's go ahead and fix this EPUB right now.
| | 04:26 | It's actually a very easy fix and
I'm going to do it here in Sigil.
| | 04:30 | I'll be talking about Sigil in another
video when I talk about EPUB editing tools.
| | 04:35 | But what I like about Sigil is that
you can open up an EPUB without having to
| | 04:38 | expand it first, and we're going to go
right here, and it's also very easy with
| | 04:43 | Sigil to access an EPUB's metadata.
| | 04:46 | So we're going to Tools > Meta Editor.
We're going to click More, Add Basic.
| | 04:55 | We want Date of publication, and then
I just added that date of publication.
| | 04:59 | You know, while we're here we'll go
ahead and enter a title and an author too,
| | 05:03 | because that's two other pieces of metadata.
| | 05:05 | Not required by EPUB check.
| | 05:06 | But I'll just say San Francisco History
by Anonymous, all right, and then we'll
| | 05:14 | close that document and save our changes.
| | 05:17 | And now we'll go ahead and
upload the corrected EPUB.
| | 05:22 | So I go back to Tools, Browse, and we
actually saved changes to that very first
| | 05:28 | one without the date, right,
so let's see if it worked.
| | 05:30 | Click Open and Validate.
| | 05:33 | It passed. I had that other one
there just in case something went wrong.
| | 05:36 | But that is a very simple explanation
of how you validate in EPUB and then how
| | 05:40 | you correct it and re-validate it.
| | 05:42 | Now there is one other way.
| | 05:44 | You don't have to go to Threepress Consulting.
| | 05:45 | There is an application called EPUB Checker.
| | 05:48 | You can download EPUB Checker.
| | 05:50 | It's a free app that runs on Mac, PCs,
and Linux computers, or you can also
| | 05:55 | just quickly grab any EPUB that you've
created and have it check the EPUB for any problems.
| | 06:03 | It checks it against the same
Google code as the Threepress web site.
| | 06:07 | So there you have it. Two easy ways to
validate your EPUBs and to find out what
| | 06:11 | the problem is if they are invalid.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. Editing EPUB Files for FunctionalityGetting inside an EPUB file| 00:01 | Successfully exporting an EPUB out of
InDesign and then having it validate is
| | 00:06 | I'm very sorry to tell you only the
very beginning of the process, because
| | 00:11 | essentially an EPUB is like a miniature website.
| | 00:14 | It's a series of XHTML files and
the formatting is from a CSS file.
| | 00:20 | If you have ever tried to create a
website out of InDesign you know how great it
| | 00:24 | does at that. In other words it's not very good.
| | 00:26 | So after you export to EPUB you are
very likely going to want to get into those
| | 00:31 | files inside the EPUB and edit those
in XHTML and CSS files, add some links,
| | 00:36 | just things like that.
| | 00:37 | Now, how can you get at
the innards of an EPUB file?
| | 00:41 | That's what I'm going to talk about in
this video. But first even before we talk
| | 00:44 | about how to get at the
innards, what are the innards?
| | 00:46 | Take a look at your Exercise Files.
| | 00:48 | I have them here opened on the screen.
| | 00:50 | Here is the SFHistory EPUB file
that we've been working with often on
| | 00:54 | throughout this video.
| | 00:55 | It should look very familiar to you, and
then above that is a folder called SFHistory.
| | 01:01 | If we twirl that open,
you can see that SFHistory,
| | 01:05 | this is the contents of the EPUB file.
| | 01:07 | It has a couple of folders.
| | 01:08 | It has some weirdo files and then
inside this folder, OEBPS, it has the guts,
| | 01:14 | really the entire book.
| | 01:15 | The XHTML files, it's got
the CSS file, and so on.
| | 01:19 | So how did I get this folder out of this?
| | 01:22 | Well, actually it's kind of neat.
An EPUB file is like a lot of modern
| | 01:26 | files actually a package.
| | 01:28 | It's like a ZIP file that contains
everything that you saw there in that folder,
| | 01:32 | except that it's been compressed
and has the extension .EPUB.
| | 01:36 | Now if I were on a PC to get at the contents
of this EPUB file would be as simple as this.
| | 01:42 | Watch!
| | 01:43 | I'm going to first of all
duplicate this file, so I don't mess it up.
| | 01:46 | We'll call this SFHistoryTest.
| | 01:50 | I'm going to select this test and change
the extension from EPUB to ZIP. Are you sure?
| | 01:58 | Yes, use .ZIP, and now
it's like a zipped folder.
| | 02:01 | So on a PC all I would need to do
would be to right-click and choose Extract
| | 02:05 | All, and it would extract
everything to a folder called SFHistory.
| | 02:10 | I could get in here, I could edit
these files with whatever tools I want, and
| | 02:13 | then when I'm done, I could right-click
on here, compress it, save it as a ZIP,
| | 02:18 | and then again go the other way and
change the ZIP extension to EPUB and it
| | 02:22 | would be perfectly valid.
| | 02:23 | I could upload it and validate it, no problem.
| | 02:25 | Unfortunately, it's not so easy on a Macintosh.
| | 02:28 | In fact, it's impossible.
| | 02:30 | You can change the extension to ZIP and you
can decompress the ZIP folder on your Macintosh.
| | 02:37 | When you recompress it and change
it back to EPUB, it won't validate.
| | 02:40 | The reason is because for some reason
the IDPF consortium, the people who
| | 02:46 | govern the EPUB file format, say that
when you zip up or compress folder into an
| | 02:52 | EPUB file, this folder and its contents
can be compressed, this folder and its
| | 02:57 | contents can be compressed,
but not the mimetype file.
| | 03:00 | Apparently, the PC is smart enough to
not compress this file, but on a Macintosh
| | 03:05 | it adds all sorts of Macintosh
something like ds_store files or resource forks,
| | 03:10 | whatever the heck those things are.
| | 03:12 | And what happens is that even though
you can end up with an SFHistory.epub,
| | 03:16 | it won't validate and the error that's
reported to you will be that this file is
| | 03:20 | compressed and it shouldn't be.
| | 03:21 | By the way if you want to try to unzip
this, if you don't see like an Extract or
| | 03:25 | Unarchive, in the very latest versions
of OS X that Archive Utility won't work,
| | 03:30 | but you could use something like say
StuffIt Expander and then that will go
| | 03:34 | ahead and expand it.
| | 03:36 | So here is that folder
and then you can get inside it.
| | 03:39 | We are not even going to use it,
because as I said if we recompress it and then
| | 03:43 | change the extension back
to EPUB, it won't validate.
| | 03:45 | Now if you've read any other kind of
EPUB documentation or seen any other
| | 03:49 | EPUB videos, you may have heard on a Macintosh
that what you're supposed to do with an EPUB--
| | 03:54 | Actually let me get rid of this before I
go on, because I'm going to get confused.
| | 03:57 | What you're supposed to do is take
this EPUB file and you're supposed to
| | 04:00 | decompress it through Terminal, which
is the OS X program that is also the
| | 04:06 | command line interface. It lets you type-
in UNIX commands and it definitely can be
| | 04:10 | done that way and I have
nothing against Terminal.
| | 04:12 | However, I discovered that there
are a couple of scripts around, free
| | 04:15 | AppleScripts that will do the same.
| | 04:18 | So I have a couple here in
your exercise file for you.
| | 04:21 | I should move these other ones out of there.
| | 04:23 | Let's just do this.
| | 04:24 | I'll rename this to old. Here we go.
| | 04:26 | All you do is you take your EPUB and
you drag-and-drop it on top of the one
| | 04:31 | that says EPUB Unzip.
| | 04:33 | So it unzipped it, and then we can
come in here and we can edit this file.
| | 04:38 | And then when we're done,
let's actually rename this guy too.
| | 04:43 | We're going to run into the same problem.
| | 04:44 | We're going to take this guy and then drag it
back onto EPUB Zip, and there is our EPUB Zip.
| | 04:53 | So it is an essential skill to be able
to completely extract the contents of an
| | 04:57 | EPUB file, so you can get at it with
various text editing programs and then be
| | 05:01 | able to zip it back up.
| | 05:03 | But there are many times when you just
need to tweak one file or just a letter
| | 05:06 | in another one, or fix a little link,
and in that case what you also might want
| | 05:10 | to check out, especially on the Mac
side, is any number of free or low-cost
| | 05:15 | utilities that will let you edit the
contents of a compressed archive without
| | 05:19 | having to decompress it first.
| | 05:21 | For example, one that I like to use
is called Springy. I have it running.
| | 05:25 | It's here in my dock.
It looks like a little a spring.
| | 05:28 | If I drag an EPUB on top of it, it
opens up as though I had decompressed it,
| | 05:33 | but it really hasn't.
| | 05:34 | So I can actually come in here and get
at any one of these files, and then if I
| | 05:39 | right-click, I can choose to extract it
or I can just choose to edit it with
| | 05:43 | some kind of program.
| | 05:45 | Then when I'm done editing, I save
it back in here and then when I close it,
| | 05:49 | it's still an EPUB.
| | 05:50 | So you can't really do any kind of
multiple Find/Changes because it needs to
| | 05:54 | extract these one at a time.
| | 05:56 | Another caution is that you need to go
to Preferences, because there's likely to
| | 06:01 | be an option here having to
do with Macintosh information.
| | 06:05 | I know that some people have got
problems with these kinds of programs.
| | 06:08 | Springy, another one is called Better Zip,
because when it re-archives, there is
| | 06:13 | an option that might be turned on by
default to preserve Macintosh information,
| | 06:17 | like those invisible DS store
files, if you've ever seen them on a PC.
| | 06:22 | Here in Springy in the third panel
under Archiving, a check box way down here
| | 06:26 | at the bottom, Preserve Macintosh
contents, you want to turn that off and
| | 06:30 | then close it before you start
working with this program or before you
| | 06:34 | archive your first archive.
| | 06:35 | So I'm going to go ahead and close this,
and then we are left back with our EPUB.
| | 06:42 | So that's how you get at the innards of
an EPUB and now we need to look at what
| | 06:46 | exactly are those files inside an EPUB.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Identifying parts of an EPUB file| 00:01 | Inside an EPUB file, when expanded you'll
find a whole bunch of little separate files.
| | 00:07 | These separate files comprise to
tell the ereader about all of the
| | 00:11 | contents, all of the images, all of the links,
all of the metadata contained in this ebook.
| | 00:17 | Now some of these files you'll never
need to touch, but other ones you will
| | 00:21 | really need to get in there and start
doing some major editing too, depending on
| | 00:26 | the state of your EPUB.
| | 00:27 | And it's a good idea to get to know the
names of these different files and what
| | 00:31 | they refer to, like this mysterious toc.ncx.
| | 00:35 | First of all, whenever you validate an
EPUB, if there's a problem it's going to
| | 00:39 | tell you the name of the file that is
having the problem. Or like there might be
| | 00:44 | a bad link inside toc.ncx, or
content.opf, or something like that.
| | 00:49 | And so you'll know all those little files
that are sitting sort of inside the OEBPS folder.
| | 00:55 | And number two is that if you go to
any support forum for EPUB stuff where there
| | 00:58 | are other people working with this kind
of things, people will be tossing around
| | 01:02 | these names with abandon.
| | 01:03 | They'll assume that everyone knows what
they're talking about and so you might
| | 01:06 | as well get to know what they mean.
| | 01:08 | All right so let's go through actually
each one of these files and talk about
| | 01:11 | what its significance is and if
you would ever need to edit it.
| | 01:14 | For a text editing program I am going
to be using TextWrangler, which is a free
| | 01:19 | text editing program from Bare Bones Software.
| | 01:22 | They also make a commercial one called
BBEdit, but TextWrangler is good enough.
| | 01:26 | If you're on a PC, the program
that I recommend is called Notepad++.
| | 01:30 | We'll now be talking more
about these in another video.
| | 01:33 | But I just want to let you know that
if you want to follow along you should
| | 01:36 | use a text editor that colorcodes some of
the tags that are used inside these files.
| | 01:40 | Okay, so first let's
look at the major divisions.
| | 01:42 | We have expanded SFHistory here in this folder.
| | 01:46 | We have two folders and we have this one
weird file without an extension called a mimetype.
| | 01:51 | These three things are all
required in every EPUB and InDesign will
| | 01:54 | automatically create them for you.
| | 01:56 | The mimetype is a very simple file.
| | 01:59 | Let me open this up in TextWrangler.
| | 02:01 | All it contains is this one line of
code and it tells the ereader this is
| | 02:06 | an EPUB, all right.
| | 02:07 | That's all, just leave it alone, and
this is the file by the way that cannot be
| | 02:10 | compressed when you re-zip this folder.
| | 02:13 | Inside the META-INF folder you're
going to find at least one file called
| | 02:18 | container.xml, which is believe it or
not an XML file and it's also quite short.
| | 02:25 | It gives some information to the ereader
confirming that this is an XML file and
| | 02:29 | then it tells it the path to this
very important file that I'll get to in a
| | 02:33 | minute called content.opf.
| | 02:35 | Now InDesign will automatically create
that file for you and put it inside the
| | 02:40 | folder called OEBPS.
| | 02:43 | I am just saying this in case for
some reason you go inside that OEBPS
| | 02:47 | folder and you rename content or you
move it inside another folder for some
| | 02:51 | bizarre reason, you are going to have
to remember to come to container.xml
| | 02:55 | and change the path as well.
| | 02:57 | So normally you never want to mess
around with the name or the location of
| | 03:01 | content.opf, and that's all.
| | 03:03 | That's container.xml.
| | 03:05 | By the way if you have any kind of
digital rights management or you've encrypted
| | 03:09 | any kind of fonts in your EPUB file,
you'll probably also find a couple other
| | 03:12 | folders or files inside META-INF
that has information about those things.
| | 03:17 | But it is this folder called OEBPS
where really the meat of the entire EPUB is.
| | 03:23 | I often call this the book folder.
| | 03:25 | All of your content, your CSS, all of your
images is going to be inside this folder.
| | 03:30 | In case you're wondering what
that stands for, it's Open eBook
| | 03:34 | Publication Structure.
| | 03:35 | It's going to be on the test at the
end of the video, so make note of that.
| | 03:38 | And inside the OEBPS folder you might
find subfolders. Other programs will just
| | 03:43 | put everything flat.
| | 03:44 | But you're going to find all of the XHTML files.
| | 03:48 | This is the content for every
chapter or section of your EPUB.
| | 03:52 | You're going to find the CSS file, at least one.
| | 03:55 | You can have multiple ones that contain
the coding for all of your XHTML files.
| | 04:01 | Let's actually take a look at
each one of these really quick.
| | 04:03 | We're just going to open up one randomly.
| | 04:06 | Here is an XHTML file.
| | 04:07 | And I am going to turn on Soft
Wrap Text so we can see it better.
| | 04:11 | So you can see here's the actual content.
| | 04:13 | So if you wanted to come in here and
change something without actually having to
| | 04:16 | change the InDesign file, you could
change it here and then save your changes.
| | 04:20 | And the style, CSS file, which we
will be talking about in great detail in
| | 04:26 | another chapter is the CSS file that
governs the formatting for all of your
| | 04:30 | paragraph and character styles that
have been applied inside the XHTML files.
| | 04:36 | If you have any images in your EPUB
they are segregated into their own Images
| | 04:40 | subfolder, these are all JPEGs, and
then you have two critical files. One is
| | 04:45 | called content.opf and toc.ncx.
| | 04:48 | Let's look at this one first.
| | 04:50 | TOC is the table of contents.
| | 04:52 | This is the navigational table of contents,
| | 04:55 | the automatic one that gets generated
from InDesign that appears inside like
| | 04:59 | Adobe Digital Editions on the left-hand side.
| | 05:01 | So I am dragging that over to
TextWrangler and inside the toc.ncx file we have
| | 05:09 | a whole bunch of weird codes.
| | 05:11 | The main point of this file
starts with navMap. Do you see this here?
| | 05:15 | We're going to actually be talking bout
editing this file in a different video.
| | 05:18 | But these are the links in that
navigational table of contents on the left.
| | 05:23 | So A Brief History of San Francisco
points to where that XHTML file is.
| | 05:28 | The one called Contents points to that
XHTML file, and so on. That's that file.
| | 05:34 | And then the content.opf file.
| | 05:37 | Let's take a look at that one inside
TextWrangler and switch to Soft Wrap Text.
| | 05:42 | This stands for Open Packaging Format,
and it's the second of two files.
| | 05:48 | The first one being the toc.ncx
file that describes to the ereader the
| | 05:52 | content of this EPUB.
| | 05:54 | Okay, so the content.opf file is an XML file.
| | 05:58 | It contains three quite important and
required sections, required by the EPUB
| | 06:03 | standard, and one optional one.
| | 06:06 | So the first section is the metadata section.
| | 06:09 | So there is the title, the
publisher, the date that it was published.
| | 06:13 | We have a video talking about
editing this metadata section.
| | 06:16 | The second required section is the manifest.
| | 06:19 | The manifest is a place that lists
every single item in this EPUB folder.
| | 06:24 | All right, so all the XHTML files, all
the JPEGs, the CSS file, and I've seen
| | 06:30 | when people validate EPUBs, that a
frequent cause for the EPUB to fail
| | 06:34 | validation is that there are files inside the
EPUB folder that aren't listed in the manifest.
| | 06:40 | So just like a manifest in the real
world is supposed to list all the contents
| | 06:43 | of a shipment, that's what the manifest is for.
| | 06:45 | The manifest is
automatically generated by InDesign.
| | 06:48 | Normally it's not something
that you need to worry about.
| | 06:51 | The third required section is called
the spine, which refers to the order of
| | 06:56 | the files that appear when the
ereader starts going through them.
| | 06:58 | So when somebody has done reading this
XHTML file and they click the icon for
| | 07:03 | next page, then this XHTML file is
supposed to open up, and again this is
| | 07:07 | something that InDesign
will create automatically.
| | 07:10 | And then the last, this is an optional
section and this is not something that
| | 07:14 | InDesign creates on its own.
| | 07:16 | I actually created this for you
so you can see what it looks like.
| | 07:19 | It's called the guide section, and this
is something that Apple would like your
| | 07:24 | EPUBs to have for the iBookstore.
| | 07:26 | It basically identifies if something
is copyright page, a title page, an
| | 07:31 | acknowledgments page, and then the text
pages are the actual content of the EPUB.
| | 07:34 | We'll be talking about
that too in another video.
| | 07:37 | So now we've gone through every
single one of these files and you know the
| | 07:41 | contents of an EPUB file, and I believe
your brain is probably about 50% larger
| | 07:45 | than when we first started talking about this.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Choosing an EPUB editor| 00:01 | When you're working with the files in
your EPUB there are really so many choices
| | 00:04 | for which software program you want to
use, that I want to go over a few of the
| | 00:09 | I think more useful ones that I
know a lot of professionals are using.
| | 00:13 | And in general you want this program to
be a text editor that will let you edit
| | 00:19 | stuff and save changes, but also one
that is accustomed to working with, say
| | 00:24 | web pages, or some kind of code so that
it will color the tags differently than
| | 00:29 | the actual text, which makes life a lot
easier when you're editing these files.
| | 00:33 | You also want to make sure that it
lets you do multiple Find/Changes because
| | 00:36 | often you're going to want to deal with every
XHTML file. You might want to change a tag.
| | 00:41 | So instead of having to go one-by-one
you want to be able to select all these
| | 00:45 | files and do the same Find/
Change across all of them.
| | 00:48 | And finally you want to make
sure that this program will not
| | 00:51 | introduce additional code.
| | 00:52 | Internally that will cause an EPUB to
be invalid when you try to validate it.
