IntroductionWelcome| 00:05 | Hi! I'm Anne-Marie Concepcion, and this is
InDesign CS5.5 To EPUB, Kindle, and the iPad.
| | 00:12 | This course covers the complete
eBook workflow for getting your InDesign
| | 00:17 | contents into a number of
devices and EPUB reading software.
| | 00:21 | From determining which format you're
planning on using, then setting up the
| | 00:25 | original InDesign file to make it EPUB-
friendly, to tinkering with the final
| | 00:30 | EPUB in a variety of utilities like
TextWrangler and oXygen Author, to putting
| | 00:36 | the final file out there for
publication through Amazon's Kindle, Apple's
| | 00:40 | iBookstore, and plenty of
third-party sites and options.
| | 00:45 | I'll show you some specifics like
setting up the images and other graphics
| | 00:49 | for best presentation in an EPUB,
adding and editing metadata and alt tags to
| | 00:54 | your files, and building custom table of
contents and covers for your final presentation.
| | 01:00 | eBook publishing is a great way to
get your work to your waiting audience.
| | 01:04 | So let's get started with
InDesign CS5.5 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.
| | 00:12 | Sometimes the exercise files are just an
InDesign file. Just open that up in InDesign.
| | 00:16 | A lot of times the files that we're
using are EPUB files and they are opening up
| | 00:22 | in my default EPUB reader,
which is Adobe Digital Editions;
| | 00:25 | probably the same thing for you.
| | 00:27 | During the title I'll be letting you
know where to download all these different
| | 00:30 | utilities that we'll be using.
| | 00:32 | And when we actually get into editing
the contents of EPUB files, then you'll
| | 00:37 | see that we're dealing with a lot of
text files like HTML files and XML files.
| | 00:42 | You can use any kind of
text editor that you'd like.
| | 00:45 | I bounce around between a
few of my favorite ones.
| | 00:47 | If you don't have access to the
exercise files, you can follow along from
| | 00:51 | scratch or with your own assets.
| | 00:53 | Let's get started.
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1. eBook OverviewWhat's 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 web site.
| | 00:37 | A book can even be a web site;
| | 00:38 | that would be an eBook as well.
| | 00:40 | But I think when people think about
eBooks, they're thinking of certain formats.
| | 00:44 | And the three main formats, I
have up here on the screen.
| | 00:48 | It's the same book;
| | 00:49 | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
which is in the public domain now, and it's
| | 00:54 | 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 a MOBI file might be more familiar to you
as a Kindle file. This is the Kindle format.
| | 01:09 | PDF, I'm sure, is very
familiar to you what a PDF is.
| | 01:12 | And an EPUB might be 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're 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. It has
got great looking titles, and great
| | 01:59 | looking images, and wraps, and things like that,
but essentially a PDF is like a frozen page.
| | 02:04 | Now let's come back
here and talk about an EPUB.
| | 02:07 | 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 reflowable format.
| | 02:22 | If I make the screen smaller or larger,
look at the line endings. They're changing.
| | 02:28 | The type isn't changing, the size of
the type isn't changing, but the line
| | 02:31 | 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 that's
| | 02:42 | critically important.
| | 02:43 | If you tried to read that big old
PDF on a little iPhone, it might be
| | 02:48 | impossible, because the type would be
too small to read, or you'd constantly be
| | 02:52 | scrolling from line to line.
| | 02:54 | I can have this eBook open on an iPhone;
| | 02:56 | here I have it opened 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 a Kindle format.
| | 03:04 | And if I go from page to page, you can
see that this is what the eBook would
| | 03:09 | look like on an iPhone.
| | 03:11 | So it has reflowed; the line endings
are much shorter, but you can read it. You
| | 03:16 | 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 that it is a MOBI format, which
| | 03:26 | is very similar to the EPUB
format, means that it's reflowable.
| | 03:29 | And those are the kind of eBooks that
we're going to be talking about in this
| | 03:33 | title, is how to make this reflowable format.
| | 03:35 | It is the wave of the future.
| | 03:37 | Now, don't get me wrong: I love PDFs,
and I would love for a way for us to be
| | 03:42 | able to get this kind of 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 reflowable format.
| | 04:01 | Here I have Kindle Reader for the
Macintosh. And here I can make it as large
| | 04:09 | or as small as I want;
| | 04:10 | you can see how it reflows.
| | 04:11 | I don't know how often people will be
reading an EPUB on their computer, but you
| | 04:17 | 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, that's what an EPUB or a Kindle is,
| | 04:25 | is that it's a 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 on dedicated
devices like a Kindle, or like a Nook, or Sony
| | 04:36 | Reader, or an Apple iPad.
| | 04:39 | 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.
| | 04:59 | And we'll be using Adobe Digital
Editions a lot during this title as a quick
| | 05:03 | proofer for the EPUBs that we
are exporting out of InDesign.
| | 05:08 | Digital Editions can open EPUB
files, and it can open PDF files.
| | 05:12 | We'll 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 kind of software.
| | 05:21 | Like, for example, Stanza is a very well-
known EPUB reader for lots of different
| | 05:25 | devices that you can download and install;
| | 05:28 | it doesn't run on the desktop.
| | 05:29 | Or if you have an Android phone, you could
download this eReader, which is very popular.
| | 05:34 | So you just install this software, and
then you can open up any kind of EPUB.
| | 05:38 | You can even read the EPUB in your browser.
| | 05:41 | So anywhere that you have a browser,
on your computer, or on an iPad, or on 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 reflowable
| | 06:00 | eBooks called the MOBI format.
| | 06:02 | So we're 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,
| | 06:18 | Amazon has created all sorts
of free Kindle reading apps.
| | 06:22 | So if you go to Amazon.com and in the
Kindle flyout menu 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.
You can install the Kindle Reader app on
| | 06:35 | your iPhone, on your PC,
your Mac, 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;
| | 06:49 | I can resize the window and the text
reflows, but I can still access the
| | 06:54 | chapters and so on, just as though I
were reading it on an external device.
| | 06:59 | So I hope you have a
better idea of what an EPUB is.
| | 07:01 | We are not going to be talking about PDFs;
| | 07:03 | you go away. We are going to be
mainly talking about EPUBs, which is
| | 07:09 | the default, almost, I guess you
could say generic, open source format
| | 07:13 | for reflowable eBooks.
| | 07:16 | And the MOBI format is
very closely related to that;
| | 07:20 | we're going to be talking about the MOBI or
the Kindle format in its own chapter later on.
| | 07:24 | But as you'll learn, once you create
a really good EPUB, then it's not that
| | 07:28 | difficult to convert it to
the Kindle or the MOBI format.
| | 07:31 | So we're 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 marketplace is
like a bazaar 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 ton of free
books that you can download, and then
| | 00:37 | there are also places where you as an
author can search for eBooks, and you
| | 00:41 | can buy eBooks as well.
| | 00:42 | Another big one is Feedbooks.
| | 00:44 | A lot of the EPUB readers that you can
download, like Stanza, they have links
| | 00:49 | directly to Feedbooks so that you can go
ahead and search for EPUBs and download
| | 00:54 | them; a lot of free ones
and a lot of ones for sale.
| | 00:58 | 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 are already available as
HTML, but slowly, but surely they are
| | 01:13 | becoming EPUBs, so you can download
them to Adobe Digital Editions, or Stanza, or
| | 01:18 | any of the other eReaders that can read in EPUB.
| | 01:20 | Now, of course one of the big kahunas in
the marketplace is Amazon.com, and this
| | 01:25 | is where people download a ton of eBooks.
| | 01:28 | But anything that you download from
Amazon.com, remember, cannot be opened in
| | 01:33 | any device that doesn't read MOBI files, or
in any software that doesn't read MOBI files.
| | 01:38 | So you can't get an eBook from the
Kindle Store and open it up, say, in Adobe
| | 01:42 | Digital Editions, or Stanza. You would have
to use one of Amazon's own Kindle eReaders.
| | 01:48 | But it's not that difficult to get
your book into the Kindle Store at all, as
| | 01:51 | you'll find out later on in this title.
| | 01:55 | Here is another place that 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
| | 02:07 | and that you as an author or publisher can get
your books listed here. Such as Barnes & Noble:
| | 02:11 | they are called NOOK Books 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 of months ago.
| | 02:22 | Google Books has been around for a
while, where you could see scans of books,
| | 02:27 | but they are starting their own eBook store.
| | 02:29 | So if you go to books.google.com/
ebooks, you can see all these eBooks.
| | 02:34 | A lot of them are for sale, and then
there are a lot of free ones, and they are
| | 02:37 | all in that reflowable EPUB format.
| | 02:39 | You don't have to be a big store, or big
organization, you could just have your
| | 02:44 | own little publishing company. Like my
friend Adam Engst and his wife Tonya run
| | 02:48 | Take Control Ebooks, which is a series
of really great books that are not too
| | 02:53 | large, not too small, and they help you
out a lot if you're working on anything
| | 02:57 | on the Macintosh, or with publishing.
| | 02:59 | They started out as PDFs, but they're
also converting all their eBooks to EPUB as
| | 03:04 | well, so that you could download them to
like a small device, like an Android or
| | 03:07 | iPhone, and read them on
that little screen as well.
| | 03:10 | So when you think, gee, where can I
find an EPUB? There is a huge number of
| | 03:15 | places 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 BasicsExamining the EPUB file format| 00:00 | Now that you've finished your whirlwind
tour of the eBook and EPUB ecosystem;
| | 00:05 | how you find them, how you read them,
I think it's time that we take a
| | 00:09 | look under the hood.
| | 00:10 | It's important, especially since you're
going to be the 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 that an EPUB is
essentially like a little Web site. Then
| | 00:23 | eReaders read that little Web site, but
what do I mean exactly? And that's what
| | 00:28 | I want to show you in this video.
| | 00:30 | I am just going to go over it briefly.
| | 00:32 | Definitely later on in the title we are
going to take a very close look at the
| | 00:36 | contents of an EPUB file, but I think
it's good to know this upfront so we know
| | 00:40 | thy enemy, and 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, not that big of a deal. But
| | 00:57 | actually this EPUB here -- EPUB is a compressed
collection of file, kind 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
| | 01:25 | you just double-click it.