| | 00:57 | So you want to do something that's
very clean and simple but powerful.
| | 01:01 | So with those requirements in mind,
let me tell you about the kind that I like to
| | 01:04 | use on the Mac side.
| | 01:06 | Now by the way some of these programs
are by platform but a really good text
| | 01:10 | editing program on the PC that's not
available on the Mac is called Notepad++,
| | 01:16 | and it's similar I believe to
TextWrangler on the Macintosh that I am going to
| | 01:20 | show you in a second.
| | 01:21 | It's a text editing program that does
color coding of tags and that lets you do
| | 01:24 | a lot of these kinds of Find/
Changes that I was talking about.
| | 01:27 | Now let's talk about TextWrangler.
| | 01:29 | This is a free program from
the people who make BBEdit.
| | 01:33 | In TextWrangler I can choose to open a
file, let's just open one of these XHTML
| | 01:39 | files, and you can see that it does the
color coding and you can Soft Wrap Text
| | 01:44 | so you can see it easier. You can
open up multiple files and if you go to
| | 01:48 | Find/Change which has its own Search menu.
| | 01:50 | It's very powerful.
| | 01:51 | You can see that you can
do multiple file search.
| | 01:54 | Well you know one other feature that I
forgot to mention is that you want to
| | 01:57 | find a text editing program that can do Grep.
| | 02:00 | So like her it says here
find with a Grep checkmark.
| | 02:03 | That stands for General Regular
Expression Parsing or it's often called Regex or
| | 02:08 | Regular Expressions in a program.
| | 02:10 | What that lets you do is
pattern-based searching.
| | 02:13 | Because there are a number of
instances where you want to search for every
| | 02:16 | instance of say a tag called h1
regardless of what it's followed by, and
| | 02:21 | replace it with something else, and
then with a little bit more information
| | 02:24 | at the very end of it.
| | 02:25 | So you want to keep some stuff
intact and change other stuff.
| | 02:28 | Those are kind of complicated Find/
Changes and that's usually done quite easily
| | 02:32 | with something called
Grep or Regular Expression.
| | 02:34 | Not every program can do that, so TextWrangler
and BBEdit, its big brother can. So can Notepad++.
| | 02:40 | I was talking with somebody just
last week who told me he likes to use
| | 02:44 | Dreamweaver, which makes a lot of
sense when you're editing contents of EPUB
| | 02:48 | files because they're
basically miniature web sites.
| | 02:50 | Let me hide others. So with
Dreamweaver if you already have it and you're
| | 02:55 | familiar with it, why not?
| | 02:56 | You can easily open up an XHTML file
and not only can you edit the code and do
| | 03:03 | searches, you know I mean
Dreamweaver is meant for this stuff.
| | 03:05 | But you can also easily see what
it looks like in the Design View.
| | 03:09 | I mean with a program like TextWrangler
or Notepad++, you keep having to preview
| | 03:14 | that in another program to see what
it's going to look like as in the results.
| | 03:18 | But Dreamweaver gives you a design view.
| | 03:20 | And of course if you're editing CSS
files, so Dreamweaver is really powerful with
| | 03:24 | CSS files and you can see the immediate
result of your changes to your cascading
| | 03:29 | style sheets directly in your XHTML files.
| | 03:31 | Now another one is, especially if
you're very familiar with XML that you might
| | 03:35 | want to use is any of the products from
oXygen, and this is <oXygen/> XML Author
| | 03:42 | is what I have open now.
| | 03:43 | They also have <oXygen/> XML Editor.
| | 03:46 | Now these products range in
cost from about $200-$700.
| | 03:51 | This is not as powerful as XML Editor.
| | 03:54 | What's great about XML Author is that it's
got a lot of the big brother features about it.
| | 03:59 | But it also let's you easily work with EPUBs
without having to expand or unzip them first.
| | 04:06 | What I've done here in Author is I've
turned off a lot of the sidebars and
| | 04:09 | panels that I don't need.
| | 04:11 | But I have opened one called the
Archive Browser. And you get to the Archive
| | 04:18 | Browser by going to the Window menu,
choosing Show View, and choosing Archive Browser.
| | 04:22 | As with InDesign, you can save the
layouts. You can save this as your layout
| | 04:27 | for working with EPUBs.
| | 04:28 | What Archive Browser lets you do is
you click the very first icon and it lets
| | 04:32 | you open the actual EPUB
and it expands it inside here.
| | 04:35 | Well it actually shows you the content
it hasn't quite expanded it yet, but if I
| | 04:39 | twirl this open and I say let
me take a look at this toc.ncx,
| | 04:44 | it expands it right here.
| | 04:45 | And I can go ahead and edit this as I want.
| | 04:48 | And now when I am done I just save it.
| | 04:50 | If you open up more than one file like this,
it opens them up as tabs like in a browser. I like that.
| | 04:56 | And it's very simple to work on
this and it shows you every single item
| | 05:00 | inside that EPUB file.
| | 05:02 | Unfortunately you can't do multiple file
Find/Changes in this way. You'd have to
| | 05:06 | expand it first, but it would be
cool if they added that feature.
| | 05:10 | When you're done working on an EPUB
archive then you click the second icon,
| | 05:13 | which is Close archive.
| | 05:15 | So they're kind of expensive.
| | 05:17 | A program that I like is a free program
called Sigil, not quite as powerful by
| | 05:21 | any means as Author, but its claim to
fame like Author is that it can open up
| | 05:27 | the EPUB file without having to expand it first.
| | 05:31 | So I can go to File > Open, select the
EPUB file that we've been working with,
| | 05:37 | and as with XML Author,
I can see the files on the left.
| | 05:41 | However, Sigil is a little different
in that we're not seeing every single one
| | 05:45 | of the files. Like notice you don't
see the toc.ncx file here in the left.
| | 05:49 | So you can't rely on this
as showing you the entire thing expanded.
| | 05:53 | The way that Sigil works is that it's
trying to hide the really geeky stuff from
| | 05:57 | you and give you a
different way to work with it.
| | 05:59 | So for example when you want to work on
the navigational table of contents you
| | 06:02 | don't have to edit the code of toc.ncx.
| | 06:05 | You come up here to the Tools
menu and you go to the TOC Editor.
| | 06:08 | And here you can choose whether or
not to include these chapter headings in
| | 06:12 | the navigational TOC and you can even select
some of this text and change the contents of it.
| | 06:18 | And Sigil will in the background
update the toc.ncx file for you.
| | 06:23 | It's got a lot of other features.
| | 06:24 | This isn't how to use Sigil program, but
I wanted to point out to you that it's a
| | 06:28 | very interesting and useful program
that I'll be using quite a bit during the
| | 06:31 | course of this video.
| | 06:33 | It's available for Mac,
Windows, and Linux computers.
| | 06:35 | And the author does really great
technical support on a forum called
| | 06:39 | mobileread.com that I'll be talking
about in the last video about resources
| | 06:44 | you should know about.
| | 06:45 | So my suggestion is to gather a few of
these tools together, because sometimes
| | 06:50 | one tool is better than the other
depending on the particular kind of job.
| | 06:53 | And having any of these tools available
to you will make it much easier to work
| | 06:56 | with EPUB files than just
a plain old text editor.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Modifying the navigational TOC| 00:00 | The navigational TOC or table of
contents is the automatic table of
| | 00:05 | contents that ereaders pick up based on the
contents of the toc.ncx file in your EPUB file.
| | 00:12 | So here we are looking at the EPUB
file called CAHistory-frombook, meaning I
| | 00:16 | created this from an InDesign book, a
compilation of five different InDesign
| | 00:21 | documents, and because I didn't use
the feature in CS5 that lets me use a TOC style,
| | 00:27 | InDesign went ahead and created
the nav TOC but it used the names of the
| | 00:30 | documents as the TOC entries.
| | 00:33 | Now here is an example of where you
might want to actually edit the EPUB file
| | 00:37 | instead of going back and re-exporting
from InDesign doing all the TOC style stuff.
| | 00:42 | So you want to be able
to edit these labels here.
| | 00:45 | Because you've watched the previous
videos, you know that all this is governed
| | 00:49 | by the file called toc.ncx, which is
inside the expanded EPUB folder, which I
| | 00:55 | have already done for you in the Exercise Files.
| | 00:57 | If you look inside the OEBPS folder or
the book folder, you'll see the toc.ncx.
| | 01:03 | Now what I'd like to do though is if I
just need to edit this one little file,
| | 01:06 | I would like to try and edit it
without having to expand the EPUB and then
| | 01:09 | have to rezip it again.
| | 01:11 | So I would turn to a program that would
open up the Archive and let me edit the
| | 01:15 | innards of the archive, and to me that
would be either Sigil or oXygen Author.
| | 01:20 | So if we go to Sigil and we
choose open this one from the book,
| | 01:27 | CAHistory-frombook-- and remember Sigil
doesn't show you the actual toc.ncx file.
| | 01:32 | It lets you edit the TOC from
the Tools panel, TOC Editor.
| | 01:36 | But this is an instance where Sigil is
not going to help you, because Sigil only
| | 01:40 | counts as a table of contents when the
table of contents has been marked off with
| | 01:44 | an h1 tag, which InDesign will
automatically do if you use the TOC style.
| | 01:50 | But because in these files, if you
look at early_history here, at the code,
| | 01:54 | these are styled with the class subhead, not h1.
| | 01:57 | It's thinking that there are no TOC entries.
| | 02:00 | Which is kind of weird. I think it
is a failing of Sigil, but it's free
| | 02:03 | program and you have to donate money to
this guy to help develop it until what
| | 02:07 | we need done with it, and maybe
there's a way to do what I want it to do but I
| | 02:10 | just don't know how.
| | 02:11 | Anyway, what I am going to do is I am
going to close this document in Sigil and
| | 02:14 | we will jump over to Author
and we will open it there.
| | 02:18 | So I'm opening up the archive.
| | 02:20 | It's the same EPUB file and here we
do have access to the toc.ncx file and
| | 02:26 | here's all of our text.
| | 02:27 | So when I went over the contents, what's
inside this toc.ncx file, in a different
| | 02:32 | video. I mentioned that all of your
Navigation links appear between these two
| | 02:36 | tags called navMap.
| | 02:38 | Here is the opening navMap and then
the closing navMap tag is at the bottom.
| | 02:43 | Every instance of a link inside the
navigational table of contents is called a navPoint.
| | 02:49 | So here is the opening of the navPoint.
Each one has its own unique ID and
| | 02:53 | playOrder and then each navPoint
has two things. It has a label.
| | 02:59 | This is the actual text that appears
and then it has a content source,
| | 03:03 | meaning where it links to.
| | 03:05 | By default the label is the same as the
content source except for the extension.
| | 03:10 | So all we need to do is change the label.
| | 03:12 | Let's go ahead and start
up here with the first one.
| | 03:14 | So we don't want the text
label to be 01_early_history.
| | 03:18 | We would like it to say just Early History.
| | 03:20 | So we are just going to change it
right here, Early History and then we will
| | 03:24 | save the changes that we've made,
Command+S or Ctrl+S. And now I will
| | 03:29 | double-click on that file again to
open it up and you can see that we have
| | 03:33 | made the change, Early History, and
we would go through and make the other
| | 03:36 | changes as necessary.
| | 03:38 | So that's how you can edit the navTOC in Author.
| | 03:41 | There is a time though that Sigil will
help you with navTOCs and that's if you
| | 03:46 | have created one from the TOC Style feature.
| | 03:50 | If we go to File > Open in Sigil and
choose CAHistory-fromTOCstyle.epub and
| | 03:56 | choose Open and then we go up to the
Tools panel, you can see the TOC Editor.
| | 04:01 | And here we see the actual Table Of
Contents Editor and you can choose whether
| | 04:05 | or not to include any of these,
and then you can also edit the text.
| | 04:09 | But a caution is that editing this text
here, you just double-click it to edit it,
| | 04:13 | will actually edit the text inside the file.
| | 04:16 | Unlike editing the TOC directly,
| | 04:19 | the actual XML file like we just did in
Author, but if I said Early History Of
| | 04:23 | the People and said OK and saved our
change, and then we come back to it,
| | 04:30 | you can see that it actually change that.
| | 04:32 | Now according to the Sigil instructions,
if you don't want to change the content
| | 04:35 | of the XHTML file but you just want to
change the header, what you would need to
| | 04:39 | do would be to-- let's try
another one. Go to Code View.
| | 04:43 | I am going to actually go to Split View,
so we can see both the Source and the Code,
| | 04:48 | and inside, you see how it's
marked out with an h1 that's what InDesign did.
| | 04:52 | You would have to add a title tag
and call it title=" and then what it is
| | 04:58 | that you want to say.
| | 04:58 | So I'll say SFO like the airport,
and then save those changes by pressing
| | 05:05 | Command+S and then when we look
at the TOC Editor it says SFO.
| | 05:11 | And then if you want to see the actual
EPUB, then we will come over here and
| | 05:16 | double-click this and
there you see it says SFO.
| | 05:19 | So depending on what it is that you need to
do with the TOC, you can use either Sigil's
| | 05:23 | = pretty friendly user interface or
you might need to actually get your hands
| | 05:26 | dirty editing the code in a
program like oXygen or TextWrangler.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding and editing metadata| 00:00 | What are we looking at here?
| | 00:02 | The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
| | 00:05 | What we are looking at are the types of
metadata that can be included in EPUB.
| | 00:11 | Subject, Description, Publisher.
| | 00:13 | This is the actual source for what
this metadata is suppose to represent.
| | 00:17 | Now do you remember back in InDesign
when we exported to EPUB there is a
| | 00:21 | checkbox in the first panel called
General that said Include Metadata and then
| | 00:27 | there was a field for Publisher.
| | 00:29 | This is where you would enter that
information and that is what's going to
| | 00:33 | happen in the resulting EPUB files
that there's going to be an entry called
| | 00:37 | Publisher with what you entered there.
| | 00:39 | But notice that there are many more
fields available here that you can enter in
| | 00:44 | an EPUB Metadata section then were
available in InDesign, even if you went to be
| | 00:50 | File Info panel which I showed in
another video and added information there
| | 00:54 | unlike keyword and copyright information.
| | 00:57 | So where is this metadata listed?
| | 01:00 | Let's open up Author program and we
will go ahead and open up an archive.
| | 01:05 | We have history text with metadata
information and we'll open it up and it's
| | 01:10 | inside the OEBPS folder.
| | 01:12 | It's one of the important sections of
the content.opf file, so double-click that.
| | 01:17 | Now sometimes when you open up an XML
file in Author or even TextEdit it'll open
| | 01:23 | up in one long scrolling list because
apparently there is only two lines in this
| | 01:27 | file and one of them is very-very long.
| | 01:30 | So depending on the kind of program that
you have, you should try a software app
| | 01:33 | or something like that, but what I love
about the oXygen programs is that it's
| | 01:37 | got this wonderful little icon here
called Format and Indent if you click it
| | 01:42 | just breaks it out and makes it much
easier to work with and it doesn't add any
| | 01:45 | extraneous comments or code
to the files, so it's great.
| | 01:49 | Here is the metadata section.
| | 01:50 | It starts with metadata right at the
top and ends with the closing metadata at
| | 01:54 | the bottom and here are all
the entries starting with DC.
| | 01:58 | It means Dublin Core.
| | 01:59 | The once we entered in
InDesign came through just fine.
| | 02:02 | When we set the title of the work in
InDesign's File Info dialog box, History of
| | 02:07 | San Francisco : Excerpt, I entered the
author, that was Joe Schmoe, and then
| | 02:11 | here are my keywords
according to the Dublin Core.
| | 02:13 | And according to IDPF specifications
you can enter in multiple subjects,
| | 02:17 | multiple keywords for this, but I can
tell you though that in most cases when
| | 02:22 | you are uploading EPUB to say the
Apple iBookstore or Kobo or Sony bookstore,
| | 02:27 | they have a form there that they want
you to fill out with metadata and they
| | 02:31 | want you to choose from a
standardized list of subjects.
| | 02:34 | So that it's easier for people who are
organizing say like on the iBookstore
| | 02:39 | where it says here is all of our
history books, here is all of our
| | 02:41 | science-fiction books, that
everybody has used the same term.
| | 02:44 | So you can go ahead and enter as many
subjects as you like, but you're probably
| | 02:48 | going to have to redo
some of this down the road.
| | 02:52 | Now one thing that InDesign does not
let you enter unless you Tales Dejong's
| | 02:56 | script that I mentioned earlier called
Fixed Links and add that publication year
| | 03:01 | is the publication year of the EPUB.
| | 03:03 | That's this right here which is Date.
| | 03:05 | Notice that it's empty.
| | 03:06 | And if I submitted this for validation,
it would kick it back and say that
| | 03:10 | you are missing a date.
| | 03:11 | So you can go ahead and add it
yourself by editing the content.opf file.
| | 03:16 | What I like about using a program like
oXygen Author for this rather than say a
| | 03:20 | free TextWrangler is that oXygen Author
does automatic code completion, so like
| | 03:25 | if I get rid of this closing tag and
then just start typing you see how it
| | 03:29 | automatically created an opening and a
closing tag and I can just type in 2011.
| | 03:34 | You also have the option of doing
something like February 15, can do something.
| | 03:38 | That's all optional but at least a
four digit date is what they want.
| | 03:42 | And now just that one little change
will make it go ahead and validate.
| | 03:45 | So I am going to close this and save
changes at the prompt and then close the archive.
| | 03:51 | Now if you don't have oXygen Author,
which I know is kind of expensive, Sigil
| | 03:56 | also lets you easily create and edit metadata.
| | 03:59 | So I am moving over to Sigil and I
will just go ahead and choose Open and
| | 04:06 | select the same file.
| | 04:07 | You're not able to access the
content.opf file over here on the left.
| | 04:12 | Remember Sigil tries to hide
the uber geeky stuff from you.
| | 04:15 | Instead you use something from the
Tools panel called the Meta Editor.
| | 04:20 | Any kind of metadata that you've
already entered appears here and sometimes it
| | 04:24 | will appear like this.
| | 04:25 | Like oh, what happened to it?
| | 04:26 | I'll just click More and then you
can see everything that's in here.
| | 04:30 | And if you want to add or remove
stuff you just click here, add some more
| | 04:35 | basic metadata properties, like an ISBN
number, the source, type, the rights, and so on.
| | 04:42 | Or you can also remove entries as well.
| | 04:44 | So you can edit the metadata either in
Sigil's Meta Editor or you can just go
| | 04:49 | ahead and enter the content.opf file yourself.
| | 04:52 | Just be carrel that you are opening and
closing the tags correctly and that you
| | 04:56 | only use the metadata tags that are
allowed in the specification, that are
| | 05:02 | allowed by the Dublin Core.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating guide sections for iBooks| 00:01 | Has this ever happened to you?
| | 00:02 | You are reading an EPUB and
here we are at the front of it.
| | 00:06 | It says A Brief History of San
Francisco in the NAVTOC here.
| | 00:09 | It's says we are on page 1 of 14.
| | 00:11 | Okay let's see what's in
here. Click on Contents.
| | 00:13 | But well wait a minute.
| | 00:13 | It says Page 3 of 14.
| | 00:16 | Sometimes I've opened up and EPUB and
it says that I'm on chapter 1 and I look
| | 00:20 | at it and says I am on page 8 and it
automatically skipped the first beginning
| | 00:24 | pages, so I am always obsessive about that.
| | 00:26 | I am like what did I miss?
| | 00:27 | So I am going to click back here
and I missed the title page. Ohhh.
| | 00:29 | Well this is actually an optional part
of the content.opf document in you EPUB
| | 00:36 | called the guide section and Apple
recommends that you include a guide section
| | 00:42 | for books that will be listed in the
iBookstore and I'm pretty sure that
| | 00:46 | Kindle does as well.
| | 00:47 | Because I'm pretty sure that
this has happened to me on a Kindle.
| | 00:50 | And as you can see if it has a guide
section then a lot of other ereaders like
| | 00:55 | Adobe Digital Editions will also honor it.
| | 00:57 | So what is the guide section exactly?
| | 01:00 | Let me close this and show it to you.
| | 01:03 | Here I already have this open in Author.
| | 01:05 | We are looking at the content.opf file
and at the very bottom after the spine
| | 01:11 | we have this section called Guide, if
you remember from the beginning of this
| | 01:15 | chapter when I was going through
identifying the parts of an EPUB file, I said
| | 01:19 | that this file has a fourth optional section
and that's this optional section down here.
| | 01:23 | If you don't have the guide, this EPUB
will still validate, assuming everything
| | 01:27 | else is still right.
| | 01:28 | But the guide tells the EPUB reader the
semantic meanings of the different files.
| | 01:33 | For example, text. See the type Text?
| | 01:36 | This is the actual
chapters inside the EPUB file.
| | 01:40 | But then we also have other semantic
meanings like cover, and title-page,
| | 01:44 | and table of contents.
| | 01:47 | So the guide tells the ereader what are the
meanings for the different kinds of pages.
| | 01:52 | You could have acknowledgements,
you could have a type that says index,
| | 01:55 | glossary, copyright page, dedication, and so on.
| | 01:59 | And depending on the ereader's
specifications, it will automatically make
| | 02:03 | one page appear first.
| | 02:04 | And then the user will actually have
to scroll backwards to see other pages.
| | 02:08 | So if you want to create or add a
guide to your document, InDesign will not
| | 02:12 | create this for you unfortunately.
| | 02:14 | You actually have to open up the
content.opf file and add this code yourself.
| | 02:18 | This might be one instance where I
would use Sigil instead of a text editor
| | 02:22 | because Sigil does this
very nicely. Let me show you.
| | 02:26 | I'm going to close out of this document.
| | 02:27 | We have SFHistory before.
| | 02:29 | This is after I added a guide. This is before.
| | 02:32 | And in this one, I'm going
to open up this file in Sigil.
| | 02:35 | So I'm just going to right-
click it and choose Sigil.
| | 02:40 | Remember Sigil is a free,
cross-platform EPUB editor.
| | 02:43 | It's kind of interesting how it works
in Sigil is that you locate the page that
| | 02:49 | you want to designate as
being a particular kind of page.
| | 02:53 | And then you right-click
and choose Add Semantics.
| | 02:57 | All right, and this will
build the guide for you.
| | 03:01 | So you say, this is the table of
contents page and this is the cover page and
| | 03:08 | then these, you have to do
them one by one as far as I know.
| | 03:11 | I haven't been able to do this
automatically to all of them.
| | 03:14 | But remember what's cool about Sigil is
we don't have to expand that EPUB file.
| | 03:18 | And you just here and say all these are Text.
| | 03:20 | So your actual chapters should be text.
| | 03:23 | And I probably don't even have to go right to
the page but I'm just going to do it anyway.
| | 03:27 | And now I'm obsessively finishing this
since we only have a few chapters to do.
| | 03:32 | And then this will add
the guide section for you.
| | 03:35 | And then we're going to close this
entire document and save all of our changes.
| | 03:41 | So I've moved over to XML Author and
we'll go ahead and open up that file.
| | 03:46 | That was the before one that I just edited.
| | 03:49 | And we'll go to OEBPS, to the content
file, and at the bottom, there we go.
| | 03:56 | There's our guide that we
just created with Sigil.
| | 03:59 | So this is just another little bit of
editing that in most cases you're going to
| | 04:03 | have to do by hand in whichever program
that you have and if you have Sigil, it
| | 04:07 | makes it a lot easier.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
8. Editing EPUB Files for FormattingCleaning up the XHTML files| 00:00 | Very often when InDesign exports its
content to an EPUB file the XHTML file that
| | 00:06 | it exports that contains the text
contents and the links to the images in your
| | 00:11 | EPUB file are full of superfluous code.
| | 00:14 | And it's a lot easier to work with an
EPUB file, if you just take a moment to
| | 00:18 | clean up some of that extra stuff that
InDesign adds. Why it adds that, we don't know.
| | 00:23 | So in this document called California
History that we've been working with
| | 00:26 | during this title, I've already expanded
it so we can see the internal files and
| | 00:31 | if you have been paying attention you
know that all of our XHTML files are
| | 00:34 | inside the OEBPS folder.
| | 00:36 | So I am going to go ahead and Shift+
Click or Ctrl+Click all of these text files.
| | 00:43 | Just the XHTML ones.
| | 00:44 | Just the ones with the content, and I'm
going to open them in Text Wrangler, which is
| | 00:50 | one of my favorite XHTML text editors.
| | 00:52 | You can use any kind text editor that
lets you do find and changes, because
| | 00:56 | that's mean what we are going to do here.
| | 00:58 | Let's take a look at one of these
documents. Let me turn Soft Wrap text and take
| | 01:04 | a look at some of this code.
There is first of all the fact that
| | 01:09 | whenever it applies the paragraph tag
it always applies a class to the whole
| | 01:13 | paragraph. Well that's a
another video on its own.
| | 01:15 | We really don't have to deal with that.
| | 01:17 | It's not going to hurt the EPUB for
to do that. It's just really not standard
| | 01:20 | XHTML coding, but what's really getting
me here is what CS4 does with this span
| | 01:25 | class generated style.
| | 01:27 | This is completely unnecessary. So
this tag and then it's closing tag is
| | 01:33 | unnecessary and it does add
for every single paragraph.
| | 01:38 | All that needs is p class="body" and
then a close p. In fact it just needs p and
| | 01:42 | then the close p, but we can just
leave this body alone because this is where
| | 01:46 | InDesign applies the paragraph styles.
| | 01:48 | So this body, you might say body first,
you might say subhead and so on. So you
| | 01:52 | really don't want to get rid of
this, but this stuff you don't need.
| | 01:54 | Now this is the reason why you'd want
to choose a text editor that lets you do
| | 01:58 | find/changes on multiple files at once
because while this book only has like five
| | 02:03 | or six chapters, but you might be
doing something with 20-30 chapters and you
| | 02:07 | don't want to have to go through every
single chapter and do a find/change for this.
| | 02:11 | You want to be able
to do it to multiple files.
| | 02:14 | So here in Text Wrangler I am able to
do that from the Search menu, go down
| | 02:18 | to Multi-File Search.
| | 02:20 | And it lets me choose the ones that I
want to search for it, but I'm going to
| | 02:23 | say just the open text documents and
here it's listed them all. So I will go
| | 02:28 | turn on the checkbox and what we could
do is search for span class="generated style"
| | 02:33 | and then replace them all with
nothing and then search for close span and
| | 02:38 | replace them all with nothing, but very
often this close span tag that you see here,
| | 02:43 | we actually want to keep it
because they're sometimes when it applies to
| | 02:46 | span that you want to retain, such as
for example down here where it applied the
| | 02:51 | class italic to this title.
| | 02:55 | So if we got rid of the
span then that would break that.
| | 02:57 | So instead we're going to use a very
intelligent kind of a search and replace
| | 03:02 | that I have saved here. We are
going to use Grep and Grep stands for a
| | 03:06 | General Regular Expression Parsing.
| | 03:08 | You don't have to memorize that, but
basically it's pattern-based searching so
| | 03:12 | instead of searching for every single
instance of something literally, we are
| | 03:16 | going to search for variations of
it that match a specific pattern.
| | 03:20 | So it only finds the things that we
want to find and it ignores other things
| | 03:23 | that partially match it.
| | 03:24 | I have actually saved this because
it's a little kind of complicated.
| | 03:29 | I called it Clean spans from ID CS4 xHTML.
| | 03:33 | Let me enlarge it so you can see the
whole thing and you might want pause the
| | 03:37 | video here so you could write this
down. Now actually, I didn't make this up
| | 03:41 | myself. I got this from Liz Castro who's
written a wonderful book called Straight
| | 03:45 | to the Point: Creating EPUBS from both
Word and InDesign. She has a number of
| | 03:49 | different Grep find/changes
to help you clean things up.
| | 03:52 | But seriously this is something that
you could have come up with on your own if
| | 03:56 | you just a little bit of studying on how
to write Grep expressions and there are
| | 03:59 | so many resources out there.
| | 04:01 | I definitely encourage you to do that
if you're going to be doing a lot of
| | 04:04 | cleanup for your XHTML files.
| | 04:06 | But you know actually you could have
come up with this on your own if you had
| | 04:09 | down any kind of studying or research
on Grep. In fact right here at lynda.com
| | 04:13 | Michael Murphy did a fantastic video
all about using Grep in InDesign but a lot
| | 04:18 | of what he talked about can be
translated to other programs as well.
| | 04:21 | If you just want to get an idea of
what this is searching for, its searching
| | 04:25 | for literally this text, span class
="generated-style, but instead of a closing quote
| | 04:30 | we have in here some attributes
that say you know if it finds like -1
| | 04:37 | or -2 or a number one or number two.
This is like a hyphen with the digit
| | 04:40 | because sometimes it will create
multiple generated styles, so we went to find
| | 04:43 | them all in one fell swoop instead of
having to search for generated style one,
| | 04:47 | generated style 2, and so on.
| | 04:49 | And then whatever comes in between the
end of this and the next span tag, such as here,
| | 04:58 | the close span tag, all this
stuff here, we want it to keep that. We don't
| | 05:03 | want to delete that, so that's
what this parenthesis stuff is for.
| | 05:07 | And then under Replace, this \2 means
replace it with whatever you found in
| | 05:12 | the second found set.
| | 05:14 | So I think it will be a little clearer
if we don't do a multi-file search.
| | 05:18 | Let's close this and do just a single
file search first for this one.
| | 05:22 | So we will do Find and to remember what
to find, we will start up here and then
| | 05:27 | click Next and here's what it found.
So it found this, everything in between and
| | 05:35 | then this. So that's what this means,
anything in between right here, the dot
| | 05:40 | and the asterisk and the question mark.
| | 05:42 | And then we will choose
Replace and you see what it did.
| | 05:45 | It put that text back but it got
rid of the opening and closing span
| | 05:49 | generated style mess. Uh, yuck.
| | 05:52 | So that's what we want it to do.
| | 05:53 | So let's go back to Multi-File Search
and Replace and now that we know that it's
| | 05:58 | working we will just say Replace All.
| | 05:59 | When you say Replace All you have the
option in his program to see the results.
| | 06:05 | So let's say Proceed and you know in a
split second, look at all these changes
| | 06:09 | that it made. It made it nice and
clean in all these different documents.
| | 06:14 | I'm sure that you're going to
come across as you get more and more
| | 06:16 | comfortable with XHTML. Other instances
of Grep searches and regular searches
| | 06:21 | that you want to do.
| | 06:23 | Mainly what you are trying to do is get
rid of all the extra stuff that InDesign
| | 06:26 | added that's completely unnecessary
because then they're much easier to work
| | 06:30 | with as you edit them further.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Cleaning up the CSS file| 00:00 | Just as we did some basic cleanup to
the XHTML files that InDesign included in
| | 00:05 | its EPUB export, we are also going to
do some basic cleanup of the CSS file.
| | 00:10 | Now you may recall from previous videos
that all the styling in an EPUB comes from
| | 00:16 | the cascading style sheet, the CSS file,
and the styles in the CSS file come from
| | 00:22 | the paragraph and character styles that
you created in InDesign and applied to
| | 00:27 | the texts. And all that we
covered in previous videos.
| | 00:30 | Inside the expanded EPUB file, we already
extracted all the files from inside our
| | 00:34 | EPUB, you'll recall that inside the
OEPBS folder, also known as the Book folder,
| | 00:41 | we have the XHTML file and this is the CSS file.
| | 00:45 | I have open both of these
up inside Text Wrangler.
| | 00:49 | There's the history sample of XHTML and
template.css and with the CXHTML file showing,
| | 00:55 | I just want you to notice that toward
the top in the head section it reminds you
| | 01:01 | that the CSS formatting is coming
from this file called template.css.
| | 01:06 | So any changes that we make to this CSS file
you will be able to preview in this XHTML file.
| | 01:15 | So let's take a look at the CSS file
and I've got some typical changes that
| | 01:19 | you might want to make.
| | 01:20 | Let me drag this over to the center, here we go.
| | 01:24 | First at the top you'll usually find
some of these generated styles next to
| | 01:29 | divs and these are the ones that
InDesign automatically spits out for the name
| | 01:33 | of the InDesign document.
| | 01:35 | and for the text frame containing the
text. I briefly mentioned those in the
| | 01:39 | previous videos. These you can get rid of.
| | 01:41 | You really don't need them.
| | 01:42 | They are not going to apply anywhere.
| | 01:43 | It's okay to leave those tags in the
XHTML file. They are just going to be ignored.
| | 01:50 | Now notice that for every paragraph
style and character style in your InDesign
| | 01:55 | document we have a matching CSS style.
| | 01:59 | The subhead for h1.subhead has been
styled with all these settings and then we
| | 02:04 | have a p.headline, p.body-first and you
can see where these are applied in your
| | 02:10 | XHTML file in the opening class.
| | 02:14 | So here's p class=body-first, here's
class=headline, h1 class=subhead Early History.
| | 02:23 | All right keep scrolling. We
have a class called image-w-caption.
| | 02:29 | This was the actual paragraph style assigned to
the paragraph containing our anchored graphic.
| | 02:36 | Underneath the anchor graphic we have a
caption with the paragraph style caption.
| | 02:41 | So again let's come back to the CSS file
and hopefully this is all making sense to you.
| | 02:45 | Now I am not going to teach you how to
write CSS. There are many titles here at
| | 02:50 | lynda.com that will do much better job
of that and you really don't need to be
| | 02:54 | CSS experts in order to do
some basic editing of these files.
| | 02:59 | And actually because you are already
familiar with paragraph and character
| | 03:03 | styles in InDesign, you have a leg up on
a lot of other people in understanding
| | 03:07 | what cascading style sheets are all about.
| | 03:09 | Because one of the first problems
that you're going to see or that actually
| | 03:13 | you'll realize with the cascading
style sheets is that they have settings for
| | 03:18 | things that you really don't care
about and that could make it more difficult
| | 03:22 | for you to change the styles later on.
| | 03:25 | It's kind of like you know how
character styles work in InDesign where you can
| | 03:28 | just make a character style called Bold
and no matter what size type you apply
| | 03:32 | it to it will become bold?
| | 03:34 | Well what about if somebody who wasn't
that familiar with InDesign created a
| | 03:37 | character style but they also included
specifications for the type size and type
| | 03:42 | weight and all the other settings for
character style. That just makes it much
| | 03:46 | more inflexible right. You would have
to create multiple character styles every
| | 03:50 | time you wanted to apply the
character style bold to a different typeface
| | 03:53 | without changing the typeface.
| | 03:55 | Well this is for some reason what
InDesign does in CSS is that it automatically
| | 04:00 | assigns attributes to 11 different
settings for every style. Even though they
| | 04:05 | don't have to be set. Even though it
would be easier if you would just leave
| | 04:09 | them alone and keep them at the default
of not even declaring a special setting.
| | 04:13 | For example here under body-first we
have font family Chaparral Pro. Now we're
| | 04:19 | not even talking about assigning
fonts because you don't have that much
| | 04:22 | control at all over the typeface used.
All of the devices, or at least 90% of them,
| | 04:28 | they have their own typeface is
built-in and many of them are not shared
| | 04:31 | from device to device. So you can't
just say for example Arial like you could
| | 04:35 | with a web site and know that most
browsers will be able to open up a document
| | 04:39 | and show you that font.
| | 04:40 | I mean Apple's iPad has 30 fonts and the
Nook has 5 fonts and I don't think any
| | 04:45 | of them are the same.
| | 04:47 | You can just delete the
entire setting for body-first.
| | 04:50 | You don't need to know what the face is.
| | 04:53 | You know font-weight, that's
something like a Normal or Bold and that is
| | 04:57 | something that you don't want it be Bold.
| | 04:58 | You want it to be Normal.
| | 04:59 | You can leave it as is.
Same thing with font-style.
| | 05:02 | Font-size and line-height are fine and
notice that it uses the em measurement
| | 05:07 | system and em is an interesting
measurement system that's only used with web
| | 05:12 | design and em is a good thing.
| | 05:14 | And em, when you define a font size in
an em, it means that it is this amount of
| | 05:20 | the default font size for the ereader.
| | 05:24 | So in 1 em is the size of the default font of
the ereader and most ereaders are 16 points.
| | 05:30 | So .7 9 of an em means a
little less than 16 points.
| | 05:35 | If you want to get exactly 1em out of
InDesign you have to set your type size to 12 points.
| | 05:41 | It'll come out as 1 em.
I know it's weird. Not 16.
| | 05:44 | So in other words the default type size
in InDesign of 12 on auto leading will
| | 05:48 | give you the default font size for ereader.
| | 05:51 | And then for every other measure that
says em, it is actually a percentage of
| | 05:56 | the current font size.
| | 05:57 | So 1.42 em line height, which is leading,
means its 1.42 times the size of this font.
| | 06:06 | It's good to know that you can keep it
and you don't have these pixels or inches
| | 06:09 | or anything like that.
| | 06:11 | Text-decoration are things like dotted
underlines or backgrounds. Again this is
| | 06:16 | an example of an attribute that
InDesign set that you don't need, so you can
| | 06:19 | just completely deleted it.
| | 06:22 | When the attribute has not been set
then the ereader or the web browser will
| | 06:27 | assume it suppose to be the default of none.
| | 06:29 | Same thing for font-variant. That
would be like case. Leave that alone.
| | 06:35 | A text-indent, a first line indent, of 0.
Sometimes you might want to keep it at zero or
| | 06:41 | sometimes you might want
just delete it or leave it alone.
| | 06:44 | Text alignment, justifying. Actually
people have very little control over if text
| | 06:49 | is justified or left aligned or right
aligned, so I normally just get rid of that.
| | 06:54 | And a color of all zeros means black.