| | 01:26 | I've noticed that in later versions of
the OS it doesn't work, and you need to
| | 01:30 | use, like, StuffIt Expander to do that,
to actually unzip it. But on a PC it's a
| | 01:35 | no-brainer. 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
| | 01:53 | file. And then we have this strangely
named folder OEBPS, which actually stands
| | 01:58 | for something significant that you
don't need to worry about, along with a
| | 02:01 | couple of 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 the Barnes & Noble
| | 02:31 | Nook Reader, or Apple iBooks, to open up
an EPUB, what it's doing is it's loading
| | 02:37 | these XML files with the contents of the
book, and then it's showing it to you as
| | 02:44 | text. And when the book calls for an
image, it's showing you an image, just as
| | 02:48 | how a Web site is a text file, the HTML
file is a text file, that links to images
| | 02:53 | 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, it's
just an EPUB that we will be working with
| | 03:09 | quite a bit in this title. A very simple one.
| | 03:12 | When I expanded it you can see that it
has a same sort of structure as Alice's.
| | 03:19 | It looks slightly different inside the
OEBPS folder, and because this is how
| | 03:26 | 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. And this is what
| | 03:38 | we're going to be spending a lot of time
on in this title is exactly how it does
| | 03:41 | 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. Okay.
| | 04:01 | So this is, like, a chapter inside
the EPUB, and it's actually just a
| | 04:04 | stand-alone XHTML file.
| | 04:07 | So I hope you can see that EPUB
readers are kind of like little Web browsers,
| | 04:11 | and that what it is that you're
creating out of InDesign is like a little
| | 04:15 | 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, that is the challenge
| | 04:24 | 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. And there are
| | 00:06 | 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.
| | 00:30 | And I'm going to talk about some things
in the InDesign file that translate over
| | 00:35 | to EPUB, and some things that don't, and
the best ways to prepare your InDesign
| | 00:38 | file for an optimum EPUB export.
| | 00:41 | So there's some tweaking that you are
going to need to do to the InDesign file.
| | 00:45 | In fact, you'll probably find yourself,
if you've designed it for print, doing a
| | 00:48 | Save As, and then really tweaking
it heavily for your EPUB export.
| | 00:53 | Then inside InDesign there is a
command to Export to EPUB format.
| | 00:57 | Depending on the version that you
have, it might be called Export for
| | 01:00 | Digital Editions, which is the name
of the default utility that Adobe ships
| | 01:05 | with for viewing EPUBs;
| | 01:07 | I showed that in the previous video. Or
it might be called Export for EPUB, but
| | 01:10 | even then the dialog box still
says Digital Editions Export options.
| | 01:14 | So 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 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're
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 will be
talking about in a video, that checks your
| | 02:04 | EPUB file to make sure that it adheres
to the standards set forth for all EPUB
| | 02:08 | files. That the links are working right,
that the required files are there, and so on.
| | 02:13 | It's important because when you are
ready to sell this, when you're ready to
| | 02:17 | distribute it to the Barnes & Noble
store, the Sony ReaderStore, 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 will know that if it doesn't validate
| | 02:34 | in the future, it wasn't something from
InDesign; you probably forgot to close
| | 02:37 | 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, so we
| | 02:47 | are going to do some simple, or maybe complex,
editing of the XHTML files, and the CSS files.
| | 02:52 | I will be talking about different ways
to do that, and some common fixes that
| | 02:55 | you might want to do.
| | 02:56 | 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 proof and validate again.
| | 03:04 | So like I said, it's a series of
iterative steps, but at this point when you're
| | 03:08 | proofing you probably want to go beyond
Adobe Digital Editions, and actually get
| | 03:12 | it, say, on to your iPad, and proof
it in iBooks, or put it on a Nook.
| | 03:15 | In other words, you want to preview
it in something closer to what your
| | 03:18 | customers 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
| | 03:34 | own Web site. You upload it to the
Apple iBookstore, or to a third-party
| | 03:38 | aggregator who is helping you
distribute this EPUB in the different venues that
| | 03:42 | we will be talking 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
| | 03:48 | that EPUB directly to the Kindle Store,
and they will convert it to the Kindle
| | 03:52 | format for you, because Amazon
uses a slightly different format.
| | 03:55 | They don't use EPUBs, they
use something called MOBI.
| | 03:57 | And 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, 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
| | 04:21 | eBook workflow.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| What can and can't be converted from INDD to EPUB| 00:00 | One of the best ways to jump into an
EPUB project is to take one of your
| | 00:04 | existing InDesign files that may not
have been designed for EPUB at all, just a
| | 00:09 | regular print design file, and export
it to EPUB and see what it looks like.
| | 00:13 | So I've got such a document open here called
History_SF.indd, A Brief History of San Francisco.
| | 00:18 | We will be using an excerpt from
this book throughout the course.
| | 00:23 | It was designed and laid out by
Nigel French, with copy and images from
| | 00:27 | Wikipedia, so it's a nice little job here.
| | 00:29 | So I am just scrolling through the spread
so you can get an idea of what's included.
| | 00:33 | Now, we have a number of frames, some of them
are not threaded together, some of them are.
| | 00:37 | We have some random objects so we
can see what happens with some sort of
| | 00:41 | InDesign object like this.
| | 00:43 | We have master page, folios, and running
footers. We've got text frames that are
| | 00:48 | threaded, images, we have some groups,
we have some things that are not groups.
| | 00:52 | We have stuff on the pasteboard --
that's my dog, Zoey -- and a sidebar with a
| | 00:56 | background. We've got a table, more
pictures, more sidebars, and so on. All right!
| | 01:01 | Nice looking book. Nothing overly
complex, but definitely something that was
| | 01:05 | created for printing.
| | 01:06 | So to export this to EPUB just go
right to the File menu and choose Export.
| | 01:13 | You will find EPUB is one of the
formats that you can export to in the
| | 01:19 | dropdown Format menu.
| | 01:21 | We're going to export this directly
out to the Desktop, History_SF.epub.
| | 01:26 | And just like exporting to PDF, it
doesn't actually export it at this point. It
| | 01:29 | puts up a dialog box first, so you can
always cancel later if you want, or if
| | 01:33 | you just want to check out the
dialog box and then cancel, it's fine.
| | 01:38 | But we're actually going to create an EPUB.
| | 01:40 | So if you're following along what I
would like you to do is leave everything at
| | 01:43 | the default, which should be No
Cover Image, Based on Page Layout.
| | 01:48 | You might need to turn on
View EPUB after Exporting.
| | 01:51 | Leave everything in the
Image panel at the default.
| | 01:54 | And under Contents, I am not sure if you
need to check or uncheck, but make sure
| | 01:58 | nothing is selected under the Contents section.
| | 02:01 | And under CSS Options, you should have
at least these two options turned on;
| | 02:05 | Include Style Definitions
and Preserve Local Overrides.
| | 02:08 | We won't be talking about fonts
at this point. And then click OK.
| | 02:12 | So InDesign exports a copy of the
file to EPUB format, and the EPUB file
| | 02:19 | automatically opens in your default EPUB reader.
| | 02:22 | Now, most likely it will be Adobe
Digital Editions, a free EPUB reader
| | 02:26 | available for Macs and PCs.
| | 02:28 | If you don't have it, you can download it.
| | 02:30 | It is definitely not an eReader that you
want to use for real eReading of EPUBs;
| | 02:34 | it's kind of rudimentary, but
it's a great rough proofer for EPUBs.
| | 02:38 | So first I am going to expand the
entire window. What do we have?
| | 02:42 | Doesn't look too good right now, but
we have here the name of the actual
| | 02:48 | InDesign file, and I didn't put an
author name in. We just have the name of the
| | 02:52 | InDesign file repeated here. Here
is an image, and there is some text.
| | 02:55 | I am just scrolling with my scroll wheel.
| | 02:57 | There is the table of contents; it's
not linked. There is the first story, and
| | 03:04 | we have some links in here, and I am
just going to scroll all the way down.
| | 03:06 | So you can see it's mostly text, and then
all the images, which appear to be centered.
| | 03:12 | Oh, there is that lovely table. All right!
| | 03:14 | So you can see this document; it's
going to need a little bit of work. But why
| | 03:18 | not, go ahead and export your
document to EPUB and see what happens.
| | 03:23 | Now that we have an idea of what this
is going to look like -- and don't worry, at the end of
| | 03:26 | this course you are going to be a pro
and it's going to look very nice -- the
| | 03:29 | first time you export to EPUB.
| | 03:30 | Let's jump back to the InDesign file
and let me briefly go over what actually
| | 03:35 | gets included in the export to
EPUB, and what gets left behind.
| | 03:39 | So you see, here is our lovely cover,
and we didn't see that cover in the EPUB.
| | 03:44 | But if I click here, you can see
that we did see a lot of these images.
| | 03:48 | So the images came through; it's
just that they weren't put together as a
| | 03:52 | complete cover, and you'll learn how
to do that later on in the course.
| | 03:55 | We did see this text, and this guy down here,
but the spacing between them wasn't included.
| | 04:01 | So what happens is that when you
export to EPUB, everything that is on the
| | 04:07 | document actually does get exported,
with the exception of artwork that you
| | 04:12 | created in InDesign, like this arrow thing.
| | 04:15 | If you noticed, that was not in the EPUB.
| | 04:18 | But any text that was on the live
document pages, that does get included.
| | 04:22 | I will zoom in here with Command+Plus or Control+Plus.
| | 04:26 | So there is our drop cap in the first
sentence. So we didn't get the exact same
| | 04:31 | size of the drop cap, but we did get a drop cap.
| | 04:33 | Let's jump back here and take a look.
| | 04:37 | And what also got included was
the fact that this is a hyperlink.
| | 04:42 | There is a variable down here.
| | 04:44 | If you can see, the light blue
rectangle surrounding, this is actually a
| | 04:48 | creation date variable, that did get
included in the EPUB, but it got flattened
| | 04:53 | out or expanded, I guess
you'd call it to live text.
| | 04:56 | Also, footnotes came through, so
there's a footnote, and you can jump down to
| | 05:01 | the footnote text here, also known as
Frankie to his friends. And you click on
| | 05:05 | the footnote, and it brings you
back to the footnote source.
| | 05:07 | So that's kind of great!