That is the default assumed in color.
| | 06:59 | so we will get rid of that and so on.
| | 07:02 | So you can go through all of your
styles and get rid of the settings that don't
| | 07:06 | need to be set, and this will
make it a lot easier for you, especially as
| | 07:09 | you get into more advanced CSS, of
being able to do like child and parent
| | 07:15 | settings. Because CSS remember stands
for cascading style sheets and in that
| | 07:21 | sense it's kind like
based on styles in InDesign.
| | 07:25 | So that if you have a parent style that
says text decoration is dotted and then
| | 07:30 | you make a child based on that one, then
its text decoration will also be dotted
| | 07:35 | unless you say something else.
| | 07:37 | That's why it's best to leave the
attribute set to none to have them completely
| | 07:42 | not even defined. So that they can be
most flexible and they can take on the
| | 07:46 | attributes of their parent, should
you decide to set up your CSS this way.
| | 07:50 | So you need to go through the CSS and
get rid of all of the specifications
| | 07:55 | that really aren't required and then
you can come back and you can fiddle around
| | 07:58 | with changing the ones that you do
and I am going to show you a few common
| | 08:02 | things that you might want to change
in this chapter, things like Spacing,
| | 08:06 | Drop Caps, stuff like that.
| | 08:08 | But I also want to encourage
you to explore more with CSS.
| | 08:12 | It's extremely powerful.
| | 08:13 | I've called a couple web sites in
Firefox that you should know about.
| | 08:18 | First of all right now we are using EPUB
specification I think its EPUB Version 2.
| | 08:22 | And EPUB version2 allows tags from CSS2,
that's the version of CSS standard, and
| | 08:31 | this is the website for CSS2 with a ton
of information about what kind of tags
| | 08:37 | are allowed with CSS2.
| | 08:38 | There might the more information that
you want but I know that there are some
| | 08:41 | gearheads out there wondering which version of
CSS does EPUB support and this is the version.
| | 08:47 | And then I also want to show you this
really cool site called EPUB Zen Garden.
| | 08:52 | It's from ThreePress consulting, the
same people who do Ibis Reader and the EPUB
| | 08:57 | check online, and it's along the same
veins as another very well-known website
| | 09:02 | called CSS Zen Garden. And basically
the producers create a set of content and
| | 09:09 | they invite people to take that same
set of content and change how it looks
| | 09:13 | purely based on CSS.
| | 09:16 | And people can come to the website and
choose among this different CSS files
| | 09:20 | that have been associated with the
same content to see how it looks, kind of
| | 09:24 | like skinning a website or skinning
a game, to see what the same content looks
| | 09:28 | like with the different cascading style sheets.
| | 09:30 | So here at EPUB Zen Garden, they only
allow CSS that is supported by the EPUB
| | 09:37 | specification and you can change
the style from his drop-down menu.
| | 09:41 | So like here is what this style looks
like, the same content. So it's a book so
| | 09:46 | there's a chapter open or a quote, a
drop cap. You can look at all the chapters
| | 09:52 | because a lot of them have different
content and section openers with all these
| | 10:00 | and what's even more cool is that when
you find one that you like, like I like
| | 10:06 | this Gibson one, isn't that elegant, you
can actually grab the CSS and use the CSS as
| | 10:12 | long as you attribute to them.
| | 10:14 | You can find out more about that
underneath the About section, but they're all
| | 10:18 | released under a Creative Comments
guidelines. And to get to the CSS you go to
| | 10:23 | View > Page Source and
then click on the CSS link.
| | 10:28 | So I've been playing around with this.
I notice some of the CSS is very well
| | 10:31 | commented and it has instructions
about like who wrote this. The comments are
| | 10:37 | all written out with the slash and the
asterisk next to it. You can see like here
| | 10:41 | h1 he is saying is used for the book
title and the font size is 3.5 em and in
| | 10:48 | parentheses, he's reminding you that
16 points, which is the default type size,
| | 10:53 | times 3.5 equal 56 points.
| | 10:56 | So the font size for the title will
be 56 points. Very well commented.
| | 11:00 | So you can just select all this copy
and paste it to a text file and try this
| | 11:04 | out with your EPUBs.
| | 11:06 | Design is design and the CSS file
in an EPUB is what drives the design.
| | 11:13 | So I recommend that any time that you
can spend learning more about CSS will
| | 11:16 | improve the quality of your EPUBs.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting spacing in the file| 00:00 | One of the things that designers will
find themselves fiddling around with in
| | 00:04 | the CSS file of an EPUB is the spacing,
the spacing between paragraphs, between
| | 00:09 | heading and subheading, between
image and caption and caption in the next
| | 00:14 | paragraph following that, because
sometimes even though you might be diligently
| | 00:18 | adding space above and space after,
in InDesign it doesn't really translate
| | 00:24 | correctly to the EPUB.
| | 00:26 | So all that is controlled in the
cascading style sheet file and let's take a
| | 00:30 | look that right now.
| | 00:31 | I have expanded SFHistory.epub to a
folder and inside the OEBPS folder we
| | 00:38 | have the CSS file and in this example, we
just have one story found, just the XHTML file.
| | 00:44 | So I am going to select them both
and open them up with TextWrangler.
| | 00:51 | So here's the CSS file and you can
see that I've already gone through and
| | 00:54 | gotten rid of a whole lot of
extraneous CSS code. This is something I talked
| | 00:59 | about in a previous video.
| | 01:00 | What controls the spacing in between
paragraphs is called the Margin setting.
| | 01:06 | Now let's take a look at what this XHTML
file looks like, as it would be viewed in EPUB.
| | 01:11 | Now here's a little tip that I
would like to use, especially for this
| | 01:15 | intermediate proofing.
| | 01:17 | We could go back to the Finder or
Windows Explorer and actually select this
| | 01:23 | folder and then recompress it and
change the extension to EPUB or use one of
| | 01:28 | those cool scripts that I
showed you for Mac OS X.
| | 01:32 | But instead what I found is that if you
preview the XHTML file in a browser then
| | 01:40 | you can get a close approximation of
what it's going to look like in an ereader.
| | 01:44 | Now a program like Dreamweaver, for
example, would be ideal for this in that you
| | 01:49 | can edit the code and then always look
at Design view to see what the XHTML file
| | 01:53 | looks like, so that would be
great if you use Dreamweaver.
| | 01:56 | Also if you use Sigil, that utility that
I showed earlier, you can edit the CSS
| | 02:02 | file without even unzipping the
EPUB file and then look at the built-in
| | 02:06 | EPUBReader to see the effects of your changes.
| | 02:09 | But right now, I am in the
groove of using TextWrangler.
| | 02:12 | So instead what I'm going to do is I am
going to take this XHTML file right here
| | 02:16 | in the Finder and I am
going to preview it in Safari.
| | 02:20 | Now why Safari and why not
Firefox, which I usually prefer?
| | 02:24 | Because both Safari and iBooks, the
Apple ereader, use the same rendering engine.
| | 02:31 | So the closest you can get to
previewing how an EPUB will look like on an iPad
| | 02:36 | without actually having to put it on
the iPad, is to preview the individual
| | 02:40 | XHTML files in Safari.
| | 02:42 | I am just going to drag this over to
Safari and it might open up like this.
| | 02:49 | There are very few ereaders that look
like this, so you might want to resize it
| | 02:53 | to be roughly what it might
look like at 600 pixels wide.
| | 02:57 | And now actually let's take a look at this.
| | 02:59 | I am going to hide the other
applications so we can focus on this.
| | 03:03 | So there's our title in blue and our
subheads in orange, which is how I designed it.
| | 03:08 | We have an image with a black stroke on
it and a small caption below it, which
| | 03:13 | is centered. That's working great.
| | 03:14 | I have some words in bold.
| | 03:17 | My drop cap isn't quite working.
| | 03:19 | We will be talking about that in
another video and we have some indents.
| | 03:22 | But you know the first thing that
strikes me is what the heck happened
| | 03:26 | between these paragraphs?
| | 03:27 | What's all this white space doing?
| | 03:30 | I don't really want that white space.
| | 03:31 | I have first line indents.
| | 03:33 | We'll see what happened was that I
became a little too vigilant in getting rid
| | 03:38 | of what I thought was superfluous code
and at the end of every body declaration
| | 03:43 | here I forgot I got rid of the margin setting.
| | 03:46 | So in CSS if you don't set a margin,
like down here or say underneath the
| | 03:51 | headline, then it's assumed that you
want extra space in between the paragraphs.
| | 03:56 | If you want no bottom margin, you have
to set a margin of zero for the bottom.
| | 04:01 | So let's go ahead and fix that right now.
| | 04:04 | The margins are set in four measures
and they start from the top, so if you
| | 04:08 | think of like the hands of the clock,
12 o'clock, 3 o'clock, 6 o'clock,
| | 04:12 | 9 o'clock, top, right, bottom, left,
and they're all in em measurements which I
| | 04:18 | talked about in previous video. This is
a percentage of the current font size.
| | 04:23 | So zero em means zero.
| | 04:25 | Let's just actually copy this entire
line to the clipboard and I'm going to
| | 04:30 | paste it after body-first and
we don't want that indent there.
| | 04:35 | I don't want any margin top, bottom,
I will leave everything at zero actually,
| | 04:40 | just like that. We want no margin anywhere.
| | 04:44 | And I'll select this whole thing again,
and I'll put it after body, here we go.
| | 04:49 | So then you save your CSS file and then
jump back to Safari for using my method
| | 04:56 | and refresh the view. Just click the
Refresh button up here. Here you go.
| | 05:01 | So it fetched the latest version of
that XHTML file, which in turn fetched the
| | 05:07 | latest version of the CSS file that
hooks into it, and that's how you change
| | 05:11 | spacing in between paragraphs.
| | 05:13 | Now the spacing that is the first line
indent is actually called text-indent and
| | 05:18 | you can see it right over here in p.body.
| | 05:21 | So any paragraph that has been tagged with
the class of body has an indent of one em.
| | 05:27 | If you want to increase that, you can
just do this. Let's say 3ems, save it,
| | 05:33 | I'm pressing Command+S or Ctrl+S here,
jump to Safari, refresh, and you see the
| | 05:39 | first line indents go in.
| | 05:41 | So there's lots of places where you
might want to play around with indents and
| | 05:45 | spacing between captions and subheads
and titles and it's very simple to do.
| | 05:50 | Just use the margin setting
and the text indent setting.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating drop caps| 00:00 | Now, even though you may have been very
careful in your InDesign file to apply
| | 00:05 | the drop cap character style to any
drop caps you may have in there, because you
| | 00:09 | watched my video about nested styles
and you know that just because it was
| | 00:13 | included in a paragraph style doesn't
mean it's going to survive in the EPUB.
| | 00:17 | You actually have to apply the
character style called Drop Cap to that
| | 00:20 | character. Even if you are that careful,
I am sorry, but I can guarantee you
| | 00:25 | that it's not going to look like a
drop cap when you export it to EPUB.
| | 00:28 | At some sort of internal bug in this
version of InDesign. The Drop Cap style
| | 00:33 | does get applied, but the styling
itself you have to do over again by hand.
| | 00:38 | Let me show you what I mean.
| | 00:39 | I have already expanded an EPUB
story called SFHistory-sample.
| | 00:43 | It's a very short story here and inside
the OEBPS folder, we have two files that
| | 00:51 | we want to work on: the
XHTML file and the CSS file.
| | 00:54 | So I've selected them both.
| | 00:56 | I'm going to right-click,
choose Open With > TextWrangler.
| | 00:59 | Now you can open up this with
any text editor that you want.
| | 01:04 | In fact, you don't even have to expand
in EPUB. You could open it up in Sigil or
| | 01:08 | XML Author and there you can also
access the CSS file without having to expand it
| | 01:14 | and then as you save your CSS changes,
you can see what the EPUB is going to
| | 01:17 | look like, but I happen to be
into TextWrangler this morning.
| | 01:20 | So I'm going to use that one.
| | 01:22 | Let me move this over to the center.
| | 01:24 | So let's see what's happening in the
XHTML file and let me soft wrap the text.
| | 01:30 | And you see up here in body-first,
because I did actually apply the character
| | 01:37 | style to the first character L,
it's surrounded by a class style called
| | 01:43 | drop-cap, which was what I created in InDesign.
| | 01:46 | Now if we preview this in a browser--
the Safari browser is the closest one to
| | 01:53 | The iPad so I like to always preview in Safari.
| | 01:57 | We can see that the color is there, but
the droppedness of that cap is not there.
| | 02:03 | So let's see what's happening in the CSS file.
| | 02:06 | I am going to switch to CSS.
| | 02:08 | All of the character styles
will be at the bottom of the list.
| | 02:11 | Paragraph styles come first and all
the character styles start with span.
| | 02:14 | So you can see that for Drop Cap,
all that maintained was the color and I've
| | 02:19 | done a bunch of these and
sometimes it doesn't even maintain that.
| | 02:22 | Sometimes it's just an empty style.
| | 02:24 | So you actually have to add this
yourself. Like if it's a drop cap that's
| | 02:28 | black sometimes it won't include that.
| | 02:30 | So the first thing that we want to do is we
want to increase the size of this drop cap.
| | 02:37 | There is no setting called Drop Cap in CSS.
| | 02:39 | You have to actually add three
or four different attributes.
| | 02:42 | So I am going to hit Return and type
font-size:, space, and we'll make it 3em.
| | 02:53 | And then we end with always a
semicolon. And you might be wondering what is 3em.
| | 02:58 | No, it's not a company.
| | 03:00 | 3em, e-m, is an em space and actually an em is
a unit of measurement for websites for HTML.
| | 03:07 | That is the size of the default font
and in a web browser or a EPUB Reader
| | 03:13 | usually the default font size is
16 pixels, equivalent to 16 points.
| | 03:18 | 3em is three times that size.
| | 03:21 | So if we want a drop cap that's like
three lines big, you know that's going to
| | 03:24 | get us close enough.
| | 03:25 | We're probably going to have to fiddle around
with this, but that's a good place to start.
| | 03:28 | Now you won't see the effect on your XHTML file
until you first save changes in your CSS file.
| | 03:35 | So I'll choose Save and then if you
are using my method of proofing in the
| | 03:42 | browser, you're going to have to click the
Refresh button in your browser. So there it is.
| | 03:47 | That's larger.
| | 03:48 | That's a good sign. And now we actually
need to move it down and get the text to
| | 03:53 | wrap around the right edge of it.
| | 03:54 | So we are going to go back to the CSS file.
| | 03:57 | Now to get text to wrap around,
you use the Float command.
| | 04:03 | I know it's strange, but it's
the closest thing to text wrap.
| | 04:05 | We are going to say float.
| | 04:08 | Now we want the drop cap to float and we
want it to float on the left, all right.
| | 04:14 | So I have float: left.
Semicolon. Save the file.
| | 04:18 | I'm just using the keyboard shortcut to save,
switch to Safari, refresh, there you go.
| | 04:23 | It's getting closer.
| | 04:25 | Now we need to move the L down and we
can do that with a margin-top measure to
| | 04:31 | add some margin above it, so we come back here.
| | 04:34 | You've seen a bunch of different ways
described for creating a drop cap with
| | 04:37 | CSS. This is just one of them.
| | 04:39 | So we'll add a margin-top
measure of 0.25em, quarter of an em.
| | 04:48 | Let's save our change.
| | 04:49 | I'll just press Command+S or Ctrl+S,
jump to Safari, refresh, here we go.
| | 04:55 | Move down a bit and it's kind of touching
the text over here on the right, so we'll
| | 04:59 | add a little margin on the right edge as well.
| | 05:02 | So I come back over here, hit
Return, margin-right, let's try 0.05em.
| | 05:13 | Save. Safari. Refresh.
| | 05:17 | We see how it nudged over a little bit.
| | 05:20 | It's pretty cool, huh!
| | 05:20 | You can keep going.
| | 05:22 | You can change the color, you can make
this bold, you can make it italic, you
| | 05:26 | can increase the size and then you
have to fiddle around a little bit more
| | 05:29 | again with the margin-top to move it down, so if
you wanted to drop down three lines for example.
| | 05:35 | But that's how you create a drop cap
and I really don't know why InDesign can't
| | 05:39 | figure this out when it exports,
but maybe in a future version it will.
| | 05:44 | In the meantime, just remember that it's
pretty easy to create your own drop cap
| | 05:48 | and it's actually kind of fun.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating sidebars and pull quotes| 00:00 | You see this blue box right
here in the middle of the text?
| | 00:04 | For lack of a better term or as a
generic term, I am going to call this a
| | 00:07 | pull quote and it is actually quite
simple to create these kind of pull
| | 00:11 | quotes in your EPUBs.
| | 00:12 | I am previewing an XHTML file from an
EPUB in Safari because both Safari and
| | 00:19 | iBook use the same rendering engine
called WebKit and as I have mentioned before
| | 00:24 | in other videos in this chapter, it is a
good way to preview what's happening in
| | 00:27 | your XHTML and CSS code.
| | 00:29 | I am going to show you how to create
this in CSS, but before we jump over to
| | 00:33 | the CSS and XHTML files, let me tell you
that this is not how it came out of InDesign.
| | 00:39 | When it came out of
InDesign, it looked like this.
| | 00:42 | So it was using a header and it did
have a paragraph, but we didn't see any
| | 00:48 | colored background or a
box or anything like that.
| | 00:51 | And even though I created this in
InDesign by putting this text into a text frame
| | 00:58 | and then I anchored the text
frame in the text flow just like how you can
| | 01:04 | anchor a graphic or an image in a
paragraph, so that it flows with the text so
| | 01:09 | that when you export according to
layout order, remember we talked about that
| | 01:13 | earlier, that it'll appear in
the correct position in the story.
| | 01:17 | So it might have even looked exactly like this
in InDesign, but that's not how it comes out.
| | 01:22 | And again, this is sort of like how
InDesign strips out drop-cap formatting.
| | 01:26 | It strips out object styles because I
actually did create an object style for
| | 01:31 | this frame called pull quote.
| | 01:33 | Now one thing it did do though is
that it brought along the actual tags.
| | 01:38 | So all we need to do is fill it in.
| | 01:39 | So let's see how to do that.
| | 01:41 | I am going to close both of these for
now and I have opened up both files in
| | 01:47 | TextWrangler, our text editing
program, both the XHTML file and the
| | 01:52 | template.css file that governs its formatting,
from the expanded EPUB folder in the exercise file.
| | 02:00 | Take a look about fifth of
the way down the screen now.
| | 02:03 | This is where the image was of the San
Francisco Harbor in 1851 and then below
| | 02:08 | that paragraph we have this thing
called div class="quote-box" and quote-box
| | 02:14 | was actually the name of my object
style that I had applied to that blue text frame
| | 02:20 | that I then anchored in the text flow.
| | 02:23 | When you apply an object style to a
text frame in InDesign, even though the
| | 02:28 | formatting doesn't come across, the
name of that object style does come across
| | 02:32 | and your text is enclosed in this div
class of the same object style name.
| | 02:38 | So it says div class and then we have
the actual paragraphs of text with their
| | 02:43 | own paragraph styles.
| | 02:44 | So I call this quote-head, that was the
name of my paragraph style, and this was a
| | 02:49 | quote-body and then at the end
of that, the div is closed off.
| | 02:52 | So this is one div.
| | 02:54 | Now if we look at the template.css,
here is what InDesign does is that remember
| | 03:00 | how it adds all your divs at the top of
the CSS file and this is one that I've
| | 03:03 | already cleaned up somewhat.
| | 03:05 | It adds the div for your object
styles that you've included, but it doesn't
| | 03:10 | include any kind of formatting and
you have to enter it on your own.
| | 03:13 | That's actually kind of fun, if you
want to play around with CSS, and I do have
| | 03:17 | in the exercise files a finished
version, so you don't have to madly scramble
| | 03:22 | down what I am going to type right now.
| | 03:25 | But let's go ahead and enter in some formatting.
| | 03:28 | First of all, we are going to create a
box or border around those two paragraphs
| | 03:33 | that are in the pull quote and so to
do that you need to give it a style.
| | 03:36 | So I am going to call it border-style: solid,
| | 03:41 | and it can be dotted and all
sorts of fancy styles that you can do.
| | 03:46 | Then I also want to give it
a color. So border-color: grade.
| | 03:52 | Now if you are using a program that's
meant for CSS like Dreamweaver or Coda
| | 03:56 | or something like that, then you will get a big
list of choices as you enter in your CSS codes.
| | 04:01 | But right now, I am just doing it
because I have already tested these and now
| | 04:05 | you want a width for that border.
| | 04:07 | Pretty thick, the default
width, unless you specify something.
| | 04:09 | So I am going to say 1 pixel.
| | 04:12 | Then we will save these changes and
check out what it looks like so far.
| | 04:17 | So as I have done before, I am going
to preview this XHTML file in Safari.
| | 04:23 | I am going to reveal this in the Finder,
right-click, Open With > Safari, and
| | 04:31 | then refresh because I guess I had it
open before, and now we have our box.
| | 04:37 | We need to add some space around
here and then maybe a background color.
| | 04:41 | So to add some space around it,
let's go ahead and add some margins.
| | 04:45 | So I am going to go back to the CSS file
and we will add margin and we are going
| | 04:55 | to go, remember, starting from the
clock at 12, then 3, then 6, then 9, so top,
| | 04:59 | right, bottom, left.
| | 05:01 | So you want 1em and then on the right
3em worth the space, underneath 1em and on
| | 05:08 | the left 3em, and save this.
| | 05:13 | Go back to Safari. Refresh.
| | 05:15 | We have added some margin room there.
| | 05:18 | It is kind of neat how it always keeps
it at 3em, left and right, as you can see.
| | 05:22 | But the text is touching here
and so we need to do a text inset.
| | 05:27 | You would think that they had text inset
in CSS because that's what InDesign is,
| | 05:30 | but no, it's actually called padding.
| | 05:32 | So we are going to add a padding amount.
| | 05:35 | Padding, let's try 0.5em.
| | 05:40 | Remember an em is size of
the type in this element here.
| | 05:44 | So this is going to be half of the
size of whatever the type size is, and
| | 05:48 | save that, refresh.
| | 05:51 | Now that looks better and then
we want to add a background color.
| | 05:55 | So come back here and we
will say background color:, space.
| | 06:02 | There are some default colors like
you can say blue or red or gray and
| | 06:06 | those will work fine.
| | 06:08 | But they're solid colors and if you want
to get a really cool looking color,
| | 06:11 | you need to enter one of these
interesting little hex codes down here.
| | 06:15 | A fast way to find out a hex code, well
there is probably at least 5000 websites
| | 06:19 | that will give you hex codes for
various colors, but I would like to use
| | 06:22 | Photoshop because I
usually always have it open anyway.
| | 06:24 | What you do is you click the bottom-
left down here for the Photoshop Color
| | 06:28 | Picker and then you can use the Color
Picker. Notice it has a hex field right here.
| | 06:33 | So if I am looking for a light blue
color, I would come here to the blues and
| | 06:38 | then come over here and I am watching
this square where it says new color to see
| | 06:43 | the background color that I want to use.
| | 06:46 | Then as I click, notice that the hex
code is updating, so that looks good.
| | 06:50 | I think that's kind of cool.
| | 06:52 | I am going to select that and copy it
and then go to TextWrangler and we are
| | 06:57 | going to paste it in.
| | 06:58 | Now the hex code needs to be
preceded with a number symbol.
| | 07:02 | If you just type in red or gray or black,
you don't need to put the hex symbol.
| | 07:06 | Let's go ahead and save this
and try again in Safari. Refresh.
| | 07:12 | So that's how you can do a pull quote.
| | 07:13 | Now you don't have to think ahead like
how I did make an object style and embed
| | 07:17 | it and things like that.
| | 07:18 | I mean like if you want you
can just edit the XHTML directly.
| | 07:22 | You just have to add div class before
the paragraph that you want to be part
| | 07:27 | of your pull quote.
| | 07:28 | So like I can select this part here. Copy it.
| | 07:32 | Let's try this one right here.
| | 07:33 | So I am going to paste.
| | 07:37 | Then when you are done at the end of it
then you close it with the close div tag.
| | 07:43 | So at the end of this paragraph,
I am going to write </div> and then
| | 07:49 | we will save this file and go back to
Safari and refresh and there is another pull quote.
| | 07:57 | So whether you thought ahead and
created object styles and embedded them in
| | 08:02 | text flow or you decide, hey you know
what, this would look better as a pull quote,
| | 08:06 | you can do it very easily with
some simple edits to the XHTML and the
| | 08:10 | CSS files in your EPUBs.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting text wrap rules| 00:00 | Another way to create interest in your
EPUBs and to call attention to special
| | 00:04 | chunks of text or images is to set them
off with this kind of text wrap effect
| | 00:09 | that we are looking at.
| | 00:10 | Notice that as I resize this
that the text wrap maintains.
| | 00:15 | How do you make that kind of text wrap?
| | 00:17 | Well it's not something that you can do
in InDesign and expect to be supported
| | 00:22 | in the resulting EPUB
without any kind of intervention.
| | 00:25 | Unfortunately, we always hope that the
next version of InDesign will actually
| | 00:29 | convert these correctly.
| | 00:31 | When I actually created this in
InDesign and exported to EPUB, this is after I
| | 00:37 | fiddled around with the CSS.
| | 00:38 | Before I fiddled around with CSS,
it looked like this, all right?
| | 00:42 | So it wasn't too exciting.
| | 00:43 | In fact you don't need to do anything
really in InDesign. If while you're looking
| | 00:48 | at it, you are like you know what this
would look better in a little sidebar box
| | 00:52 | that the text wraps around.
| | 00:54 | You can do it yourself very easily in XHTML.
| | 00:57 | And it doesn't just have to be a
text frame that other text runs around.
| | 01:01 | It could be an image
that other text runs around.
| | 01:04 | So let's take a look at the starting files here.
| | 01:09 | In the Finder, I have in the Exercise
Files we were just looking at the final one.
| | 01:14 | This is an EPUB file that's been
expanded to its component parts and in the
| | 01:19 | beginning we are going to look at the
before version and then I will show you
| | 01:23 | how you can make that interesting runaround box.
| | 01:26 | Inside the OEBPS folder you need to
open up the XHTML file that you want to
| | 01:31 | include that runaround in and the CSS
file. That remember the CSS file has all
| | 01:37 | the formatting instructions.
| | 01:39 | So I am Shift+clicking both of these and
I am going to open them in TextWrangler
| | 01:43 | and you can actually edit these in any
one of your favorite editing programs.
| | 01:48 | I just happen to have TextWrangler open.
| | 01:50 | So first actually let's look at the
XHTML file and let me turn on Wrap Text and
| | 01:57 | we will find this guy. It's down here.
| | 02:01 | It's simply a side-box div and if
you are not into CSS I just said
| | 02:06 | gobbledygook, but this is basically you
surround the text that you want to have
| | 02:11 | in a floating sidebar with a tag called
a div and it has to have a class and then
| | 02:18 | you give the class a name.
| | 02:20 | Now if you had actually embedded a text
frame with an object style in here, as
| | 02:24 | I mentioned in the previous video when
we were talking about pull quotes, then
| | 02:29 | InDesign will automatically add these tags
for you with the same name as the object style.
| | 02:34 | But you don't have to think that much
ahead. You can actually do it right here.
| | 02:37 | You could type in div class= and
then type in anything that you like.
| | 02:42 | And then you close it with a slash
mark and a div at the end of where you
| | 02:47 | want that box to end.
| | 02:48 | There is two parts.
| | 02:49 | You have to have the tags in the
XHTML file and then you have to have the
| | 02:54 | tags in the CSS file and in the CSS file is
where you actually give it some attributes.
| | 03:00 | So that's why it looks so plain right
now, what we were just looking at in
| | 03:03 | Safari, because it has no attributes.
| | 03:05 | So we are going to go ahead and add them.
| | 03:08 | I do have, as you saw, I have the final
version of this in the Exercise Files.
| | 03:12 | So you could always go inside there
and grab that template.css, which has
| | 03:16 | everything I am about to type out here.
| | 03:17 | So you don't have to go crazy, madly
scribbling down everything you are
| | 03:20 | watching on the video as I enter it.
| | 03:23 | But the main thing is that we don't want the
box to take up the entire width of the window.
| | 03:28 | We want it to take up a percentage of
the window and because we don't know where
| | 03:33 | this EPUB is going to be read, on an
iPhone, on a Galaxy, on an iPad, whatever,
| | 03:39 | we can't really specify it in
number of pixels or even ems.
| | 03:42 | We are going to give it a percentage.
| | 03:44 | So we want the width of this box, width,
to be 50%, 30%, whatever you'd like and
| | 03:54 | then here's the magic part
that makes it actually text wrap.
| | 03:58 | It's the float command and if you watch
the video on drop caps that's how we got
| | 04:02 | the text to run around that
letter, by assigning a float to it.
| | 04:06 | So we are going to float this box on the
left. We will do left, but you could do
| | 04:11 | right if you want to.
| | 04:13 | And then we are going to go ahead
and add the same kind of things that we
| | 04:15 | added to our pull quotes.
| | 04:18 | So I am going to say we want a little
line around it because I am a big fan of
| | 04:21 | borders and we'll just say gray border.
| | 04:24 | You could put in any normal color
or you could put in a hex code here.
| | 04:27 | Don't forget your semicolons
at the end and border-style: solid
| | 04:33 | and the width of that border,
because if you forget this they come out
| | 04:38 | really thick and clunky looking. border-width:
| | 04:40 | 1px and now you need to add
some air around this thing.
| | 04:49 | margin, starting from the top of this
box and then at 12 o'clock and then I'm moving
| | 04:55 | to 3 o'clock, 6 o'clock and 9
o'clock, so top, right, bottom, left.
| | 04:59 | We are going to put that we don't need
space above it, so we will just put zero
| | 05:02 | and if it's zero, you
don't even have to write em.
| | 05:06 | Just type a space and we will put on the
right-hand side, remember because it's
| | 05:10 | floating on the left, so on the right-
hand side we want some space and let's try
| | 05:15 | .75em and then we don't need
any other space. That looks good.
| | 05:22 | We want to add some padding.
| | 05:24 | That's like the text-inset if you
remember from the pull quote video. padding,
| | 05:28 | I'll just do 0.5em and let's save our changes.
| | 05:37 | And then we are going to
preview this in the browser.
| | 05:39 | So I am going to select this and right-click
and say Open With > Safari and there it is.
| | 05:48 | I am going to make sure we have the
latest version by clicking Refresh.
| | 05:51 | There is our little floating box nickel.
| | 05:54 | And do you remember how
to make a background color?
| | 05:56 | We want to add a background color.
So if I come over here back to TextWrangler
| | 06:01 | and we want to add one ore
attribute here. Call it background-color.
| | 06:09 | Let's choose an interesting background color.
| | 06:11 | My favorite way of choosing a hex
color is just to jump into Photoshop,
| | 06:16 | assuming it's running.
| | 06:18 | And click on the Photoshop Color
Picker and then from this wonderful Color
| | 06:22 | Picker dialog box, let's try one of
these guys down here like this and then
| | 06:31 | maybe out here a bit and then here is
the little hex code that we need to copy.
| | 06:33 | So you select it, copy it, we can
cancel out of there, jump back to
| | 06:38 | TextWrangler, paste and if you are
using a hex code, you have to put a little
| | 06:42 | number sign or hash symbol in front.
| | 06:44 | Don't forget the semicolon. I can't
tell you how many times I have forgotten to
| | 06:47 | do that. And then choose Save.
| | 06:50 | If you forget the semicolon, it just
ignores what you just typed. And come back
| | 06:53 | to Safari and refresh.
| | 06:56 | So that's how you can make like a
little floating box with text inside it or of
| | 07:01 | course if you are just floating an image,
you don't need to put in any of this
| | 07:03 | border kind of stuff.
| | 07:04 | You just need a width and you need
a float: left and some sort of margin.
| | 07:09 | And it's as simple as that.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating links| 00:00 | Normally if you want somebody who's
reading your EPUB on a ereader device or
| | 00:05 | software to be able to use hyperlinks
inside that story, to be able to tap or
| | 00:11 | click or do whatever to get from on
your linked text to jump to another part of
| | 00:16 | the document or to another website even,
| | 00:19 | that's stuff that you do in
InDesign because InDesign has pretty robust
| | 00:22 | hyperlinks and cross-references features.
| | 00:25 | There are some cautions with that though,
and I talked about them in detail in an
| | 00:29 | earlier video, so make sure and watch that.
| | 00:31 | In fact, as I mentioned in that video
there are some instances especially with
| | 00:36 | cross-references into different
documents of an EPUB, like in this EPUB that I've
| | 00:42 | already expanded inside the OEBPS folder.
| | 00:46 | You can see it has multiple files.
| | 00:48 | Sometimes InDesign doesn't do the job
that it should do when it's blinking from
| | 00:53 | one document to the other and you
actually have to go in there and fix them.
| | 00:57 | Or sometimes you just, you realize, oh I
should've made this into a link. You can
| | 01:00 | do it directly in this file.
| | 01:02 | Now this has nothing to do with the
template.css file, so we are just going to
| | 01:06 | be working directly in the XHTML files.
| | 01:08 | I am going to open all these up in
TextWrangler. Though you know, I think
| | 01:13 | probably the best place to work on
linking in between documents would be a
| | 01:18 | program like Dreamweaver, because
this is just like a website where you are
| | 01:22 | trying to link in between different web pages.
| | 01:24 | But I happened to have TextWrangler
open so I'll just do it right here.
| | 01:28 | So let's say that when somebody is
reading this EPUB that when they get to the
| | 01:31 | phrase Native Americans, that we want
Native Americans to be a link and we
| | 01:37 | wanted to bring them to say the section
on Native Americans which is covered in
| | 01:41 | the arrival chapter.
| | 01:44 | So what you need to do is in front of
the phrase that you want to be a link,
| | 01:48 | you type in this code. You type <a. That
means an anchor link, and a space, then href.
| | 01:57 | That means hyperlink reference. Equals,
no spaces, quotes, and then the URL of
| | 02:03 | where they should go.
| | 02:04 | Now I happened to know that this file,
01-early-history, is at the same level in
| | 02:09 | the same folder as this one.
| | 02:10 | So all I need to do is enter the other
file's name, 03_arrival.xhtml, and if you
| | 02:19 | are using a program like Dreamweaver
you often can just drag-and-drop and point
| | 02:23 | to the destination document.
| | 02:25 | So that's the first part of the link
and notice how our friend TextWrangler is
| | 02:30 | letting us know "Uh, you're not done yet
because you have to close off the link."
| | 02:33 | So it wants to know where does the
link end and so after Native Americans we
| | 02:37 | want to close the link.
| | 02:39 | Why is it still brown?
| | 02:41 | Oh I know why. Because I
forgot to put my closing quote mark.
| | 02:45 | So this is actually going to turn
it into a link and we can see it for
| | 02:48 | ourselves if we save this and then
preview this document in a web browser.
| | 02:57 | So I'll open this up in Safari
and there is Native Americans.
| | 03:04 | Now you can in your CSS apply
a different kind of formatting to your links by
| | 03:09 | making a CSS entry for the a
and the a visited and so on.
| | 03:14 | But most ereaders will go ahead and
give it the default blue color with the
| | 03:18 | underscore, though an iPad I think
doesn't put any kind of text decoration, is
| | 03:22 | what the underscore is, and it colors it
a tasteful of violet or something like that.
| | 03:27 | So it's up to you.
| | 03:28 | But now when somebody clicks this
then it'll automatically open the file
| | 03:32 | that you told it to.
| | 03:33 | So it opens up at the top.
| | 03:35 | Okay, now let's say that we want to
link to a specific paragraph or image in
| | 03:42 | another document or maybe
further down in this document.
| | 03:45 | That requires a two-step process.
| | 03:47 | In addition to creating the link like
we just did here for Native Americans,
| | 03:51 | we actually have to go to the destination
document and at the point where we want
| | 03:56 | this link to end up at, we have to
add something called an anchor tag.
| | 04:01 | Let's say for example, I'm going to
scroll down here a bit, that where Yerba
| | 04:05 | Buena is mentioned, that we want
somebody to be able to jump to where Yerba
| | 04:10 | Buena is discussed in
detail in another document.
| | 04:14 | So I believe that we have
that in the arrival document.
| | 04:18 | So I am actually all queued up there.
| | 04:20 | So kind of far down here we
have it right here, Yerba Buena.
| | 04:24 | So we want somebody to end up at this
location on this document, not just at the
| | 04:28 | top of the document like the link we just made.
| | 04:31 | So first go to destination and
then you want to enter an anchor ID.
| | 04:35 | So you go in front of the word or
paragraph or even an image that you want
| | 04:40 | somebody to end up at and you enter
a id=" and then give it some kind of code
| | 04:48 | word like an anchor word. We'll just
call this yerba and then close that and
| | 04:52 | then at the end where you want them to go,
| | 04:56 | it could even just be a
single space if you want,
| | 04:57 | you have to remember to close that.
| | 05:00 | So we've made our anchor id,
remember it's Yerba, and I am saving changes.
| | 05:05 | Now we are going to go back to early_
history and down here right by Yerba Buena
| | 05:10 | we are going to link to that anchor ID.
| | 05:12 | So you start out by creating a regular
link to the XHTML file, <a href=" and
| | 05:21 | then the XHTML file is 03_arrival.
xhtml and then you add the anchor tag, that
| | 05:31 | word that you just made up, after a hash symbol.
| | 05:34 | So no spaces, just append it to the
end of the URL. yerba, close the quote,
| | 05:40 | close the tag and then
close the actual link like that.
| | 05:45 | Save it and let's preview our work.
| | 05:48 | I am going to preview this in Safari.
| | 05:51 | I'll open with Safari. Let's
close or hide the other applications.
| | 05:58 | I made the window really small.
| | 06:01 | We are going to pretend we are
actually looking at it like on a Nook or
| | 06:03 | something or an ereader.
| | 06:05 | So there is our Native Americans links
and then if we go down here, there is the
| | 06:08 | Yerba Buena and when you click it, boom!
| | 06:11 | You arrive at the new chapter right
with Yerba Buena, right at the top.
| | 06:16 | So that's how anchor links work.
| | 06:18 | Finally, if you just want to make a link
to a website, that's really simple to do.
| | 06:22 | So if you said, "The Spanish found that
Lynda.com is fantastico!" Fantastico!
| | 06:34 | We want somebody when they see lynda.
com to be able to tap it or click on it
| | 06:38 | and it will bring them to the actual
web site, assuming their ereader will let
| | 06:41 | them go to a web site.
| | 06:43 | So we surround lynda.com with the
URL. <a href=" and now we don't need to
| | 06:51 | actually enter this document.
We just want the entire website address.
| | 06:55 | So lynda.com, close quotes, close that
tag, and then close the anchor itself.
| | 07:03 | We'll save it and preview this
in Safari again, there you go.
| | 07:11 | There is lynda.com and you click it and it
starts searching for lynda.com on the web.
| | 07:18 | That's how you create
links and how you fix them.
| | 07:22 | Now the problem with the cross-
reference is that InDesign doesn't do is that
| | 07:27 | often it will just have the ending part,
this little id tag, and it will drop the
| | 07:32 | actual URL for the cross-references.
| | 07:35 | So that's typically the problems that
I've seen, that you actually have to go
| | 07:38 | through here one by one and
add them yourself. What a pain.
| | 07:41 | So, hopefully if you use that Teus de
Jong's script that I mentioned in that
| | 07:45 | chapter about making cross-reference
links InDesign files, then that will
| | 07:49 | save you a ton of time.
| | 07:50 | But otherwise it's very simple to
create any kind of links in the XHTML files.