| | 05:10 | In addition to the text that's on the
live document pages, all the images that
| | 05:15 | are here, other than the artwork
that you created with InDesign like I
| | 05:18 | mentioned, but images do get exported
as well, whether they're in a group, or
| | 05:21 | they're standing on their own.
| | 05:22 | They may not appear in the right
location, but they did come through, they just
| | 05:27 | happen to be added to the end. And
that's because that's the default way that
| | 05:30 | things get exported from InDesign. And
we will be going into that in a lot more
| | 05:34 | detail in preparing your
InDesign file for EPUB export.
| | 05:37 | Notice that this image is rotated,
and it has a drop shadow exactly as it
| | 05:41 | looked in InDesign.
| | 05:43 | So image attributes;
| | 05:45 | rotation, scaling, cropping, drop
shadows: those do get maintained when you
| | 05:51 | export to EPUB. But compare that with
our sidebar, this one here called Climate,
| | 05:59 | this sidebar is in its own frame to
the right of the main story, and it has a
| | 06:05 | yellow background and there is some inset.
| | 06:08 | What doesn't get included with text
frames is the frame itself. The position of
| | 06:12 | the frame, and the attributes of the frame.
| | 06:14 | The text itself came through.
| | 06:16 | Here is the Climate paragraph with
some of the formatting that came through,
| | 06:20 | with the colored subhead, but it
definitely did not include the fact that it's
| | 06:24 | in the right and that it's a sidebar itself.
| | 06:27 | So what's called page geometry
does not get exported to EPUB.
| | 06:32 | All the text comes through as one long
text file, and we'll be talking about ways
| | 06:37 | to break that up or to create your
own sidebars later on in the course. But
| | 06:41 | don't be surprised when you don't see
these things replicated in the EPUB file.
| | 06:45 | There is a vertical ruler to the left of this;
| | 06:47 | of course this was created in
InDesign, so it does not appear in the export.
| | 06:52 | Your paragraph and your character
styles are converted to a Cascading Style
| | 06:56 | Sheet, and you'll learn later in the
course how to edit the Cascading Style
| | 07:01 | Sheet to tweak the formatting for you EPUB.
| | 07:03 | Now, what does not get
included are things on the pasteboard.
| | 07:09 | Here's the picture of Zoey, my dog,
that did not get concluded in the EPUB
| | 07:12 | export, because no part of it
was overlapping the document.
| | 07:16 | If part of it was, if it was like this,
then the image would get included, same
| | 07:20 | as like when you're printing.
| | 07:22 | So if an image frame or a text
frame is partially overlapping into the
| | 07:26 | pasteboard, the entire bit of
content will get included in the EPUB.
| | 07:31 | The same thing for overset text: all
overset text will automatically be exported
| | 07:36 | to the EPUB as well.
| | 07:38 | Something else that never gets
exported are overridden master page items.
| | 07:42 | So, for example, where it says
Explore California along with the page
| | 07:46 | number, this did not get included in
the EPUB, because it's from the master
| | 07:50 | page. And you can tell because it
has a dotted outline around it, which
| | 07:54 | makes sense, because pages really
don't have an equivalent in EPUB land
| | 07:58 | since they're reflowable.
| | 07:59 | We have the same book on a tiny 2" x 3"
screen on an iPhone as you do in a really
| | 08:05 | large iPad, or even in the Kindle.
| | 08:08 | So the page numbers don't make that
much sense at all, so those get ignored.
| | 08:12 | If you happen to have overridden something
from the master page, that will get included.
| | 08:17 | Inside the text itself there are
certain characters that get ignored. Like, for
| | 08:23 | example, if I hit Return a bunch of
times, if somebody created white space by
| | 08:28 | adding a bunch of carriage returns,
these will get collapsed to one return.
| | 08:32 | Same thing for space runs. If I'm
doing indents or trying to align columns
| | 08:37 | using space runs, those will get
collapsed into a single space, or ignored I
| | 08:42 | guess you could say.
| | 08:43 | If I use a bunch of tabs, the same thing.
| | 08:46 | In fact, all tabs are ignored. They are
translated into just a single space, so
| | 08:51 | even ten tabs in a row will be one space.
| | 08:54 | If you've ever done any kind of Web
design, this is kind of familiar to you,
| | 08:57 | because the same thing is true for Web
pages. And in fact, that's what EPUB is:
| | 09:00 | series of Web pages.
| | 09:01 | A lot of people ask me, what
about if I have a group of elements?
| | 09:08 | So let's say, for example, that we have
this image grouped with this text frame,
| | 09:13 | so that you see a dotted outline around
it. This does get exported to EPUB, but
| | 09:19 | the fact that it's grouped
does not have any special powers.
| | 09:22 | It doesn't mean that all these
elements will appear in the same relation. Not
| | 09:25 | even does it guarantee that
they'll appear in the correct order.
| | 09:29 | Depending on the position of this
caption, it might appear after the picture
| | 09:32 | rather than before the picture.
| | 09:33 | We'll be talking a lot more about
managing the order of elements that have been
| | 09:37 | exported and so that you get the
caption exactly where you want it, but turning
| | 09:42 | it into a group really doesn't help at all.
| | 09:45 | You can take this group, or any
multiple selection of objects, and convert them
| | 09:51 | into an image, and that's really the
only way to maintain the exact look and
| | 09:56 | object relationship in the EPUB.
Sometimes that's not what you want though; you
| | 10:00 | want it to be actual live text.
| | 10:02 | The same is true, for example, with a table.
| | 10:05 | The table does come through, but
a lot of the formatting is lost.
| | 10:08 | So if you want the table to actually
look exactly how it looks here, you might
| | 10:14 | need to turn that into an image.
| | 10:16 | There are different ways to turn
objects, like InDesign created artwork, and
| | 10:20 | groups, and tables, into images when
it's exported to EPUB, but keep them
| | 10:24 | completely editable in InDesign, which
I'll be showing you in a later video.
| | 10:29 | And finally, when you export to EPUB --
let me just get there really quick -- right
| | 10:34 | here, there is this option under
Contents to Include Embeddable Fonts. And let
| | 10:41 | me just say that at this point it's
kind of in a murky area, because there are
| | 10:46 | very few eReading devices, or eReader
software, that will understand and show
| | 10:52 | those embeddable fonts.
| | 10:53 | And often by including embeddable
fonts from InDesign, the kind of code that
| | 10:58 | InDesign writes prevents the file from
validating, which is a requirement to get
| | 11:02 | your EPUB to validate, as we
explained in the previous video.
| | 11:05 | So for the most part we're not
going to really deal a lot with Include
| | 11:08 | Embeddable Fonts in this title. Instead
you're just going to have to get used to
| | 11:14 | what most EPUB designers are getting
used to: the fact that the font that your
| | 11:18 | EPUB will show up in will be
the default font of that eReader.
| | 11:22 | This is why it's so important to proof,
in later stages, what your EPUB will look
| | 11:26 | like on a Kindle, or on an iPad, or in a
Nook. Because each device and each piece
| | 11:32 | of software has a
different set of default fonts.
| | 11:35 | So now you have a better idea of what
does get included and what doesn't get
| | 11:39 | included when you export to EPUB. And
learning how to tweak it so that what you
| | 11:43 | want to include does get included, and
what you don't want doesn't get included,
| | 11:47 | in the easiest and most efficient
manner, is the point of this entire title.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Preparing an InDesign Publication for EPUBCreating a navigation table of contents (TOC) with a TOC style| 00:01 | Here we have a finished, decent looking EPUB
that I have open in Adobe Digital Editions.
| | 00:06 | It's the same document that we
were looking at in previous videos.
| | 00:09 | It's created from an InDesign file
called a Brief History of San Francisco.
| | 00:13 | We are looking at the cover, and you
can see on the left that there is a table
| | 00:16 | of contents that's actually linked
to those chapters in this document.
| | 00:20 | So if I click Contents, there is the Contents
with a linked TOC. Early History
| | 00:26 | starts Early History chapter.
| | 00:28 | This is quite understandable, but it's a
little tricky getting from InDesign to
| | 00:32 | this end result: to getting the
navigational table of contents.
| | 00:36 | That's what we call this
part here, the navigational TOC.
| | 00:40 | Every eReader, and every eReader
device, has a way to show you the table of
| | 00:44 | contents of the book that you are
reading called a navigational TOC.
| | 00:48 | It's part of the software.
| | 00:50 | It's different from the actual table
of contents that you may or may not
| | 00:54 | include in the EPUB.
| | 00:55 | It's completely optional to
include something like this.
| | 00:59 | You can see that actually
you don't even need this;
| | 01:00 | it might be superfluous, because you
have the navigational TOC here on the left.
| | 01:04 | The navigational TOC is
something that can be shown or hidden.
| | 01:07 | If I come up here, I can choose Hide
Navigation Pane and then just scroll
| | 01:12 | through my document this way, or use
the built-in table of contents that this
| | 01:16 | author included in the EPUB.
| | 01:18 | But like if you're reading this on an
iPad or something, you just tap on the
| | 01:21 | screen, and then you will see little
icon appear where you can show the TOC.
| | 01:25 | Same thing on a Kindle.
| | 01:26 | So I'm going to show the navigational
TOC. The point of this video, and the next
| | 01:31 | couple of videos, is how do you
create this coming out from InDesign?
| | 01:34 | Because it's not how it works by default.
| | 01:36 | I am going to close this, and back
here in InDesign I have a document open
| | 01:41 | called history text.indd.
| | 01:44 | Essentially it's a selection of the
text from a larger book, and it's a just a
| | 01:49 | couple pages long. Okay three pages,
with some paragraphs and some subheads.
| | 01:55 | So I click inside, open up paragraph
styles, so you can see these are subheads. This
| | 01:59 | is just regular body copy.
| | 02:03 | This is my book. I want to export it
to EPUB, and I want each one of these
| | 02:06 | subheads to be an entry in the
navigational table of contents.
| | 02:10 | I am going to export to EPUB by going
to File>Export, or just pressing Command+E or
| | 02:15 | Control+E. Save it on the desktop. You
can leave everything in the General area
| | 02:21 | as the default; Based on Page Layout.