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|
|
9. Converting EPUB Files to Other ebook FormatsPreparing your ePub for Kindle conversion| 00:00 | Now that you have a validating
perfectly formatted EPUB, guess what?
| | 00:06 | The great news is that you are 95% of
the way done in converting this to a Kindle.
| | 00:12 | Now it's kind of strange that Amazon's Kindle
does still does not take the EPUB format.
| | 00:16 | It doesn't show it.
| | 00:17 | It's got their own proprietary format
known as the MOBI format which I have up
| | 00:22 | here in the example files and the MOBI
format is exactly equivalent to the AZW
| | 00:28 | format in case you've seen that as
well. They are all the same thing.
| | 00:30 | It's kind of funny because actually inside
each one of these files they look very similar.
| | 00:36 | Let's open up our EPUB in Springy,
which is our cool little utility that lets you
| | 00:43 | look at the insides of files without
having to actually extract them so all this
| | 00:47 | looks very familiar to you: the OEBPS
folder, the META-INF folder with the
| | 00:52 | container.xml, and so on.
| | 00:55 | Here is the same exact ebook only for the
kindle and I am going to open up that in Springy.
| | 01:03 | It looks just about the same.
| | 01:04 | There's some different organization
inside here, but that's only because I added
| | 01:08 | these folders myself or I think SQL added those.
| | 01:11 | But for example if we look inside the
MOBI format at the content.opf file.
| | 01:16 | I am going to edit that with
TextWrangler and we'll turn on Soft Wrap.
| | 01:28 | It's kind of the same.
| | 01:30 | It is an XML file. It uses a different
namespace it's called up here, but it's
| | 01:35 | got the same media type and it's got
the same kind of items and you can see
| | 01:39 | there is a manifest and there is
some metadata and there's a spine at the
| | 01:42 | bottom, there is a guide at
the bottom. It's 99% the same.
| | 01:46 | So if you go to Amazon's web site to
their Kindle Direct Publishing portal, that
| | 01:53 | is the name for the program, KDP for
publishers who want to publish to Kindle,
| | 01:59 | you'll see that a lot of their
documentation says, "Okay well what we want from
| | 02:02 | you, writer or a
publisher, is we want an HTML file."
| | 02:06 | Convert your book to HTML using these
guidelines and upload it and we will
| | 02:11 | convert it to MOBI for you. Or if you insist,
it can be a Word document or even a PDF. It's crazy.
| | 02:18 | It wasn't until very recently, maybe
in the last couple of months that they
| | 02:22 | quietly started accepting
EPUBs for conversion to MOBI.
| | 02:26 | As I said, if your EPUB is fully
validating, that's basically what a MOBI format
| | 02:33 | is and they do a very good job of converting it.
| | 02:36 | However, I would not suggest that
you upload your EPUB directly to KDP.
| | 02:41 | Even though they will take it and they
will convert it for you. Because it's
| | 02:44 | always better to preview it on your
computer, because you want to see what it's
| | 02:48 | going to look like once it's on the
Kindle, and that's what this chapter is about,
| | 02:52 | is how do you convert your EPUB to a
Kindle and what kind of things do you need
| | 02:56 | to be aware of before you even convert,
because what you don't want to happen is
| | 03:00 | to upload the EPUB and then have
Amazon kick it back and say "This is
| | 03:04 | unacceptable because there are problems."
| | 03:06 | Now once you join KDP and it's very
simple as you can see. You can just sign
| | 03:10 | in with your own Amazon account if you have
one or go ahead and create one if you don't.
| | 03:14 | It's free and they welcome independent
publishers or publishing companies with open arms.
| | 03:19 | Then you can download a whole
bunch of guidelines and PDFs.
| | 03:22 | They have a very good
forum that you can get into.
| | 03:25 | You don't even have to log in, like
you see I am guest, with lots of very busy
| | 03:29 | forums, all about like how to prep
your file and how you get paid and so on.
| | 03:34 | If you look at those guidelines,
you'll see that there are some formatting
| | 03:37 | issues having to do with the EPUB,
MOBI file, and the CSS itself that you
| | 03:43 | should be aware of.
| | 03:44 | And I kind of pulled out some of the high points.
| | 03:46 | It's definitely not comprehensive, but
things that you should be aware of when
| | 03:50 | you are formatting your EPUB for the
Kindle is first of all every EPUB has to
| | 03:56 | have a standalone cover image and it
has to be exactly 600 pixels wide by 800
| | 04:02 | pixels tall and it has to be a JPEG.
| | 04:04 | So you need to get that cover image
into its own JPEG file and this is
| | 04:10 | actually something that you also need
to do for iBooks, is that they're going
| | 04:13 | to want to know what is the cover
image, but when we talk about actually
| | 04:17 | submitting your ebook to the iBookstore,
they just want to know where is the
| | 04:21 | cover image and then they will go
ahead and write the code for you, if you
| | 04:24 | don't want to do it yourself.
| | 04:25 | But it also has to be
referenced in the content.opf file.
| | 04:30 | So they give you in this guideline
instructions about here are the three lines
| | 04:33 | of code that we want you to enter in
the metadata and then the spine, and I'm
| | 04:37 | going to show you a faster way to
actually do this in a little bit.
| | 04:41 | A navigational table of contents
that you are all familiar with right now,
| | 04:45 | toc.ncx, is required and that's not a biggie.
| | 04:48 | Your EPUB I am sure has one already,
but also they require a content TOC like
| | 04:54 | a first page or some page in the beginning of
the document that has links to the chapters.
| | 05:01 | Because in the Kindle interface there
is a button or a choice that the users
| | 05:05 | press to see that, so they
want that. Ot has to be part of it.
| | 05:08 | If you don't have one, they
are going to kick it back.
| | 05:10 | As far as formatting is concerned,
you may have noticed this if you have a
| | 05:13 | Kindle, but by default all paragraphs
get a first line indent of a quarter inch.
| | 05:18 | If you don't set anything for the text
indent, then that's what's going to happen.
| | 05:22 | So you have to remember in your CSS to
set a text indent of zero, for example, if
| | 05:26 | you don't want them indented or some
other measure, and of course if you don't
| | 05:29 | want it zero then you are going to
have to add some margin space because
| | 05:33 | otherwise you are going to
have this one big block of text.
| | 05:36 | They don't put space in
between paragraphs by default.
| | 05:39 | Also everything is fully
justified, left and right.
| | 05:41 | Now Kindle 1 users, were able to turn
that off. Kindle 2 users are not able to
| | 05:46 | turn that off and who knows
what's happening with Kindle 3.
| | 05:49 | I have heard it says in the
documentation that you can use CSS to overwrite.
| | 05:53 | So you can say the text should be left
aligned for paragraphs in your CSS, but
| | 05:58 | I've also heard that sometimes it
doesn't work. So be aware that.
| | 06:01 | That is an ongoing issue with
formatting your EPUBs for a Kindle.
| | 06:05 | Also float, they don't support float in CSS.
| | 06:09 | So in other words anything that would
use float like say a drop cap and also
| | 06:12 | runaround text wrap
sort of things doesn't work.
| | 06:15 | So let me show you how to add that cover image.
| | 06:18 | I am going to come over here to Finder
where I have a file called fix cover.
| | 06:23 | Now here is my cover.
| | 06:25 | This image is exactly 600x800
pixels and here is my coverless EPUB.
| | 06:30 | I am going to open this with our friend Sigil.
| | 06:36 | One of Sigil's greatest features is
that it saves you from having to actually
| | 06:40 | get in there and write code in those
content.opf and the toc.ncx files.
| | 06:46 | You just have the user interface.
| | 06:47 | For example if you want to add the
cover image, you click in front of the
| | 06:51 | heading of your first file, you go to
Insert > Image, choose your image,
| | 07:03 | right there, and that puts it right on top of the text.
| | 07:07 | Don't worry about it.
| | 07:09 | At this point what you want to do is in
the Images folder over here, you see how
| | 07:13 | it added it to the Images folder.
| | 07:15 | Select it, right-click, and choose
Add Semantics, this is the Cover Image.
| | 07:20 | That actually wrote all the code
that we need in our content.opf file.
| | 07:25 | Finally, with your cursor still
blinking, after this image go back up to the
| | 07:30 | Insert menu and choose Chapter Break
and it creates a new XHTML file and
| | 07:36 | again adds all the information for the
manifest and the spine to the content.opf file.
| | 07:41 | That's the end of story. Then you
can just close it. Isn't it great?
| | 07:46 | So let's see what that looks like.
| | 07:47 | I am going to open up my finished one here.
| | 07:53 | There is the cover image and there are all the
links for the navigational table of contents.
| | 07:59 | So that's very simple. Just a few
things that you need to do to add to your
| | 08:03 | EPUB before we go ahead and convert to
Kindle, which I'll be talking about in
| | 08:07 | the next few videos.
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| Converting with KindleGen and Kindle Previewer| 00:00 | Once you've prepped your EPUB file for
optimal conversion to Kindle, as I said in
| | 00:06 | the previous video you really shouldn't
upload it directly to the Kindle Direct
| | 00:10 | Publishing Portal, even though they'll
take it and they'll convert it for you.
| | 00:14 | It's really better to
convert it on your Desktop.
| | 00:16 | Now there is a wonderful program called
Caliber that is famous for being able to
| | 00:20 | convert formats of ebooks from one
format to the other and that can take an HTML
| | 00:25 | file or an EPUB file and convert it
to MOBI, sometimes even back again.
| | 00:29 | While that's a great program and I
have used it, Amazon themselves is really
| | 00:33 | pushing for users to use
their own conversion software.
| | 00:37 | In fact, they say that in their
publisher's guidelines that only the Kindle
| | 00:41 | converters are officially approved.
| | 00:44 | So, I figured I might as well show you
how those work and they do work very well.
| | 00:47 | If you go to the Kindle Publishing
Programs page at this URL up here, it's kind
| | 00:52 | of hard to find because you know, this
Kindle Publishing Programs there is all
| | 00:56 | different iterations around their site.
| | 00:58 | So take note of that URL because if
you scroll down, this is the hiding place
| | 01:05 | for all their software.
| | 01:07 | So what you want to do is you want
to download first of all KindleGen.
| | 01:11 | This is the actual guts
of the conversion program.
| | 01:14 | It's command line software, meaning it
runs in the CLI interface of Windows or in
| | 01:19 | Terminal of Macintosh.
| | 01:21 | But don't worry, you are not actually
going to have to run it in the command line.
| | 01:24 | But you should download this and
you have to agree to the terms of use
| | 01:28 | and then download for Windows, Linux, or Mac OS
10.5 and above, and it has to be an Intel Mac.
| | 01:36 | Read the installation instructions
because it will tell you to make sure to run
| | 01:39 | your software update.
| | 01:42 | In addition, we have the Kindle plug-
in for InDesign. While we are here.
| | 01:47 | This is a beta plug-in that
actually works quite well.
| | 01:49 | I am going to show how to
use that in the next video.
| | 01:52 | It works with either CS4 or CS5 of
InDesign, so go ahead and download that.
| | 01:57 | Then down here you want to download the
Kindle Previewer 1.5. This is fantastic.
| | 02:02 | This is something that
Apple should have for iBooks.
| | 02:06 | This is an actual previewer for the
Kindle. It converts your images to grayscale
| | 02:11 | just like current Kindles are right
now and you can see it right on your
| | 02:14 | Desktop. We are going to
take a look at that as well.
| | 02:16 | Kindle Previewer works in concert
with KindleGen, that command line stuff.
| | 02:20 | So, download all this,
install it, and then come back here.
| | 02:24 | Now in my Finder here or in Explorer if
you have downloaded the Exercise Files,
| | 02:30 | I have a few versions of the same EPUB file.
| | 02:33 | So we are going to see like you have
your final EPUB, right here we are going to
| | 02:37 | call it stage1, and we're going to
run it through the conversion software.
| | 02:42 | The way to do that is to
start up the Kindle Previewer app.
| | 02:46 | So I am going to go to
Applications, go down to Kindle Previewer,
| | 02:51 | and double-click it.
| | 02:52 | So this is actually, if you have a MOBI
file you could open it right up here and
| | 02:57 | it's going to show you it as
you're looking at it on a Kindle.
| | 02:59 | But we're going to choose Open Book and
point to our EPUB file, stage1, and open it up.
| | 03:11 | What happened?
| | 03:12 | It failed to compile the book.
| | 03:14 | I'm actually going to show you how the
different kind of messages you are going to get here.
| | 03:18 | This is always a sad thing to see, but
you have to click this downward pointing
| | 03:22 | arrow here under Compilation Details to
see if you can figure out what happened.
| | 03:27 | Look over here on the left and scroll
down. You don't have understand everything
| | 03:31 | but it's kind of understandable, but
at the very bottom you'll see Error,
| | 03:35 | The book title was not set.
| | 03:37 | Please call the set_book_title() function.
| | 03:40 | Well actually all you need to do is
open up your EPUB in Sigil or open it up in
| | 03:46 | XML Author and go ahead and add
the book title to the metadata in the
| | 03:52 | content.opf file, something that
we've talked about in a number of videos.
| | 03:56 | Do that and then try again.
| | 03:57 | So I've already done that and here in
the Exercise Files we have added the title
| | 04:05 | to stage2, so we are going to open up stage2.
| | 04:08 | From Kindle Previewer, Open Book
and come back here, stage2, open it up.
| | 04:16 | It has successfully compiled the book.
| | 04:19 | That's always good news but
there are warnings. That's not good.
| | 04:22 | You know it's interesting that it will
compile the book but it will give you
| | 04:26 | warnings that could make Amazon
reject the book after you submit it.
| | 04:29 | So never upload a book that has warnings.
| | 04:32 | Let's see what the warnings are.
| | 04:35 | Scroll down. You can see that it's
adding the metadata where it wants.
| | 04:39 | It's parsing files. Cover.
| | 04:41 | I forgot to specify the cover image!
| | 04:44 | Remember, I showed you how to do that
in the previous video under prepping your
| | 04:47 | EPUB file for Kindle conversion.
| | 04:50 | I have already done that to the
stage3 file, this guy over here.
| | 04:55 | So we are going to go ahead and
open it up and go back to KindleGen,
| | 05:01 | stage3, click Open.
| | 05:04 | It has successfully compiled
the book, nothing about warnings.
| | 05:07 | If you want to check for yourself,
everything looks pretty cool.
| | 05:11 | Just click OK and the output
file has been generated here.
| | 05:15 | It's actually pointing to this folder.
| | 05:17 | Let's actually take a look at it over
here and it opened the book, but I want to
| | 05:21 | show you what it did, is it just made a
little folder and it gives you the date
| | 05:25 | of when I created it.
| | 05:26 | So it's really nice that it gives us those
names for those versions as you're testing.
| | 05:30 | Now let's take a look over here.
| | 05:32 | So notice that it actually changes the
view to grayscale and if you page through
| | 05:37 | the document you can see what
your book looks like on a Kindle.
| | 05:43 | Now there are still a couple
of things missing in this one.
| | 05:45 | I actually made a final one down here.
| | 05:48 | Let's open Kindle Previewer.
| | 05:49 | We want to open up the one in the final folder.
| | 05:53 | So come back over here in final. In
addition to showing the cover, like if you
| | 06:05 | click up here you can see that cover,
then we also have little icons that stand
| | 06:10 | for the linked table of contents.
| | 06:12 | Remember I said that was required for
them, that you need to have a TOC page
| | 06:16 | that you've done yourself with links, and then
also here is a navigational table of contents.
| | 06:21 | So if you have a Kindle, there's a
button that you press to see the TOC and here
| | 06:25 | is navigational table of contents,
and you can click and jump over there.
| | 06:31 | Then under Devices you can say well,
let me see what this would look like if I
| | 06:34 | was looking at Kindle on the iPhone.
| | 06:36 | Aha! So you can see what your formatting is
going to look like and how it's going
| | 06:43 | to change the cover.
| | 06:45 | So it's really cool.
| | 06:46 | You need to download KindleGen and
Kindle Previewer and that's one of the best
| | 06:51 | ways to convert your files
from EPUB to the MOBI format.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the Kindle plug-ins for InDesign| 00:00 | Now I really think it's pretty cool
that you can export to EPUB from InDesign
| | 00:04 | and then use KindleGen and Kindle
Previewer to convert that to a MOBI file.
| | 00:09 | But you know what's even cooler is
being able to export directly from InDesign
| | 00:14 | to MOBI, and in fact Amazon is offering
a beta plug-in for InDesign users.
| | 00:20 | You just have to know where to find it.
| | 00:21 | So if you go to this URL or if you just
find for Kindle InDesign plug-in, this
| | 00:26 | will be one of the top hits.
| | 00:27 | If you scroll down past Download
KindleGen, you'll see this, download the Kindle
| | 00:33 | Plug-in for Adobe InDesign. Right
now it's at version 0.91 in beta.
| | 00:37 | It's been there for a couple months.
| | 00:39 | They have been paying some attention
to it but it's not something they're
| | 00:42 | putting a lot of effort into.
| | 00:44 | Agree to the terms of use and make sure
and read the installation instructions
| | 00:49 | and realize that it only works on CS4 and CS5.
| | 00:53 | On a Mac you have to make sure to
run this security update. There's more
| | 00:56 | information about that. On a PC
you don't need to worry about that.
| | 00:59 | Agree to the terms of use and download.
Notice also it only runs on Intel Mac,
| | 01:04 | so if you don't have Intel Mac I am
sorry, and you have to be running Leopard or
| | 01:08 | Snow Leopard at this time.
| | 01:09 | Anyway you downloaded it, it comes
with an installer, you double-click it, and
| | 01:13 | the same package will install on any copy of
InDesign CS4 or CS5 that you have installed.
| | 01:18 | Pretty simple. And there is an excellent little
guide that you should download in PDF format.
| | 01:24 | But the plug-in itself is nice
and simple. Let's take a look.
| | 01:27 | If I go to InDesign and I have
already installed it, so you can see that it
| | 01:32 | added it here, Export for Kindle, right
next to Export for Digital Editions and
| | 01:38 | in a book, which is what we are usually
dealing with and InDesign CS4, Export for
| | 01:43 | Kindle is also available right here.
Export Book for Kindle. Pretty neat eh?
| | 01:47 | Now this book, California History, is one
that I've dealt with a few times in this
| | 01:51 | title so far, but I want you to notice
that I took out the internal table of
| | 01:56 | contents, which I covered in a different video.
| | 01:59 | The reason is because the plug-in
itself will build that table of contents.
| | 02:03 | Remember it's one of the things that
Kindle really wants in that book and it
| | 02:06 | will create it itself,
which I thought was really neat.
| | 02:10 | So we are just going to go to the Book
panel, choose Export Book for Kindle, and
| | 02:15 | we'll save it right on the Desktop.
| | 02:17 | Do you want to Include InDesign TOC
entries? Of course you do so I am going to
| | 02:21 | say Basic TOC, and where is the cover image?