Rasterize, or not, the first page. Make sure
| | 02:26 | that View EPUB after Exporting is selected.
| | 02:30 | And Image can stay the same. And in
Contents, don't turn on any of these
| | 02:34 | items. You can leave all the options
under Generate CSS turned on if you'd like.
| | 02:39 | This is basically the default settings
for Export to EPUB, and then click OK.
| | 02:43 | So by default this is what you get
when you export something to EPUB.
| | 02:49 | Is that you don't get a
navigational table of contents.
| | 02:51 | Instead, you have one item that is
exactly the name of the InDesign file itself.
| | 02:56 | So how do we get that?
| | 03:00 | You can create one by first creating a
table of contents style in InDesign, and
| | 03:05 | then when you export to EPUB, in the
Contents area, you choose a Use InDesign
| | 03:14 | TOC Style, and select that style.
| | 03:17 | So first let's go ahead and create
a table of contents style. I don't want
| | 03:21 | to spend a whole lot of time on this.
It's completely covered in much more
| | 03:25 | detail in other InDesign videos at
lynda.com, like InDesign Eessentials. But
| | 03:31 | really quickly, now we go to the Layout menu,
go down to Table of Contents Styles.
| | 03:36 | We're going to create a New style,
and we will call this EPUB TOC.
| | 03:42 | What you want to include over here are
paragraph styles that you want to be
| | 03:46 | the items in the navigational TOC.
| | 03:49 | We know that we want subheads to be there, right?
| | 03:51 | So I find Subhead, and add that.
| | 03:55 | Now I am not actually going to include
the live TOC here. I will be talking
| | 03:59 | about that in a different video. All
I want is to create the TOC style that
| | 04:04 | tells InDesign to include
this in the navigational TOC.
| | 04:08 | So I will just click OK. Here, that's all.
| | 04:12 | Now I am going to export to EPUB. We
will Replace the existing one, and this
| | 04:17 | time the only change you are going to
make under Contents is to Turn on Use
| | 04:22 | InDesign TOC Style, and select epub TOC.
| | 04:30 | And now we actually have the
subheads appearing on the left.
| | 04:33 | There's our navigational TOC.
| | 04:35 | It doesn't actually break them up into
an individual chapter documents or insert
| | 04:39 | a page break. There is a way to do that
that's a little different, that I will
| | 04:42 | cover in a different video.
| | 04:44 | But at least we have the navigational
TOC on the left, which is a requirement
| | 04:48 | for many eReading systems. And it makes it
a lot easier, of course, for the person
| | 04:53 | reading this book to find their way around.
| | 04:55 | Now let me show you one more thing
with a creating a custom TOC style.
| | 04:59 | I am going to jump back to InDesign.
| | 05:01 | I have another document here, history
text 2.indd, that has not just subheads,
| | 05:06 | but also sub-subheads.
| | 05:09 | So if I look in the paragraph style
here, you can see this is Subhead2.
| | 05:13 | You can also include nested TOC
items in your navigational TOC.
| | 05:18 | So I have already created a TOC.
| | 05:21 | Let me show you; Table of
Contents Styles, epub TOC, Edit;
| | 05:26 | that has both. So I have both the Subhead,
| | 05:29 | that was the orange text, and the Subhead2.
| | 05:31 | Subhead2, I specified to be Level 2, so
it's going to be indented. This is just
| | 05:36 | basic TOC 101, and that's fine.
| | 05:40 | So now when I export this to EPUB,
under Contents, Use InDesign TOC Style, epub
| | 05:47 | TOC. That's the one that includes both
of those styles. Click OK, and now we
| | 05:54 | see the same entries on the left, but
look at the little + symbol. That means
| | 05:58 | there are sub entries,
| | 06:00 | sub-navigational TOCs,
underneath this main title.
| | 06:03 | So you can actually now nest multiple
levels if you'd like, depending on how you
| | 06:08 | create your TOC. And, by the way, all
this can be edited later, after the fact,
| | 06:12 | when we start getting into the actually
editing the EPUB itself. So if you don't
| | 06:16 | get it exactly right, no problem.
| | 06:19 | It is important though for you to
create some sort of navigational TOC, because
| | 06:24 | a lot of eReading systems require it.
And also of course, it's a lot easier for
| | 06:28 | your readers to find their way around.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a navigation TOC with an InDesign book| 00:00 | Whenever you are creating an EPUB from
InDesign, you always want to include a
| | 00:04 | navigational table of contents.
| | 00:06 | That's what we call this section over
here in Adobe Digital Editions. It may
| | 00:09 | show up in a different location
depending on how you're reading that EPUB; on
| | 00:13 | a Kindle, or an iPad.
| | 00:14 | Essentially, it's part of the software
of the device. It's not really an actual
| | 00:18 | page with a table of
contents that's optional to include.
| | 00:22 | And I introduced the concept of
the navigational table of contents in
| | 00:25 | the previous video.
| | 00:26 | It's something that you can show and hide.
| | 00:30 | You can create a navigational table of
contents by using a custom TOC style as
| | 00:35 | I showed in the previous video, or
you can create a navigational TOC by
| | 00:39 | creating an InDesign book.
| | 00:41 | So let me show you how to
do that and how it works.
| | 00:44 | Here I have a single document, not
a book, that has subheads. And if we
| | 00:50 | export this to EPUB, I'll just save it right on
the Desktop, with all of the default settings;
| | 00:56 | make sure View EPUB after Exporting is
selected. And under Contents, I don't
| | 01:00 | have any of these check boxes selected.
| | 01:02 | If I click OK, you can see that in the
EPUB, we do not get a navigational TOC.
| | 01:08 | Instead, we just get the name of the
actual InDesign document, and users are
| | 01:12 | left to a flounder on their
own finding certain sections.
| | 01:16 | What you can do is you can select each
one of these sections or chapters in your
| | 01:21 | long document and save
them into individual files.
| | 01:26 | So I've already done that for this document.
| | 01:28 | In the Exercise folder, I have
a folder called History book.
| | 01:32 | So you can see I took, for example, the
first chapter, Early History, and I just
| | 01:38 | cut and pasted Early History into a
stand-alone InDesign document. And I named
| | 01:43 | it 01_early_history because I want
to force the order in the book panel.
| | 01:49 | So I did that for each one of the
sections in this long document, and then I
| | 01:55 | went to File>New>Book, and created a new book.
| | 01:59 | Now I'm not going to go through the
steps in creating and working with books;
| | 02:02 | that is covered in detail by
the other essentials titles.
| | 02:06 | But I do have a book already created here
for you so you can see what I'm talking about.
| | 02:11 | A book is this actual panel that you
can stick over here on the dock if you'd
| | 02:16 | like. And in the Book panel, you
use the Plus symbol to add individual
| | 02:21 | InDesign documents;
| | 02:22 | it's kind of like a
collection of InDesign documents.
| | 02:25 | Because I preceded them with 02, 03, 04,
they appear in this order by default.
| | 02:31 | And what's interesting is that with
an InDesign book you can go to the Book
| | 02:34 | panel menu and you can export the book to EPUB.
| | 02:38 | So if I went ahead and did that,
let's say in History text_book, onto the
| | 02:45 | Desktop. We're going to use the
same settings as before, all right.
| | 02:50 | Nothing selected here under Contents.
Export, and now every individual document
| | 02:58 | becomes an entry in the navigational TOC.
| | 03:03 | And actually what InDesign has done is
created a series of separate HTML files,
| | 03:08 | one per InDesign document.
| | 03:11 | We even see like a little Page
Break happening here before that.
| | 03:14 | And you may not like the
names of these chapters;
| | 03:17 | this can be fixed later on in the EPUB,
or you can combine creating a book with
| | 03:23 | a custom TOC style, and I'll
talk about that in the next video.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using a TOC style in combination with an InDesign book| 00:00 | This is the kind of navigational TOC
that you'll end up with when you export an
| | 00:05 | InDesign book to EPUB.
| | 00:07 | Each entry in the TOC is the name of the
InDesign file that was part of that book.
| | 00:13 | So here is our InDesign book with a
collection of five different InDesign
| | 00:17 | documents and that's what got
translated to the navigational TOC.
| | 00:22 | But that's not really what we want;
| | 00:24 | besides maybe we don't have everything
numbered 01, 02, we might have completely
| | 00:29 | random names for our
different InDesign documents.
| | 00:33 | What we actually want is something
like this, with chapter names that make
| | 00:38 | sense, that match what the chapter name is.
| | 00:40 | And you can do that with a book just as
simply as you can do that with a single
| | 00:45 | document, as I showed in a previous video.
| | 00:48 | So let's go ahead and do that.
| | 00:49 | In InDesign, I have my book;
| | 00:51 | I'm going to open up the master
document, the Style Source, the one with a
| | 00:56 | little doohickey next to it;
| | 00:57 | that's the technical term.
| | 01:00 | And in the master document, I'm going to add
a custom TOC as I showed in a previous video.
| | 01:05 | And what we want to be the chapter
names are the subheads here, right;
| | 01:10 | that is PARAGRAPH STYLES>Subhead, yes.
| | 01:12 | So I go to Layout>Table of Contents
Styles, create a new style, I'll call it
| | 01:18 | epub-book, and we want to include Subhead here.
| | 01:23 | And if you wanted to also include
additional paragraph styles in the TOC,
| | 01:29 | you can do so as well.
| | 01:30 | Just make sure that you turn on Include Book
Documents at the bottom of this dialog box.
| | 01:35 | And so there's our epub-book, so I've
created the Table of Contents Style.
| | 01:40 | We don't actually have to
insert a table of contents;
| | 01:42 | we're just creating the style.
| | 01:44 | And now I'm going to export this to
EPUB. So I come to the HISTORY TEXT panel
| | 01:49 | menu, Export Book to EPUB, call this
book2. We'll leave all this at the default,
| | 01:58 | and making sure that View EPUB
after Exporting is turned on.
| | 02:00 | And under Contents, we turn on the
check box next to Use InDesign TOC Style, and
| | 02:06 | make sure and select epub-book.
| | 02:08 | I can't tell you how many times I've
turned this on, but forgot to actually select
| | 02:12 | the style. So if it doesn't work, come
back here and check. And now click OK.
| | 02:16 | And now we have chapter names that
make sense, because it's using the actual
| | 02:21 | content from those paragraph
styles that I specified in my TOC style.
| | 02:25 | So you can combine both methods, the
InDesign book, and the TOC style, to create a
| | 02:32 | custom navigational TOC that
is exactly right for your EPUB.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating chapter breaks based on a paragraph style| 00:00 | As I showed in a previous video, when
you export a single document to EPUB, if
| | 00:06 | you include a TOC style, it can make a
navigational table of contents. So let's
| | 00:11 | do that really quick.
| | 00:12 | I've already created a TOC style for
this document, called epub. And what it's
| | 00:17 | going to do is include the Subhead in the
TOC. And the Subhead, that's in orange here.
| | 00:24 | So when I export to EPUB, we'll
export directly to the Desktop.
| | 00:29 | And when I go to Contents, I'm going to
have this checked off, Use InDesign TOC Style:
| | 00:34 | epub.
| | 00:36 | So now when I export to EPUB I'll see a
nice little navigational TOC here on the left.
| | 00:42 | But look at what happens when I click
The San Francisco Peninsula, for example.
| | 00:46 | It appears down here at the bottom;
| | 00:48 | it doesn't automatically get to the top.
| | 00:50 | Just because you have specified a TOC
style, that does not mean that it's going
| | 00:55 | to start physically a new chapter.
| | 00:58 | It's not going to what we call chunk-up
the document into separate HTML files.
| | 01:02 | It's still one long HTML file.
| | 01:04 | And if you're coming from version
5, this is new for you, but it's a
| | 01:09 | little different in 5.5.
| | 01:10 | If you actually want the document to be
chunked up, you have to do one more step.
| | 01:15 | So in other words, if you want actual
page breaks, chapter breaks, you have to
| | 01:19 | do something else, so let's take a look.
| | 01:21 | I'm going to go back to InDesign, and
this time when I export to EPUB -- I'm just
| | 01:26 | pressing Command+E or Control+E,
by the way, to get here --
| | 01:30 | let's do this history text2.
| | 01:35 | In the Contents panel you need to
turn on this option: Break Document
| | 01:40 | at Paragraph Style.
| | 01:43 | So when I choose that, then you get to
choose one, and only one, paragraph style,
| | 01:48 | that whenever InDesign encounters this
paragraph style, it's going to create a
| | 01:52 | new HTML document that
starts with that paragraph style.
| | 01:55 | So in other words, you don't
want to choose like body, all right;
| | 01:58 | otherwise you're going to
end up with 500 HTML files;
| | 02:00 | that would be dumb. But something like Subhead.
| | 02:02 | Now the ideal situation is that your TOC
style specifies the same style that you
| | 02:08 | want it chunked up at.
| | 02:10 | So remember, our EPUB did specify Subhead.
| | 02:13 | You don't actually have to have this
turned on, by the way. You don't have
| | 02:17 | to specify a custom TOC in order to
get InDesign to chunk-up the document
| | 02:21 | into multiple HTML files. Let's
take a quick look at what happens if you
| | 02:25 | choose that option.
| | 02:26 | So we just want to chunk it
up at Subhead, and I'll say OK.
| | 02:32 | And what happens is that it makes
these five different HTML files, and each
| | 02:37 | one goes to the next.
| | 02:39 | Now if you are just scrolling through
the document it automatically jumps to
| | 02:43 | the next HTML file as you scroll.
| | 02:45 | So most readers aren't even aware that
EPUBs are often made up of multiple HTML files.
| | 02:51 | But this, of course, is not what we want
for our navigational TOC, so we have to
| | 02:55 | combine both methods.
| | 02:57 | We're going to export to EPUB again,
this time we'll call it 3 is the charm. And
| | 03:03 | in Contents, we're going to
choose Use InDesign TOC Style:
| | 03:07 | epub, and Break Document at
Paragraph Style: Subhead.
| | 03:11 | Click OK, and now we're
cooking with gas! There you go!
| | 03:18 | So you have a really nice-looking
navigational TOC on the left with
| | 03:22 | understandable chapter names. And when you
click they start at the very top of the page.
| | 03:27 | So you use both TOC style and Break
Document at Paragraph Style to get
| | 03:31 | this effect.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Managing page layout order| 00:00 | Up until now we've been using
fairly simple documents to export to EPUB.
| | 00:05 | Things like with a single textflow or
maybe a couple of pictures thrown in.
| | 00:09 | That's not the not the only kind
document that you can export to EPUB. You
| | 00:11 | can export anything.
| | 00:13 | What I want you to understand though,
in this video, is how does InDesign know
| | 00:17 | what comes first when it exports a page
with a number of different objects on it?
| | 00:22 | You may have noticed from previous
videos, when we go to export the document to
| | 00:27 | EPUB, that under Ordering we have three choices:
| | 00:32 | Based on Page Layout, Same as
XML, Same as Articles panel.
| | 00:36 | And in the next few videos, I'm going
to go through what each of these mean.
| | 00:41 | The default is Based on Page Layout,
which could work perfectly fine for you,
| | 00:45 | but in many cases, it's a big pain point.
And so XML, and the Articles panel are
| | 00:50 | two ways to avoid that pain.
| | 00:52 | So let's just see how the default method works.
| | 00:55 | I have a very simple two-page document.
| | 00:58 | It's got a couple images;
| | 01:00 | it has some overset text.
| | 01:02 | On Page 1, the story is threaded to the
story on Page 2, down here. And we have
| | 01:13 | a title, and a byline, a
picture grouped with caption.
| | 01:17 | Let's see what happens.
| | 01:18 | So we'll go to File>Export;
| | 01:20 | I just press Command+E or Control+E,
which is the keyboard shortcut for that.
| | 01:24 | We're going to export layout order.
| | 01:28 | We'll keep everything at the default. Make
sure View EPUB after Exporting is set up.
| | 01:32 | Down here under Contents you don't need
anything checked off under Contents. Let's click OK.
| | 01:40 | And here in the lovely Adobe Digital
Editions, we're like, what the heck is happening?
| | 01:45 | My favorite dog!
| | 01:46 | Is the very first line. Then the
byline, then the title, then the text.
| | 01:50 | Where is the picture? Oops!
| | 01:53 | Picture is down here after the jump-line,
and then the caption is way over here.
| | 01:58 | Keep going down and there is the final picture.
| | 02:01 | That's kind of bizarre.
| | 02:03 | Bizarre to you and me;
| | 02:04 | to InDesign, it makes perfect sense.
| | 02:07 | When you export to EPUB, if you choose
the default Based on Page Layout, it's
| | 02:12 | going to start with Page 1, and it's
going to look at the objects, and it's going
| | 02:18 | to export the objects starting from a
left to right and top to bottom order.
| | 02:24 | Starting with Page 1, then
Page 2, then Page 3, and so on.
| | 02:27 | So in this document, what is the
object that is furthermost to the left?
| | 02:33 | Just start dragging a guide line, da,
da, da..., and see what it hits first. Oh!
| | 02:39 | It's that very first frame that is rotated.
| | 02:43 | Now remember, text frame attributes are not
exported to EPUB, unlike image frame attributes.
| | 02:49 | So the rotation and the background color
are not being exported, but the text is.
| | 02:55 | So My favorite dog!
| | 02:57 | The contents of that gets
exported first. What's next?
| | 03:01 | The next thing moving left
to right is by Joe Schmoe.
| | 03:05 | Then the next thing is, we have two items;
| | 03:08 | My Dog, Zoey and this text.
| | 03:10 | So there's by Joe Schmoe, then
My Dog, Zoey and then this text.
| | 03:15 | My Dog, Zoey appeared first,
because these two items start at the same
| | 03:19 | position, going from left to right.
And so then in that case, InDesign says
| | 03:23 | okay, what is on top; what's above?
| | 03:26 | So it starts with My Dog,
Zoey and then goes down.
| | 03:28 | So all it's looking at are the
boundaries of the frame itself.
| | 03:32 | When it got to the story,
it exported the entire story.
| | 03:35 | It's not exporting frame positions,
remember, not text frame positions.
| | 03:40 | So it exported the
entire contents of this story.
| | 03:44 | When it was done exporting the
contents of that story, then it went to the
| | 03:49 | next object on Page 1.
| | 03:51 | So when it was done exporting this,
the next object, left to right, was this
| | 03:56 | continued line. And the next
object was this image.
| | 04:00 | So there's the continued line, then the image.
| | 04:03 | If you remember from a previous video,
grouping does not make any difference
| | 04:07 | When you export to EPUB. It's
not going to save items in that
| | 04:10 | particular relationship;
| | 04:11 | it just looks at the
individual frames within here.
| | 04:15 | Finally, the last item to get exported
after the caption was the final image.
| | 04:22 | Because then it went on to Page 2 and
said, I already exported this story, so
| | 04:26 | you just have to put the image down.
| | 04:28 | That's what you have to
watch out with in your documents.
| | 04:31 | When you export items to EPUB, if
they're not coming out in the right way, you
| | 04:36 | might need to manipulate things.
| | 04:37 | So, for example, in this group, I
might want to move the Dog's life;
| | 04:43 | I'll just double-clicked here to
select the item within the group, to the
| | 04:46 | left of Zoey, because I want the Dog's life
caption to appear above the picture of Zoey.
| | 04:54 | And then the jump line, I don't that
exported at all, so I can either hide the
| | 04:58 | object on its layer, or I could
just move him off into the pasteboard.
| | 05:02 | And then My favorite dog!
| | 05:03 | I probably want, let's move that over here.
| | 05:11 | And we want My Dog, Zoey to appear
first, and then Joe Schmoe after it. So I'm
| | 05:16 | moving that down, and actually let's
move both of these, I'm Shift+Clicking.
| | 05:22 | So I'm purely manipulating the layout
order from left to right to tell InDesign
| | 05:28 | in what order these things
should be exported. Let's try this.
| | 05:31 | So I'm going to File>Export or press
Command+E or Control+E. We'll do Version 2.
| | 05:40 | Same settings as before. Well, ah!
| | 05:42 | It's a little better.
| | 05:46 | There's the title. There's
the byline, My favorite dog!
| | 05:49 | and then the story.
| | 05:53 | We still are having the
caption appearing below the image.
| | 05:57 | We'll have to investigate that. And then
the final object is the image as before.