I already created a cover image for you.
| | 02:26 | It's the 600x800 that they require and
it's in the Exercise Files, so I'll just
| | 02:31 | select that. And then what Title did
you want? We will say California Stories.
| | 02:36 | We want to view the ebook after
exporting and it's going to automatically
| | 02:39 | open in which ever program that we
have set as the default to look at Kindle
| | 02:44 | or MOBI format books.
| | 02:45 | So if you're using Caliber, it's will
open there. If you have Kindle Reader it
| | 02:49 | will open in that one.
| | 02:50 | We'll just see what happens.
| | 02:52 | I'll click Export and it
opened up in my Kindle Previewer.
| | 02:55 | So here is the ebook and as I
page through, it looks pretty good.
| | 03:00 | I can resize and it wraps just like in an EPUB.
| | 03:03 | I can choose let me see the cover.
| | 03:05 | There is the cover.
| | 03:07 | Let me see the table of contents
and here's the table of contents that
| | 03:10 | it created on its own. It works great.
| | 03:13 | But I also like to look at my MOBI
files on the Kindle Previewer, so let me
| | 03:17 | start up that program and
we'll open up that MOBI file here.
| | 03:26 | Here we go, let's hide
everything else to make it nice and clean.
| | 03:31 | So this is as though we were looking at
it on a Kindle like we did in the last
| | 03:34 | video and we can drag to different
locations, and here is the navigational table
| | 03:41 | of contents that it would show if you
pressed whichever secret button the Kindle
| | 03:45 | wants you to press and then here is
the content table of contents that it
| | 03:49 | created on its own.
| | 03:51 | If we want to see what this looks like
at an iPhone for example, we can go up to
| | 03:55 | devices and say let me see what it
looks like on a Kindle for iPhone and it
| | 03:58 | resizes it to the size of the display
on an iPhone, which I think is so cool.
| | 04:03 | So exporting to EPUB and then
converting to MOBI is one thing, but I just love
| | 04:08 | being able to export directly from my
InDesign file right out to the MOBI file
| | 04:13 | and see what it looks like on my Kindle.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Converting for other resellers| 00:00 | Just like Amazon has its own set of
publishing guidelines for the Kindle,
| | 00:05 | other ebook resellers often have their
own publishing guidelines for the EPUB.
| | 00:10 | They all start from the same
point, that it has to be a valid EPUB.
| | 00:13 | You have to go through EPUB Checker, as
I talked about it in the previous video,
| | 00:16 | and it has to pass that test.
| | 00:18 | But sometimes what's valid for the EPUB
Checker is not valid for the reseller.
| | 00:23 | So for example if you want to
resell on the iBookstore, you want to be
| | 00:27 | an iTunes publisher.
| | 00:28 | Apple publishes a very voluminous 60
or 80 page PDF with what's allowed and
| | 00:34 | what's not allowed
inside EPUB beyond validation.
| | 00:38 | For example, you have some ability
to include different font faces.
| | 00:41 | You can include some video and audio
and they have special specifications for
| | 00:46 | the cover, that kind of thing.
| | 00:48 | Now unfortunately you can not see
those publishing guidelines until you
| | 00:52 | actually join the program.
| | 00:54 | It is free for you to join the program
and then you can get and work with them,
| | 00:57 | but because you have to join the program
before you can see them, I can't really
| | 01:00 | show them to you here on the screen.
| | 01:01 | We will be talking a little bit more
about getting involved with the iBookstore
| | 01:06 | as your own publisher in the next chapter.
| | 01:09 | If you want to see publishing
guidelines for other ereaders or sellers like the
| | 01:14 | Sony reader bookstore or the Kobo bookstore,
| | 01:17 | unfortunately they really want to work
with large publishers only. If you have
| | 01:22 | say less than 25 titles then they
want you to use an aggregator and those
| | 01:27 | aggregators very seldom take EPUB files.
| | 01:30 | The only other big major vendor
that is completely open to working with
| | 01:34 | individual publishers is a Barnes &
Noble and the Nook, which is really cool little
| | 01:40 | ereader that comes in many
different sizes and form factors. And there are
| | 01:45 | just a few different kinds of things
that you want to do to you EPUB before you
| | 01:49 | upload it to the Barnes & Noble Nook store.
| | 01:52 | First of all of course you should download
and install the Nook reader for your platform.
| | 01:59 | So for example you can install it on an
iPad. You can install it on your phone.
| | 02:04 | I like this Nook for PC and other
devices, so Mac users we are other devices.
| | 02:11 | You click here, then you can download
it for the Mac and for the Blackberry.
| | 02:15 | Now it's not the same as the Kindle
Preview. You are not going to see what it
| | 02:19 | would look like exactly on the Nook.
| | 02:21 | It's just more of a way to access the
books that you purchase from the Barnes &
| | 02:26 | Noble Nook ebook store on these
devices, because most of the books they sell
| | 02:31 | have DRM, digital rights management.
| | 02:34 | So you can't just send them
around willy-nilly and share them.
| | 02:37 | But it is important that if you want to
EPUBs there, that you have some method
| | 02:42 | of seeing what it's going to look like
and a reader that at least shares some of
| | 02:45 | the same code as the actual ereader device.
| | 02:48 | If you follow the links
to their PubIt bookstore,
| | 02:52 | PubIt is their special program for
smaller publishers and authors to upload
| | 02:58 | EPUBs and they are very open, the Barnes
& Noble people. If you come down here you
| | 03:04 | don't even have to register. You can
learn more about the service, especially,
| | 03:10 | check this out, the Formatting Guide.
| | 03:14 | You could click on the EPUB Formatting
Guide and download a very nice little PDF
| | 03:18 | that gives you some information about
if you want to format your EPUB for the
| | 03:22 | Nook readers. Here's what we suggest.
| | 03:24 | Basically if you have a valid
EPUB already they're good to go.
| | 03:28 | They don't have any special
requirements for the cover but if you have a cover
| | 03:33 | that's been called out separately
like we just did for the Kindle or like you
| | 03:36 | might want to do for the iBookstore,
| | 03:37 | it will be fine with them.
| | 03:39 | They did have a little bit of
information thought that I thought was interesting.
| | 03:43 | Let me show you how we can edit an
existing EPUB to better work with the Nook.
| | 03:48 | Apparently unlike other ereaders, it
doesn't add some margin around the page
| | 03:55 | edges, so your tax will run right up to
the edge of the screen and then they want you
| | 04:00 | to add a little bit of margin around
every page, and they actually give you the
| | 04:04 | CSS code to add to your CSS file.
| | 04:06 | So I'm going to ahead and open up this
EPUB. Let's just open it up in Sigil where
| | 04:12 | we can get to the styles right here. Let me
make this type size larger. The code is this.
| | 04:24 | You hit Return and use the @ symbol
and type page and this is actually a
| | 04:30 | page selector and then we use our usual
bracket, and you want to add some margin settings.
| | 04:36 | And this will add it around the
outside edge of every "page" that the ereader
| | 04:42 | shows the person reading the book.
| | 04:44 | And they suggest margin-top 30 pixels,
not ems, margin-left, 30 pixels, margin-
| | 04:55 | right 30 pixels and then on the bottom,
a little bit less, margin-bottom 20 pixels
| | 05:06 | and movies and then we will just end it there.
| | 05:08 | As far as I can tell, I have
tested the same kind of CSS on an iPad and
| | 05:13 | converting it to a Kindle doesn't
cause any problems. It's completely
| | 05:16 | compliant with the EPUB specs.
| | 05:18 | So this should be good to go and this
will prevent the text in your EPUBs from
| | 05:23 | running up to the edge of a Nook.
| | 05:25 | We will just save it and close it.
| | 05:27 | And then this is what you would submit
to the PubIt account that you have at the
| | 05:32 | Nook bookstore, and if you want to see
what it looks like, here I have downloaded
| | 05:35 | the ereader. We will go ahead and
open it. A Brief History of San Francisco.
| | 05:43 | So you need to give this for the
major retailers that you are going to be
| | 05:49 | distributing your EPUB through. Go
to the web site and nose around and see
| | 05:53 | if they have a set of
publisher guidelines for you.
| | 05:55 | That way you won't run into any
unpleasant surprises when your EPUB looks a
| | 06:00 | little bit off on the different ereader devices.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
10. Distributing Your ebookGetting an ISBN for each edition| 00:00 | Every book that's for sale needs to
have an ISBN, and an ISBN is 13 digit
| | 00:07 | number, nowadays, that's a unique
identifier for books and even book-like
| | 00:12 | products like audio books and it
establishes and identifies one title or one
| | 00:18 | edition from one specific publisher.
| | 00:20 | So if you enhance, for example, a print
version of the book and a digital version
| | 00:26 | of the book you need two
different ISBNs. One for each one.
| | 00:30 | Now I know that those of you listening
who are in the book publishing business,
| | 00:34 | maybe you are just the InDesign people
working for a publisher, you really don't
| | 00:38 | need to worry about this, but I know
that there are a number of people watching
| | 00:41 | this title who are independent authors
or small publishers and maybe have never
| | 00:46 | actually published a book on their own
before and it is important that you
| | 00:51 | purchase your own ISBN and assign them
to your e-books. Even if it doesn't have a
| | 00:56 | print edition, you need one for your e-
book, even if you are just going to be
| | 00:59 | publishing as a PDF. There is this
whole international ISBN organization.
| | 01:05 | The one for the US is Bowker over here
at this URL, www.myidentifiers.com.
| | 01:12 | So if your company or yourself is based
in the US or one of its territories, this
| | 01:17 | is where you purchase an ISBN from
and this is actually very good site.
| | 01:20 | It has got some really good guidelines
over here in the right that you can download.
| | 01:24 | And then to actually get the ISBN you
go over here and choose Buy an ISBN.
| | 01:29 | If you just buy one at a time, it's not cheap.
| | 01:31 | Especially if you are going to be
selling your e-book for something like you
| | 01:34 | know $2.99 or even $9.99, you need to sell
quite a bit to get this. I would recommend
| | 01:40 | that you buy at least a block of 10 if
you can possibly afford it, because then
| | 01:44 | they go way down in price, and if you
create one for the Kindle and one for an
| | 01:48 | EPUB and one for PDF, that's
three different ISBNs right there.
| | 01:52 | So you are probably
going to be using them a lot.
| | 01:55 | It's not required that you buy an ISBN.
I think the only reseller that I will be
| | 02:00 | talking about this chapter they require
you to have your own ISBN is the Apple
| | 02:05 | iBookstore and even then only if you
decide to publish directly through them as
| | 02:10 | an iTunes Connect publisher.
| | 02:12 | You can also get books into the iBook
store by working with an aggregator, which
| | 02:16 | we will be talking about
in this chapter as well.
| | 02:19 | But if you publish your book say
through Amazon Kindle bookstore, it's optional.
| | 02:24 | They can assign your own ISBN number.
Same thing with the Barnes & Noble Nook.
| | 02:28 | It's optional. They can
assign their own ISBN number.
| | 02:32 | Even if you decide to publish your
ebook with the iBookstore using an
| | 02:36 | aggregator, a lot of the aggregators as
third-party companies include the cost of
| | 02:41 | an ISBN number, because they are
buying them I guess in blocks of a thousand.
| | 02:44 | So it's not the same thing as copy
right. Even if somebody assigns their own
| | 02:49 | ISBN number through your book, you
still won the copyright to the book or
| | 02:53 | however you are working at the rights.
| | 02:54 | So they are not really related that way.
| | 02:56 | It's simply a unique identifier for the book.
| | 02:59 | Now if you're not from the US you need
to go to ISBN-international.org/agency
| | 03:07 | and locate where it is the you
purchase your ISBN numbers from.
| | 03:11 | So you just choose a
country from this drop-down list.
| | 03:15 | Let's say I'm from Belgium and I speak
French, then it shows me where should go
| | 03:20 | and the email address and web site.
| | 03:23 | Ah, well I understand that perfectly.
| | 03:27 | But that's what you do to is you go
through the different individual countries.
| | 03:30 | While I was nosing around this
international ISBN website I came upon this
| | 03:35 | wonderful FAQ about guidelines for
the assignments of ISBNs to ebooks.
| | 03:40 | This is really good a really good reading.
| | 03:41 | For example if saying that if you have
published an e-book that has DRM, digital
| | 03:46 | rights management, and an exact same e-
book and exacting format that doesn't have
| | 03:50 | DRM, you need to have two
different ISBN numbers, one for each one.
| | 03:54 | Because an ISBN conveys not just the
exact edition and publisher and title of a
| | 04:01 | book but also the rights
that go along with the book.
| | 04:05 | I think that over here on the homepage
for Bowker one of these links is a PDF of
| | 04:12 | the same thing. Guideline for
the assignment of ISBN to ebooks.
| | 04:18 | So I'm hoping that ISBNs are our not
so much of a mystery anymore and I think
| | 04:22 | you should go get yourself
one. Or a dozen or a few dozen.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Getting your ebook into the Kindle Store, iBookstore, or NOOKbook Store| 00:00 | The three major ebook resellers that
currently welcome independent authors and
| | 00:06 | small-to-midsize publishers to work
directly with them are the Amazon Kindle store,
| | 00:10 | the Apple ibookstore and
the Barnes & Noble Nook store.
| | 00:16 | Now there are other ebook resellers
like the Sony Reader store which is
| | 00:21 | very large, to Kobo bookstore, but
they are more geared to working with
| | 00:26 | larger established publishers who
already have hard covers or physical
| | 00:30 | books listed with them.
| | 00:32 | If you are an independent publisher or
you have fewer than five or ten ebooks
| | 00:36 | that you want to publish and you go to
their website looking for guidelines they
| | 00:40 | have a page up that tells you which
aggregators to work with, they want you to
| | 00:45 | be managed by a third-party;
| | 00:46 | they don't want to deal with you directly.
| | 00:48 | And I'll be talking about working with
an aggregator later on in this chapter.
| | 00:51 | Let's take a look at what's required
out of becoming a direct reseller for each
| | 00:57 | one of these vendors. For example;
| | 00:59 | for the Amazon Kindle store you just
need to go to this URL kdp.amazon.com and
| | 01:07 | it's very simple to get started with,
you just sign-in with your Amazon
| | 01:10 | account if you have one already, and
if you don't, you can set one up on the
| | 01:14 | fly, and then once you get in then
you are able to just upload your books
| | 01:19 | through a very friendly portal.
| | 01:21 | Now we are not able to show what a
lot of these sites look like internally
| | 01:25 | because they're private, but I can
give you some general information.
| | 01:29 | First of all in order to set up the
account you're going to have to fill in a
| | 01:34 | tax ID, that means your Social
Security number or if you're a Corporation you
| | 01:38 | want to register as a company that
means your Employer Identification Number.
| | 01:43 | If you don't have either one of those
or say that you live outside of the US,
| | 01:46 | you can still sell your books through
the Kindle bookstore, but you are going to
| | 01:49 | need something called an
Individual Taxpayer Identification Number.
| | 01:53 | And this is something that most of the
other resellers will also require, and
| | 01:57 | it's actually very simple to get, they
have instructions, I just wanted to show
| | 02:02 | you I jumped over here really quickly,
if you go to the irs.gov and just look
| | 02:06 | for Form W7, that is the form that you
fill out, it's actually pretty simple, I
| | 02:11 | actually downloaded it here.
| | 02:13 | Kind of like the USW9 form, and what
they're going to do is they are just going
| | 02:18 | to give you a nine-digit code that you
can then enter during your applications
| | 02:22 | for the Kindle bookstore or the Apple
iTunes ibookstore, and all they really
| | 02:27 | want to know is you know where do you
live, why do you need this, and are you
| | 02:31 | who you say you are?
| | 02:31 | They are going to want a photocopy of
your passport or something like that.
| | 02:35 | There's full instructions here, but
I've talked with a number of people who
| | 02:38 | have filled this out because at first
it was very off-putting and they said
| | 02:41 | it's actually not that big of a deal and we
are able to get their ITIN number in a few days.
| | 02:46 | So let's go back to Kindle Direct Publishing.
| | 02:49 | Even if you have not yet become a
member of KDP you can go ahead and find out
| | 02:54 | more information about how it works
and you can get to the Community forums,
| | 02:58 | it's actually pretty robust.
| | 02:59 | When you do have your EPUB ready they
will take it in either EPUB or MOBI format
| | 03:05 | or actually just about any other kind
of format HTML, DOC, but of course what's
| | 03:09 | great is that they will take your EPUB format.
| | 03:11 | You're going to ask for some metadata
like the title, the description, you have
| | 03:16 | up to 4000 characters to enter description.
| | 03:19 | The author, the contributors, when it
was published, and ISBN is optional, if
| | 03:24 | you don't have an ISBN, they will
assign one for you, to use, just for the
| | 03:28 | Kindle edition, and they want to know
if it's public domain or if you have
| | 03:32 | publication rights, and it's just like
a little checkbox, so you can actually
| | 03:35 | put together something that's
public domain on the Kindle bookstore.
| | 03:39 | Then the royalty rates are pretty well
known, it's 70% to you as the publisher
| | 03:44 | and they keep 30%, they actually do
charge a little bit for downloads, so that
| | 03:49 | if you have a huge book, it might be a
few cents, it's going to be deducted.
| | 03:53 | And by the way that 70% split 70-
30 is only for ebook that you price
| | 03:59 | between $2.99 and $9.99.
| | 04:03 | If it's less than that or more than
that, then the royalty rate goes to 35%.
| | 04:08 | So all this as detailed in the Terms and
Conditions and Pricing Guidelines, I am
| | 04:12 | just sort of giving you currently as
I am recording this what the deal is.
| | 04:16 | Let's just review that really quickly.
| | 04:19 | So with the Amazon Kindle store, this
is where you go to apply, they need your
| | 04:23 | tax ID, they're going to pay you the
royalties by the way by an electronics fund
| | 04:27 | transfer or by check.
| | 04:30 | So this is actually important because I
have talked with some other publishers
| | 04:32 | who they really prefer working with
Kindle because they are the only ones who
| | 04:36 | don't require a US bank account, they
will be happy to send you check, of course
| | 04:39 | they seem to find and print,
it will cost $8 per check.
| | 04:42 | And then if you want to read the
Publishing Guidelines PDF I have seen it linked
| | 04:46 | to publicly, so here is the URL if you
want to grab it, and it's just basically
| | 04:50 | like how to set up your EPUB or your
HTML files in order to make the best
| | 04:54 | looking Kindle edition possible.
| | 04:57 | Let's talk about the Apple iBookstore.
| | 04:59 | If you want to work directly with
Apple you might want to come here first,
| | 05:03 | this is the FAQ for book publishers,
and I think I showed this page in another
| | 05:07 | video and the very first question is
how do I apply, and there is a link
| | 05:11 | directly to the application.
| | 05:12 | The application is done completely online;
| | 05:14 | it's not onerous at all.
| | 05:16 | And then it also has a link to aggregators.
| | 05:19 | So if you'd rather not go through the
hoops and it is kind of technical actually
| | 05:25 | of uploading your ebooks to the Apple
iBookstore, a little bit more difficult
| | 05:30 | than the Kindle or the Nook, then you
might want to work through an aggregator.
| | 05:34 | So if you click here you will see a
list of Apple-approved aggregators, these
| | 05:38 | are third-party companies who have been
approved by Apple to take your EPUBs and
| | 05:43 | then get them onto the iBookstore
and you can click through to here.
| | 05:46 | We are going to really talk about
aggregators in more detail later.
| | 05:49 | But let's say that you actually do
want to apply, so you click that Apply
| | 05:53 | button, you brought here to this page where it
says, what kind of thing do you want to sell?
| | 05:59 | And you choose Books, and click
Continue, and then it tells you the technical
| | 06:05 | requirements and this -- I know
it's surprising to a lot of people, but
| | 06:08 | technically you have to have a
Macintosh to publish on the iBookstore, because
| | 06:13 | in order to upload your EPUBs and
filling all the metadata, it's an Apple
| | 06:17 | Macintosh application, it's not
something you do online, which is how the Kindle
| | 06:22 | handles it and how Barnes & Noble
and lot of the aggregators handle it.
| | 06:25 | It's an actual standalone application
that requires an Intel Mac an operating
| | 06:29 | system 10.5 or later.
| | 06:31 | I have talked with some publishers
who are completely PC-based and they are
| | 06:34 | like, we have to buy a Macintosh
just to work with the iBookstore.
| | 06:38 | The iBookstore does require that you
have an ISBN for every EPUB that you upload
| | 06:43 | to them and of course they want you
to deliver it in EPUB format they will
| | 06:47 | accept no other format and it has
to pass EPUB check, this is the EPUB
| | 06:52 | validation that I talked
about in a couple of videos.