| | 06:02 | So that's sort of how the workflow
goes when you are exporting an InDesign
| | 06:06 | document to EPUB and you're going to
base it on the page layout, the default
| | 06:11 | option in the Export to EPUB dialog box.
| | 06:15 | You need to pay attention to the left
to right order, and top to bottom order,
| | 06:19 | and you have to manipulate the items,
so that when you export, they appear in
| | 06:22 | the correct order.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using layout order to manage content flow| 00:00 | When you're relying on the layout order
of an InDesign document for your export
| | 00:05 | to EPUB ordering, for how items are
ordered in the final EPUB, probably the most
| | 00:11 | common problem you run into is
getting the images to show up where they're
| | 00:15 | supposed to show up.
| | 00:16 | Let's take a look at this new
InDesign document, and work on how you can get
| | 00:21 | those images to show up where they should.
| | 00:23 | It's called calif-normal.indd in the
Exercise file. And just normal, because it's
| | 00:29 | sort of like a normal InDesign document,
not like the one we were working with
| | 00:32 | before with the picture of Zoey.
| | 00:33 | It's a simple chapter from a book, all right?
| | 00:37 | Or you can call it a very short
book about California's History.
| | 00:41 | And in this book we have a foreword, and
that's a stand-alone textframe. And then
| | 00:46 | we have another textframe that is
threaded to other ones, just like in a regular
| | 00:50 | book, that's autoflowed,
that goes throughout the book.
| | 00:53 | We do have occasional images and captions.
| | 00:56 | In this case we have an image that is
grouped with the caption, and it has a
| | 01:00 | little textwrap around it.
| | 01:02 | If we move it out you can see it's
just forcing the text to move around. It's
| | 01:05 | like a floating image right there.
| | 01:10 | And the same is true for this image
down here, of this poor man who doesn't look
| | 01:15 | very happy, is just causing
the text to flow around it.
| | 01:20 | And then that's the end of the book,
all right, so that's the end of the file.
| | 01:24 | So let's go ahead and export this to EPUB.
I am scrolling all the way to the top
| | 01:28 | and we'll go to export to EPUB. I am
pressing Command+E or Control+E to get here.
| | 01:34 | And click Save. We are going to just
use the default settings for everything.
| | 01:39 | So Based on Page Layouts. Images can
say the same. Contents, make sure that
| | 01:45 | nothing is checked off here,
and then we'll click OK.
| | 01:51 | It opens up in Adobe Digital Editions,
and the first thing that I see here is
| | 01:56 | that this little flourish
here is in the wrong location.
| | 01:59 | If you look back here under InDesign,
it should appear between the title of the
| | 02:05 | document and the author.
| | 02:07 | But instead, it's appearing after this
little copyright info, after U.S.A and
| | 02:12 | before the word Foreword.
| | 02:14 | If you watched the previous video on
layout order, then you know why: because
| | 02:18 | InDesign got to this page, the very
first frame that it found, the very first
| | 02:23 | object that it found going from left
to right, top to bottom was this. So it
| | 02:27 | exported all the content from here and
then, moving from left to right across the
| | 02:32 | page, it found this object,
and then it exported that.
| | 02:35 | So this comes after the
contents of this textframe.
| | 02:40 | That's exactly what it did.
| | 02:41 | And you can see that the same kind of thing
happened with those images that were floating.
| | 02:45 | You're not seeing them appear here in the articles;
| | 02:48 | instead, they are at the end.
| | 02:50 | Oh, you look so lonely there.
| | 02:53 | So how do we get these images to
appear in the paragraphs where they
| | 02:55 | are supposed to be?
| | 02:56 | And this is true not just for images,
but for any kind of linked graphic that
| | 03:01 | you might have. You need to be
able to anchor them into the textflow.
| | 03:05 | So to anchor something, I'm
going to drag out this frame.
| | 03:09 | This is a stand-alone frame with an
image of the font, or it could be text in
| | 03:13 | here as well, doesn't have to be an image frame.
| | 03:16 | You can anchor objects into the
textflow, just as in previous versions of
| | 03:21 | InDesign, by cutting with the
Selection tool and pasting with the Type tool.
| | 03:25 | But there's a much easier way to
do that in 5.5, and that's with this
| | 03:29 | little blue square here.
| | 03:30 | If you hover over it, and you have
Tooltips turned on, you'll see that it gives
| | 03:34 | you a hint of how to use it. It's so great!
| | 03:36 | If you want to maintain this current
location of this object, then you just drag
| | 03:43 | that blue square to where
you want it to be anchored to.
| | 03:47 | But we actually don't want it there;
| | 03:48 | we want it to be in line.
| | 03:50 | We want it to actually appear inside here.
| | 03:52 | So instead, I'm going to hover over
this and watch the Tooltip, Shift+Drag to
| | 03:56 | make this an in-line object.
| | 03:58 | So I am going to hold down the Shift
key, and drag it right next to this empty
| | 04:01 | carriage return, and then release the
Shift key after I release the mouse. And
| | 04:07 | now this image frame is
anchored in the textflow.
| | 04:10 | If I hit Return a couple of times,
you can see the image moves with it.
| | 04:14 | You need to do the same thing to any
other images or objects that you want to
| | 04:19 | appear in a specific
location within a long text story.
| | 04:24 | So let's scroll down here and do
the same thing with this group.
| | 04:27 | I am just going to drag it right there.
And this object here, I am just going to
| | 04:37 | take the blue square and drag it right there.
| | 04:48 | Now let's export this to
EPUB and see what happens.
| | 04:50 | We'll call it 2, with the
same settings as before.
| | 04:56 | All right, so our flourish is now
appearing in the correct location in the
| | 05:03 | textflow. And there is our image with
the caption and the correct location as
| | 05:10 | well. And there is the gentleman to the left of
the text that flows around him. Isn't that great?
| | 05:17 | That's what you're going to need to do
if you're going to rely on the layout
| | 05:21 | order when you export to EPUB.
| | 05:22 | You have to actually anchor all your
images and any other floating objects that
| | 05:28 | you want to appear in a certain location.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the Articles panel to manage content flow| 00:00 | In a previous video I showed how the
default export option for EPUB, which is
| | 00:05 | Based on Page Layout, can really make
life difficult for you, especially if
| | 00:09 | you have a number of different
objects on the same page or pages in your
| | 00:13 | document, because InDesign by
default goes from left to right, and top to
| | 00:17 | bottom, when it exports.
| | 00:18 | Well, there's a great new feature in
InDesign CS5.5 called the Articles panel
| | 00:24 | that will help you gain a much more
control over the order of items that are
| | 00:29 | exported to EPUB, and HTML for that matter.
| | 00:33 | You will find the Article panel
under the Window menu. Choose Articles.
| | 00:37 | And what's really cool about this
is that between the Tooltips and the
| | 00:40 | ,
content in here it will remind you
how to use it, even without you having to
| | 00:44 | go to the Help file.
| | 00:46 | Essentially, you can create one or
more articles from the same InDesign file.
| | 00:51 | You do not have to move any objects
around on the page in order to change the
| | 00:55 | order of their export.
| | 00:57 | When you go to export this to EPUB you
are going to be using the Articles panel
| | 01:03 | rather than Based on Page Layout.
| | 01:05 | Right now, it's dimmed because we don't
have anything in the Articles panel. But
| | 01:08 | it will become enabled and we can
choose it once we add something to Articles.
| | 01:12 | So how do you do this?
| | 01:13 | I think the simplest way is to simply
start dragging and dropping stuff over.
| | 01:18 | So, for example, we want to create a
story called My Dog, Zoey so we want the
| | 01:23 | title to appear first.
| | 01:24 | As soon as you drag something over, if
there are no existing articles, you get a
| | 01:28 | pop-up saying hey, do you want to
make a New Article? Well, yes I do.
| | 01:31 | We will call it Zoey-main story.
| | 01:34 | Now this is not going to be part of the
EPUB, so you can name it whatever you'd like.
| | 01:39 | So there is the name of the article, and
then it shows the object in here. And the
| | 01:46 | text frame shows with the T along
with the characters in the text frame.
| | 01:51 | If you edited this text
this would change as well.
| | 01:54 | Now we want to add the byline, so I am
just going to drag by Joe Schmoe and
| | 01:59 | add it right below My Dog, Zoey. And
then we want the main story and we will
| | 02:03 | put that right there.
| | 02:04 | All right, so you don't have to worry
about it exporting this, or even the image
| | 02:09 | and the caption, because if we went right
now to Export to EPUB and said based on
| | 02:15 | Articles panel these would be the
only things that it would export.
| | 02:18 | It would export My Dog, Zoey,
the byline, and the story.
| | 02:21 | In fact, let's go ahead and do that. All right!
| | 02:23 | So we are going to do Same as
Articles panel. Everything else will be at
| | 02:30 | the default settings. And there you go;
| | 02:35 | My Dog, Zoey, the byline, and the story.
Nothing else was included in this document.
| | 02:41 | Now let's go ahead and make another article.
| | 02:43 | You can make another article by
clicking the New Article button at the bottom.
| | 02:47 | So I will click that, and
we'll call this Pictures.
| | 02:50 | Now because I had something
selected when I created a new article, it
| | 02:56 | automatically assumed that
it should be part of it.
| | 02:59 | And also notice that it is now part
of two different articles, and that is a
| | 03:03 | feature/bug of the Articles panel is
that you can include the same object in two
| | 03:10 | or more articles if you wanted to.
| | 03:11 | It does not mean that you are
duplicating anything in the publication, but in
| | 03:16 | this case -- sometimes it happens by
accident, you don't want that to happen.
| | 03:19 | To remove something from the
Articles panel, click the Trashcan icon.
| | 03:24 | That only removes it from the Articles panel;
| | 03:25 | it doesn't remove it from the layout.
| | 03:27 | However, if you get confused, or you're
in a hurry, if you select something in
| | 03:31 | the Articles panel and press the
Delete key, as I just did, it actually deletes
| | 03:36 | the thing in the layout. So
don't do that. I'm going to undo.
| | 03:40 | If you want to delete something from
the Articles panel because you don't want
| | 03:43 | to include it, select it in the Articles
panel, and then click the Trashcan icon.
| | 03:47 | Anyway, so let's add some
more things to Pictures.
| | 03:50 | You can add a group if you want; there
is no problem. And a group will appear as
| | 03:55 | like this is a group, and then you can
twirl it down, and you can then rearrange
| | 03:58 | the items within the group.
| | 04:00 | So say, for example, I want the
caption to appear below the picture of Zoey.
| | 04:04 | I could drag that down, which is pretty cool.
| | 04:07 | Let's go ahead and export this
to EPUB and see what we have.
| | 04:10 | We will Replace the existing. Same as
Articles panel. So there's a story on top
| | 04:19 | and there's the picture
with the caption underneath it.
| | 04:23 | Let's clear this out.
| | 04:24 | I'm going to just Shift+Click both of
these articles and press the Trashcan
| | 04:29 | button, right, not the Delete key.
| | 04:32 | You can add everything in the entire
document to the Articles panel simply by
| | 04:36 | holding down the Command or Control key
and then clicking on the Plus symbol.
| | 04:40 | The Plus symbol usually just adds the
selected object, or objects, to whichever
| | 04:44 | article is currently highlighted.
| | 04:46 | So this whole document is going to be
one article. We will just leave it at the
| | 04:50 | default name of Article. And we will
export this to EPUB, with the default
| | 04:56 | settings Same as Articles panel
as remembered. What the heck?
| | 05:04 | What's that?
| | 05:04 | We have got these green boxes on the
top. Everything else looks the same.
| | 05:09 | That's because this is another
feature/gotcha of the Articles panel
| | 05:14 | in that you can be add InDesign
artwork and it will export it as a graphic.
| | 05:20 | We will use this to our advantage in a
future video when I talk about converting
| | 05:24 | your InDesign artwork to graphics.
| | 05:25 | This is one of the new methods that you
can use. But you have to be careful of
| | 05:28 | it if you ever choose to add
everything to the Articles panel, because you can
| | 05:33 | see that it actually added those rectangles.
| | 05:35 | Now if I double-click one, it
will select that item in the layout.
| | 05:39 | So that's really useful.
| | 05:40 | You can't really rename these. You
can't call this like dark green rectangle
| | 05:43 | top of page 1. All you
can do is double-click it.
| | 05:45 | So I am going to select both of
these, and again click the little Trashcan
| | 05:49 | because I don't want those to be part
of the export. But look at this, this is
| | 05:54 | nice and useful: I can just select that
jump line, which we don't want, and I can
| | 05:58 | delete it that way, right, rather than
having to drag it off into the pasteboard.
| | 06:02 | So the Articles panel is a really
cool way for you to be able to modify and
| | 06:07 | manipulate how objects are exported without
having to move things around in the layout.
| | 06:13 | So now that you've gotten a hang of it,
let's move on to like an actual document.
| | 06:17 | I have here the document called
History of San Francisco, that I
| | 06:23 | actually showed you in one of the very
first videos in this chapter, designed by
| | 06:27 | Nigel French. And the text is
being pulled from Wikipedia.
| | 06:34 | Now the first time that I exported this
using the layout order we came into a big
| | 06:38 | mess, but now that we have the
Articles panel it can make it a lot easier.
| | 06:42 | So, for example, I might
start out with the Introduction.
| | 06:46 | So I am going to select that, and Shift+
Click that story, and then just drag and
| | 06:50 | drop them into the Articles panel.
And I will call it Introduction.
| | 06:54 | So we've got those two items.
| | 06:57 | If I wanted to include this piece of
artwork, for some reason, I could put
| | 07:01 | that right up here.
| | 07:02 | So it's going to actually convert that
to artwork. And I'm going to change on
| | 07:08 | mine because I don't want that.
I just wanted to show you.
| | 07:11 | It did include this entire story.
| | 07:13 | So when you just drag over one frame
of the threaded story, it will always
| | 07:17 | export the entire story.
| | 07:19 | If you didn't want it to do that then
you would have to actually create two
| | 07:22 | different stories from this long one.
| | 07:26 | Let's go ahead and create another article.
So I am just going to choose this and
| | 07:29 | we'll call it the Peninsula. And
I'm going to drag over this picture.
| | 07:37 | Oh, I accidentally still had that
selected so let's delete that. And then here
| | 07:44 | is the sidebar text.
| | 07:46 | So I want the sidebar
text to follow the picture.
| | 07:49 | And then here is the photo credit, and
we want the photo credit right after the
| | 07:52 | picture, so it goes there.
| | 07:54 | Here is another group of items.
| | 07:57 | This is called the View of the Presidio.
| | 08:00 | So I will create another article called Presidio.
And we'll just drag the group over. I keep doing that.
| | 08:09 | I have to remember to deselect
every time I create a new article.
| | 08:13 | So this brought over the entire group,
and I don't have to ungroup it first
| | 08:16 | If I want to reorganize how this text
is going to appear. Like right now you
| | 08:21 | can see that the photo credit will be
first, and then the text with the caption,
| | 08:25 | and then the picture.
| | 08:27 | I actually want the picture to be first, and
then the caption, and then the photo credit.
| | 08:33 | You can continue doing that
throughout the entire document.
| | 08:36 | Just be careful that if you, you know, drag
over a whole bunch of stuff, that even if
| | 08:40 | you drag over say a line, it's going to export
that as a graphic, and it will look kind of dumb.
| | 08:45 | So be careful about wholesale dragging
and dropping into here, or using the add
| | 08:50 | everything in this entire document method.
| | 08:53 | And now let's export this to EPUB.
| | 08:55 | We want to make sure and
turn on Same as Articles panel.
| | 09:02 | You can, if you want, continue to use the
TOC Style to make a navigational table
| | 09:08 | of contents. You can chunk up the
document into separate chapters, if you want,
| | 09:11 | that are based on a paragraph style.
| | 09:13 | So just because you're using the
Articles panel it doesn't mean that you can't
| | 09:16 | use some other features.
| | 09:17 | But we are going to ignore
those for now and just click Export.
| | 09:22 | So there's our Introduction along with
the other -- so that was a very long text
| | 09:28 | file in the beginning -- and then there
is the story about San Francisco
| | 09:33 | Peninsula, and so on.
| | 09:35 | So you have complete control over
what gets exported, and in what order.
| | 09:39 | Now one more thing I want to
mention: something that you can't do.
| | 09:43 | Let's say, let's go back up here,
| | 09:45 | I am going to select this story.
| | 09:49 | Say that we wanted an image to
appear within the story. So I am going
| | 09:53 | to actually grab one.
| | 09:56 | Let's take this guy.
| | 09:56 | Now I am going to Copy and
Paste it onto this page.
| | 10:04 | If you wanted this story to go right
here in between these two paragraphs in
| | 10:07 | this article, there is no way that you
can like open up the text story called
| | 10:13 | Introduction and sort of like drag and drop this
in between a couple paragraphs. You can't do that.
| | 10:19 | If you're using the XML method, which I
will be talking about in another video,
| | 10:22 | you can actually do that.
| | 10:24 | It's a little more difficult, but it
is possible to drag and drop objects
| | 10:28 | in between paragraphs.
| | 10:29 | If you are using the article method
then you have to do the same thing as you
| | 10:33 | would if you were using the default
layout order, which is to anchor the object.
| | 10:37 | So if I anchored this graphic, I am
just going to hold down the -- I think I
| | 10:42 | will do this with an inline graphic, so
I am going to make an empty Return here,
| | 10:46 | click there, and then I will select
this, and hold down the Shift key so that it
| | 10:52 | turns into an inline object.
| | 10:57 | So it looks kind of dumb there, but you
know I could have set a correct paragraph
| | 11:01 | setting with autoleading, and so on.
| | 11:03 | I am not going to bother with that
right now. But I just want to let you know
| | 11:05 | that if you anchor stuff inside a
story, and that story, which you can see
| | 11:10 | highlighted right here, gets exported,
then that anchored object will be in that
| | 11:14 | story. And so the Articles panel
really doesn't give us any help as far as
| | 11:18 | anchoring objects within long text stories.
| | 11:21 | You can put the graphic before or after
the text story, but if you want it to be
| | 11:25 | part of the text story
you still have to anchor it.
| | 11:28 | The Articles panel menu has just a few options.
| | 11:32 | You can select an item and then have
it automatically find that item in the
| | 11:35 | layout. You can choose that after you
have created these things, when you export
| | 11:39 | to PDF as a Tagged PDF, that it can use
the arrangement of these items for that
| | 11:44 | article reading order in a PDF, which
is a way to make an accessible PDF, that
| | 11:49 | is kind of beyond the scope of this
video title. And then there are just like little
| | 11:53 | shortcuts for Add Selection to the Selected
Article that I kept doing by mistake before.
| | 11:57 | But Article Options really doesn't give
you anything new other than do you want
| | 12:01 | to change the name of it, and
should I include it when exporting.
| | 12:03 | And of course, you can always just
uncheck it if you don't want to include it
| | 12:06 | when exporting, but not delete it
from the Articles panel entirely.
| | 12:10 | So there you have it.
| | 12:11 | The Articles panel makes it much easier
to manage the order of elements in your
| | 12:16 | InDesign document when you export to EPUB.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using XML tags to manage content flow| 00:00 | When you export an InDesign document
to EPUB, there are actually three options
| | 00:04 | that you have as far as how
elements are ordered in the final EPUB.
| | 00:09 | Based on Page Layout, as you know, is the default.
| | 00:12 | We just looked at Same as Articles
panel, which is a new feature in 5.5.
| | 00:18 | In the interest of completion, I'm
going to talk about Same as XML Structure.
| | 00:23 | Though seriously, now that we have the
Articles panel there is far less of a
| | 00:27 | need to ever apply tags and use the
Structure panel simply to govern what gets
| | 00:33 | exported, and what doesn't, and in what
order, without having to manipulate objects
| | 00:37 | within the layout itself.
| | 00:38 | Still maybe you are already using XML.
| | 00:42 | Let me show you how you can use the
XML Structure panel and tags to have
| | 00:46 | almost the same mode of control, and
in some ways even more control than you
| | 00:50 | can with the Articles panel.
| | 00:51 | Now you don't have to know anything
about XML in order to follow along.
| | 00:56 | If you do want to learn more about XML,
by the way, lynda.com has a wonderful
| | 00:59 | video by Jim Maivald that's all
about using XML with InDesign.
| | 01:04 | So here we have the same simple two-
page document that I've been using to show
| | 01:09 | how layout order works, and with the
picture of My Dog, Zoey in the story, and
| | 01:13 | this time we're going to use it with XML.