| | 06:55 | So you fill the application and give
them your tax ID number and all that stuff
| | 07:00 | and once you're accepted which should
take just a few days you're given a URL
| | 07:04 | where you can login and access
what's called the iTunes Connect portal.
| | 07:09 | It has links to report, and you can
download iBookstore EPUB templates, it has a
| | 07:13 | Publisher User Guide PDF with sample
EPUBs, it has lots of interesting EPUB and
| | 07:19 | CSS coding information to like include
fixed layouts in your EPUBs for the iBook
| | 07:25 | application, I will just announced
this past week and/or multimedia you can
| | 07:29 | actually include video and sound in your EPUBs.
| | 07:33 | But that will only work with the
Apple iBookstore with EPUBs for the
| | 07:36 | iBookstore edition.
| | 07:37 | So you get a lot of great
information once you get accepted and then
| | 07:40 | unfortunately I can't share any of these
URLs with you because they are all private.
| | 07:44 | But they do have a similar very generous
kind of revenue-sharing model as the Kindle.
| | 07:51 | It's 70% royalties for books, there is
no 70% just in this one range and then
| | 07:56 | less in other ranges, it's just like
how it is if you're selling apps for the
| | 08:00 | iPhone or something, it's 70%.
| | 08:03 | You can even set a price to zero, if
you want people to be able to download a
| | 08:06 | free EPUB that you publish.
| | 08:09 | The royalties that they payout to you
are paid by Electronic Fund Transfer only.
| | 08:13 | So it is required that
you have a US bank account.
| | 08:16 | And again so if you are an
international publisher then you might want to
| | 08:20 | just use an aggregator.
| | 08:21 | The other reseller is the Barnes & Noble
Nook store and it's really friendly and
| | 08:27 | accommodating for independent authors
and publishers, they of course have other
| | 08:31 | programs for the big publishers but
for the vast number of people who are
| | 08:36 | getting all into digital publishing
of their own books or they are small
| | 08:39 | publishers who are converting their
books to EPUB, this is very nice little
| | 08:44 | portal called PUBIT.
| | 08:46 | And all you need to do is login down
here to create an account and you have to
| | 08:51 | have a Barnes & Noble account, again
it's just like an Amazon account, if you
| | 08:54 | don't have one you can create one on the
fly, and the only thing different about
| | 08:57 | applying for the Barnes & Noble
reseller account is that they want your credit
| | 09:01 | card number, because they said if
people return ebooks then they might have to
| | 09:06 | actually charge you, but basically
it's the same as what it was for us.
| | 09:10 | It's like a combination of the iTunes
and the Amazon requirements in that, an
| | 09:15 | ISBN is optional, you don't have to
purchase an ISBN, they can assign one for
| | 09:19 | you, but you do need to have a tax ID
number and you do need to have a US bank
| | 09:24 | account because everything is just
paid by Electronic Funds Transfer.
| | 09:27 | So I have summarized this on this slide.
| | 09:31 | This is where you go to apply, you can
only upload an EPUB format again, and
| | 09:36 | they have very nice guidelines for how
to prep the EPUB for them which I talked
| | 09:40 | about in the previous video.
| | 09:41 | And then their royalty breakdown you
get 65% royalties for books that are
| | 09:46 | priced from 299 to 999, and
otherwise it's 35% for things that are more
| | 09:51 | expensive and less expensive.
| | 09:53 | All these places have pricing guidelines
that you really need to look at because
| | 09:56 | they want to make sure that the price
that you set for your digital books are
| | 10:00 | not higher than your setting for print books.
| | 10:03 | Some of them say, they have to be at
least 20% less and they have all sorts of
| | 10:07 | these breakdowns, but it's
all spelled out pretty well.
| | 10:09 | Whether you work with the Kindle store,
the Apple iBookstore or the Barnes &
| | 10:14 | Noble Nook store, it's pretty neat
being in-charge of your own destiny that way
| | 10:18 | being your own publisher.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using third-party aggregators| 00:00 | Setting up individual publisher
accounts with Apple and Amazon and Sony and
| | 00:07 | Barnes & Noble and whoever,
that's not the only way to go.
| | 00:10 | A very good option that you might
consider is working with a third party and
| | 00:13 | whatvare known as aggregators and
aggregators are, just like the name implies, they
| | 00:19 | aggregate all of the mom and pop sort
of publishers and they systemize them and
| | 00:25 | manage them as a service to the large
resellers. And they take a little cut or
| | 00:31 | they charge a little fee and
they make both people happy.
| | 00:34 | They make the independent publishers
because they take care of all the hard
| | 00:37 | behind the scenes stuff, they make it
nice and easy for people aren't really
| | 00:40 | into this, and they make it very easy
for the large publishers because the large
| | 00:46 | publishers can rely on them for
sending in quality product and taking care of
| | 00:49 | things, doing all the tech
support and that kind of stuff.
| | 00:52 | So it's an option. In fact on Apple's
website if you apply for an iTunes account
| | 00:58 | and they reject, you they will send
you to this URL or even during the
| | 01:02 | application process they are like "Yyou
know you might want to consider just
| | 01:06 | using an aggregator."
| | 01:07 | So this list here is what they'll
point you to and it shows the different
| | 01:11 | services that are approved
aggregators for the iBookstore to apply.
| | 01:16 | They can all create an EPUB, which kind of
defeats the purpose of ours right, for this title.
| | 01:21 | So we don't care about this column.
They help manage all the metadata, they can
| | 01:25 | help you create multimedia EPUBs, and so on.
| | 01:29 | You know, the thing is though that
this list of aggregators keeps changing.
| | 01:32 | Six months ago there were whole bunch of
other names on here and they're gone and it is a mystery
| | 01:38 | in the industry as to why like for
example one of the biggest ones, there was
| | 01:42 | Lulu Books and there is still a way to
use Lulu to get your books on the iPad.
| | 01:46 | I am going to show you that in a minute.
| | 01:48 | So you are not really limited to only
these Apple approved aggregators as far as
| | 01:52 | I know and unfortunately they are not
that friendly to independent publishers
| | 01:58 | who want to supply their own EPUBs.
| | 01:59 | They are more for like an
independent author, like Smashwords.
| | 02:03 | Smashwords is a very cool company.
| | 02:05 | They've been around for a while.
| | 02:07 | You come to this beautiful webpage, how
to publish e-books in the Apple iPad,
| | 02:13 | iBook store and if you scroll down
you'll find this sentence over here that
| | 02:18 | stopped me in my tracks, "Your book
must be uploaded to Smashwords as a
| | 02:22 | Microsoft Word doc file."
| | 02:24 | No, you can not upload a PDF or EPUB
or MOBI as your source file. What they do
| | 02:31 | is they give you this fantastic
Microsoft Word template and as long as you only
| | 02:35 | apply the styles in the template
and use the fonts and all of the other
| | 02:39 | instructions, then they take that Microsoft Word
file and they run it through the meat grinder.
| | 02:46 | So that is one of the aggregators, which
is really not what we're interested in.
| | 02:51 | If you go to one of the older
aggregators, which as far as I know they're still
| | 02:54 | working, like Lulu.com they were very
well known for doing print on-demand books.
| | 03:00 | So you could sent them a PDF or even
a Microsoft Word document and choose
| | 03:03 | different designs for the cover in
the interior and then send people to a
| | 03:07 | Lulu.com link. Somebody buys your book,
lulu.com will charge $20 for the book and
| | 03:13 | then give you eight, and they
only print as much as people order.
| | 03:16 | So they have gotten into the digital
publishing realm as well. In fact they can
| | 03:20 | be a big help in giving your help in
giving your books on to the iBookstore.
| | 03:23 | So this is what they offer. They include
ISBN; you don't have to get an ISBN number.
| | 03:27 | They do sales reporting, they do the
document conversion to EPUB if you want, though
| | 03:32 | they will accept an EPUB.
| | 03:34 | But down here you will find out like
as a publisher if you have your own ISBN,
| | 03:38 | you want to a little bit more control,
you have to have at least 25 titles good
| | 03:41 | to go. Otherwise you got to come
over here and use For Authors.
| | 03:44 | But whether you are an author or
publisher because it's the same. lulu.com takes
| | 03:50 | 20% of the money that
Apple gives you as royalties.
| | 03:55 | So they handle all of the stuff about
getting your book into the iBookstore and
| | 04:00 | they handle all the math and reporting
stuff with the iBookstore with Apple,
| | 04:04 | then your account is with lulu.com and
you find out how much money the royalties
| | 04:09 | were coming in from the iBookstore.
lulu.com icon takes 20% automatically and
| | 04:14 | then sends you a check or does an
electronic file transfer and so on.
| | 04:17 | But it's kind of neat because your
content is there and should you decide to
| | 04:21 | actually publish a print book, they're
good to go to help you out with that.
| | 04:24 | So it's actually a pretty cool company.
I just wanted to point out that there
| | 04:27 | are many e-book aggregators and I
think it's worth it to you investigate this
| | 04:32 | for a little while and
check out what they offer.
| | 04:35 | Like this company Bibliocore.
| | 04:37 | These people are so nice. They are right upfront.
| | 04:40 | I like the plain English language on
their webpage about how does it work,
| | 04:44 | how much does it cost.
| | 04:46 | If you want to send them an e-book to
get on the iBookstore, it would have to
| | 04:49 | be on EPUB, have no unmanifested files,
and that means-- I am sure you all know
| | 04:54 | what the manifest is.
| | 04:55 | It's part of the content.OPF page.
It lists all files that are in the EPUB.
| | 05:01 | So don't want to have any extra images, for
example, that are not listed in the manifest.
| | 05:05 | It has to have an ISBN
number and it has to be valid.
| | 05:09 | It has to pass EPUB checks and so on.
| | 05:11 | Now these people they don't charge or
cut of the profits What they do is they
| | 05:15 | charge so much per year and then
less than that for successive years.
| | 05:19 | Unfortunately they don't say on their
website, they are not upfront with exactly
| | 05:23 | how much they charge. They want you to
submit the application but I did talk with
| | 05:28 | them and it's pretty decent.
| | 05:31 | One of similar to them is called
BookBaby and these people do say exactly how
| | 05:34 | much they charge right upfront.
| | 05:35 | Right now they have reduced the price
to $99 a year. That's for the first year.
| | 05:40 | That's per book and then after that
if you want to keep the book going with them,
| | 05:43 | then it's like $19 year or nine
dollars year and you can find out more here but
| | 05:48 | what I like is that you can upload an EPUB
but they will also make it available for
| | 05:53 | the Kindle and the Nook and Sony Reader.
| | 05:55 | So they are an aggregator for the
Sony Reader bookstore and they have a
| | 05:59 | very nice e-publishing guide that you might
want to download and learn some things from.
| | 06:03 | So if you are considering going with
an aggregator, I think it's worth your
| | 06:06 | time to investigate at least two or
three of these companies. You want to make
| | 06:10 | sure that they can take your EPUB file
and that they have a good track record
| | 06:14 | of being honest and upfront with all
the authors and publishers that they work with,
| | 06:18 | that they are responsive to
your enquiries, and that they have been
| | 06:21 | around for a while.
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| Selling from your own web site or ecommerce site| 00:00 | There is nothing forcing you to sell
your EPUBs or your ebooks on a reseller
| | 00:06 | site or having to be exclusive on that
site, unless their terms and conditions
| | 00:10 | say that it has to be exclusive.
| | 00:12 | You can always sell it on your own website.
| | 00:14 | So create your EPUBs and write up some
instructions for people about how to read
| | 00:18 | the EPUB, point them to some ereaders, or to
Ibis Reader or something like that. Sell it yourself.
| | 00:25 | You don't even have to be a programmer.
| | 00:27 | You can use a service like eSellerate
that we're looking at right now on screen.
| | 00:32 | eSellerate is a website where a lot of
small independent software developers
| | 00:36 | will sell their plug-ins, and extensions,
and scripts and things, because it is
| | 00:40 | very easy for an independent
user to get started with them.
| | 00:43 | You upload your files to them. They
have pretty good user interface for
| | 00:46 | assigning an SKU and
assigning discount codes and so on.
| | 00:50 | And then you just link to the
eSellerate site and create your own store.
| | 00:54 | I'll show you a couple of examples in a bit.
| | 00:56 | A competitor of the eSellerate that
you may have already used is Kagi.
| | 01:00 | Kagi is often used to sell software, but
both these places can sell anything digital.
| | 01:05 | So either use eSellerate or Kagi or
another solution provider, any kind of
| | 01:10 | ecommerce provider that has the
ability to store digital media, so that when
| | 01:16 | people purchase it, they can
download it from that site.
| | 01:18 | That's what you're looking for.
| | 01:20 | I did a search on Kagi and I found
that here is an example of somebody who is
| | 01:23 | selling EPUBs using the Kagi store.
| | 01:27 | The system lets you modify what the
store looks like quite a bit and really
| | 01:31 | customize it or you can even integrate
it into your own website if you'd like,
| | 01:35 | rather than sending
somebody to an outside service.
| | 01:38 | Here is another publisher that's using
eSellerate, Take Control, and here's
| | 01:42 | their catalog. So they're just starting
to move to from PDF to also offer EPUBs.
| | 01:49 | But if I click here, Take Control of
Working with Your iPad, to the actual
| | 01:54 | book page where we have lots of great
information and if we want to buy this,
| | 01:59 | you click Buy eBook.
| | 02:00 | And it brings you to the eSellerate
store page, where the purchaser can enter in
| | 02:06 | their name and their credit card
number and then download the ebook.
| | 02:10 | In fact, on their blog that I co-host,
indesignsecrets.com, we have a store here
| | 02:15 | where we're reselling PDF
ebooks in our eSellerate store.
| | 02:19 | So if you want to purchase this book
than you just find the link to purchase it,
| | 02:25 | and it brings you right to our
eSellerate store with a full description and
| | 02:29 | buttons to buy it and so on.
| | 02:30 | So once you have your EPUB ready,
you're not beholding to these resellers.
| | 02:35 | You can go ahead and start
selling it immediately on your own.
| | 02:37 | Kagi and eSellerate, they normally
don't charge any kind of fee to get started with.
| | 02:41 | They just take a percentage or
a few cents from every transaction.
| | 02:45 | So it's a really great way to set up
your own ebook store on your own web site.
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11. Keeping Up with the FieldNext steps| 00:00 | Well thank you so much
for sticking through this.
| | 00:03 | We tried to cover everything about
EPUBs and Kindle publishing as of today.
| | 00:09 | We are at the very beginning of this
digital publishing revolution and I'm sure
| | 00:15 | that five months from now there's going
to be all sorts of new things that we can do
| | 00:18 | with CSS and EPUBs and new tags
they support and ways to sell it.
| | 00:23 | So let me tell you about more resources that
will help you keep up to date with his field.
| | 00:27 | First of all on lynda.com there are some
really great video titles on CSS and as
| | 00:33 | you have learned, CSS is a big part
of EPUB and Kindle format publishing.
| | 00:38 | So there is a good one called creating
a CSS Style Guide: Hands-on Training and
| | 00:43 | id you're working with Dreamweaver
it will apply to any kind of CSS that you
| | 00:48 | are doing, not just Dreamweaver CSS.
| | 00:50 | There's another one called CSS Crash
Course by SitePoint and though it's a little old,
| | 00:55 | I think this looks like a very
accessible course for people who are not
| | 00:57 | familiar with CSS at all.
| | 00:58 | How to format text, what is a
selector, what's inheritance, all that
| | 01:03 | stuff applies to EPUBs.
| | 01:05 | Another video on lynda.com is from my
friend Jim Maivald who do this great
| | 01:10 | video on publishing workflows with XML and XML
is very closely associated with the EPUB format.
| | 01:19 | All those files were XML files and then
of course we were dealing with XHTML files.
| | 01:23 | So if you want to go a little bit
further in setting up some sort of automated
| | 01:27 | production that would result in EPUB
you would definitely want to start with
| | 01:31 | learning about XML and InDesign right here.
| | 01:34 | Outside of lynda.com, here are some
other places where you can keep up to date
| | 01:38 | in this quickly changing field of ours.
| | 01:41 | One of my favorite ones is on twitter.com.
| | 01:43 | Now even if you don't tweet, even if
you don't have an account, you can go to
| | 01:48 | search.twitter.com and do a search
for this hash tag EPRDCTN. It stands for
| | 01:55 | eproduction and this is what
everybody's posting links and asking questions
| | 02:01 | about creating ebooks and Kindle
books and EPUBs and all sorts of stuff from
| | 02:07 | the very geekiest to just selling or
working for a publishing company, and
| | 02:11 | you're in charge of this a lot of stuff,
about metadata, a lot of talk about ISBN
| | 02:16 | numbers and resellers.
| | 02:18 | So this is a wonderful place to get
more information to ask questions.
| | 02:23 | And a resource is that I've mentioned a few
times during the course of this title is
| | 02:27 | mobileread.com. I have talked
about their forms and also their wiki.
| | 02:32 | Their wiki if you remember was the place
where it had listed every single ereader
| | 02:36 | device and their pixels and their resolution.
| | 02:38 | This is like a volunteer organization
that people just post all the information
| | 02:43 | they can and also the forms themselves
are a fantastic places, whether you are
| | 02:48 | simply a consumer or an author or
especially though, if you keep going down here,
| | 02:55 | you want to learn about ebook software.
| | 02:57 | So for example, Caliber a fantastic
program for converting from one format to
| | 03:01 | another and that's also an ebook
library manager, they do all their support here.
| | 03:06 | And so does Sigil, which I used many
times during the course of this title.
| | 03:10 | EPUBReader is a Firefox add-on that
I demoed and then there's this whole
| | 03:14 | section called ebook formats with all
these different informants that we been
| | 03:18 | talking about and a place to ask your
questions among other colleagues who are
| | 03:22 | dealing with the same issues as you
are and they may have already learned how to
| | 03:25 | solve those problems.
| | 03:26 | This is a fantastic resource and I
hope to see you there. mobileread.com.
| | 03:32 | I know that I mentioned a number of
times Three Press Consulting. These are the
| | 03:36 | people who have the website where you
can upload your ebook for validation and
| | 03:40 | they also came up with the
Ibis Reader, online ebook reader.
| | 03:43 | They have a great blog. Liza Daly is one
of the owners of Three Press consulting.
| | 03:48 | She's a luminary in her field and
this is the blog that I check daily.
| | 03:52 | I want to see daily what Daly is writing about.
| | 03:56 | Another blog that I always
check is Pigs, Gourds and Wikis.
| | 03:59 | Don't ask me why Liz called at that, but
this is another. Liz Castro wrote a book
| | 04:05 | called EPUB Straight to the Point,
which is all about how to create EPUBs from
| | 04:09 | Adobe InDesign and Microsoft Word.
| | 04:11 | And she's a coder through and through.
| | 04:13 | She's well known for writing the
HTML, XHTML, and CSS Visual QuickStart
| | 04:18 | Guides for Peachpit Press.
| | 04:20 | She has got a really great blog where
when she discovers something new, then
| | 04:23 | she will write about it with really
good captions and sample files . She's a huge
| | 04:28 | help and a huge asset to our industry.
Liz Castro's blog, pigsgourdsandwikis.com.
| | 04:34 | Finally don't forget to keep up with
me on indesignsecrets.com where I try to
| | 04:39 | write posts having to do with EPUB and
everything else having to do with InDesign.
| | 04:43 | If you come to indesignsecrets.com and
you go to blog posts, you will see we have
| | 04:46 | a section just for EPUBs,
so check that out as well.
| | 04:50 | So thanks again everybody and
I hope to see you again soon!
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