The first thing you need to do is you
| | 01:17 | have to create XML tags,
which is very simple to do.
| | 01:20 | If you've ever created a
style, you can create a tag.
| | 01:23 | The hard part is finding
where is that pesky tags panel?
| | 01:26 | We have to go all the way down to
Utilities, and there it is hiding right there.
| | 01:30 | The Tags panel always has a default
Root tag that you can leave there that
| | 01:35 | comes with every document, just like
there is a default layer 1 and a default
| | 01:39 | basic paragraph style.
| | 01:40 | But we're going to add tags, and there
is nothing difficult about adding a tag.
| | 01:44 | Just click the friendly New tag button
at the bottom and let's say that you want
| | 01:49 | to add the headline.
| | 01:50 | So what should the tag be? Headline.
| | 01:51 | Very freeing that way.
| | 01:54 | We want to add the byline; new tag, byline.
| | 01:58 | We want to add the body copy, right,
| | 02:01 | so you can just say body.
| | 02:03 | If you make a space, and you
type body copy, and you hit Return,
| | 02:06 | you're going to get a little alert
saying hey, XML has some rules according to
| | 02:10 | the tag names, and a tag name
cannot contain spaces or tabs.
| | 02:14 | All right, all right; be that
way. So we'll just go body.
| | 02:18 | We're going to export the image and the caption.
| | 02:20 | So image, and caption.
| | 02:27 | Now to actually apply these tags to
the elements, we're going to select each
| | 02:32 | element with the Selection tool
and then click on the tag name.
| | 02:35 | Before you do that, you might want to
turn on the little view helper. If you go
| | 02:39 | under the View menu and go to Structure,
choose Show Tagged Frames, because then
| | 02:47 | it will add a little non-printing
tint to any frame that you've tagged.
| | 02:50 | So you can tell at a glance which one
you've tagged, and which ones you haven't.
| | 02:55 | Let me show you. I select the headline,
I click the headline tag, and it gets
| | 02:58 | this little coloring which is a
tint of that red right there.
| | 03:03 | And then we want the byline, I
think we'll do the body story next.
| | 03:08 | Now this is a group,
| | 03:09 | so in order to select just one item in
this group, I'm going to double-click.
| | 03:13 | So now, I just have the image
selected. Just the image of Zoey.
| | 03:16 | So I'll click Image. And now the
caption; select that, and then caption.
| | 03:23 | If you remember from when I showed
you how to export this via the default
| | 03:26 | layout order, what would normally
export first would be this little call out
| | 03:31 | here: My favorite dog!
| | 03:32 | Because it was leftmost.
| | 03:34 | But now that we have tagged elements, and
we didn't tag this one, anything that's
| | 03:38 | not tagged will not be included in the export.
| | 03:41 | Similar to the Articles panel, if you
didn't include in the Articles panel, it's
| | 03:44 | not going to be in the final EPUB.
| | 03:46 | But we don't have a friendly little
Articles panel to show us the order of the
| | 03:50 | elements that we have.
| | 03:52 | Instead, we use the built-in Structure panel
which is used for full-blown XML workflows.
| | 03:58 | To view the Structure panel go to
the View menu, go down to Structure, and
| | 04:02 | choose Show Structure.
| | 04:04 | So there you'll see the Root element
and there is the little disclosure
| | 04:08 | triangle next to it. Click it, and you'll
see the objects that you've tagged so far.
| | 04:13 | Now here is a little tip is if you go
to the Structure panel menu, go all the
| | 04:18 | way down to the bottom and choose the
Show Text Snippets, and that will give you
| | 04:22 | a little bit of the text within each
object that you've tagged with an XML tag.
| | 04:27 | That will help you distinguish one
paragraph from the other; one story from the other.
| | 04:30 | Right, so here is the image with the caption.
| | 04:33 | Now if I wanted the caption to appear
above the image, I could just drag it that way.
| | 04:39 | This is going to be the order
of the content in the final EPUB.
| | 04:43 | Then notice that when you click an
element in the layout, that element gets
| | 04:47 | underlined in the Structure panel. And
if you double-click something in the
| | 04:53 | Structure panel, that gets selected in the layout.
| | 04:55 | So let's go ahead and export this to EPUB.
| | 04:58 | I'll just press Command+E, or Control+E.
We're going to export it to the Desktop, and
| | 05:03 | this time we have Same as XML
Structure is enabled, because we've actually
| | 05:08 | tagged something. When you have nothing
appearing here, when you haven't tagged
| | 05:11 | anything, this will be dimmed.
| | 05:14 | And we'll use everything else at
the default settings. Click OK.
| | 05:20 | Let's Expand this, right.
| | 05:23 | So there is the headline, and then the
byline, and then story, and the caption,
| | 05:28 | and then the image.
| | 05:29 | Nothing else. We didn't get the
little call out on the left, we didn't get
| | 05:32 | the big picture in the bottom, and
everything is in the correct order. Nice
| | 05:35 | and simple.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Naming styles and linked assets| 00:00 | While you are setting up your InDesign
document or documents in a book for EPUB
| | 00:05 | export, I want to give you few
cautions as well about file naming.
| | 00:10 | Now if you have any control at all
over the file names of your InDesign
| | 00:14 | documents, your styles, your linked
images, then you can avoid some problems down
| | 00:19 | the road by adhering to a few rules.
| | 00:22 | And the rules are important, because
remember an EPUB is actually like a
| | 00:27 | miniature Web site in a ZIP file.
| | 00:30 | Here I have an EPUB that I created
from simple version of that San Francisco
| | 00:34 | History document, and then here is
the EPUB. Then I expanded that EPUB
| | 00:39 | So we can see inside it, and here all of the
content appears as a series of HTML files.
| | 00:45 | So these are all the chapters that got
exported. And if you open up one of these
| | 00:50 | you'll see that the actual names of
your styles appear within the HTML files.
| | 00:56 | If you make a hyperlink or cross-
reference, the document that it is linking to
| | 01:01 | is also included here.
| | 01:03 | So knowing that an EPUB is
essentially a collection of HTML or XHTML files,
| | 01:09 | you want to try to use the same rules that we
use when we're designing and coding Web sites.
| | 01:15 | If at all possible your InDesign
document names, try to make them
| | 01:19 | completely alphanumeric.
| | 01:20 | I mean, don't use exclamation points or
slashes, or parenthesis, because if they
| | 01:25 | are included in a link, like a cross
-reference or something, then remember that
| | 01:29 | those characters will also be part
of the link, and a lot of those are not
| | 01:32 | allowed in HTML files.
| | 01:34 | So the link may break or
the file may not validate.
| | 01:37 | If you can avoid it don't use any
whitespace in your InDesign file names. You know,
| | 01:41 | use an underscore or a hyphen if possible.
| | 01:44 | Now, for the book cover image file -- and
we'll be talking about book covers in more
| | 01:48 | detail later -- you want to use the same
rules as the InDesign file name rules that
| | 01:53 | I mentioned. Because a lot of resellers,
like Amazon Kindle and the Apple iBooks
| | 01:58 | store, they want you to upload an
actual image, a stand-alone image, and they
| | 02:03 | have very strict regulations
according to the cover image name.
| | 02:07 | So if you are, including a cover image
in your InDesign file, you want to make
| | 02:10 | sure that it's named correctly from
the get-go, so that you don't have to
| | 02:13 | start investigating inside your HTML
files, doing a Search and Replace, and
| | 02:17 | fixing links, and so on.
| | 02:19 | If it all possible, use these same XHTML
file naming guidelines, such as, you know
| | 02:25 | all lowercase and no spaces, for
all the images and style names.
| | 02:30 | I know that it's probably going to be
impossible to do that, especially for
| | 02:33 | images coming in. But
especially with your style names;
| | 02:36 | so instead of calling something
bullet 1 that we used in last year's annual
| | 02:41 | report, try and keep it really short
like bull1 or bullet1 with no spaces and
| | 02:46 | all lowercase. Because remember the
style names appear within the HTML files and
| | 02:51 | within the CSS file later.
| | 02:53 | And you'll be very happy if you remembered
to keep these style names short and sweet.
| | 02:59 | I'll be coming back to file names in
future videos, but I wanted to give you
| | 03:03 | the heads up at this point. If you
have any control, again, over the file names
| | 03:07 | for your documents, or the style names,
to go ahead and get in the habit of using
| | 03:11 | HTML rules right now.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Modifying Text and Images for EPUB ExportMaintaining text frame spacing| 00:00 | Now sometimes what might look
perfectly reasonable and fine and in fact
| | 00:05 | nicely done in InDesign,
| | 00:07 | When you print it, or when you export
it to PDF, then it doesn't make the cut
| | 00:11 | when you export it to EPUB.
| | 00:13 | Take this case of this beautiful
title page spread, for example.
| | 00:17 | We are looking at it in InDesign and
I'm just going to go ahead and export
| | 00:21 | it directly to EPUB.
| | 00:22 | So I'll press Command+E or Control+E. Click Save.
| | 00:26 | We're going to use the default
settings for everything, Based on Page Layout,
| | 00:30 | View the EPUB after Exporting.
| | 00:33 | And Contents, you don't need to
have any of these selected. Under CSS
| | 00:36 | you can keep all three, or just the
first two, as long as you have Include Style
| | 00:39 | Definitions so the
formatting comes along. Click OK.
| | 00:44 | Oops. What happened?
| | 00:46 | All the text is jammed up next to
each other. Let's take a look why
| | 00:49 | that might happen.
| | 00:51 | I'm going to switch from Preview mode
to Normal mode, and you can see now that
| | 00:56 | the reason these four chunks of text
were spaced out is because they're all
| | 01:01 | in separate frames.
| | 01:02 | When you export to EPUB the frame
geometry, where the frames are located on the
| | 01:08 | page, is not honored, as I mentioned
in a previous video about what gets
| | 01:12 | transferred and what doesn't
getting transferred from InDesign to EPUB.
| | 01:15 | So you can't rely on this kind of thing
and hope that the EPUB will maintain the
| | 01:20 | same amount of spacing.
| | 01:22 | We're going to need to incorporate all
these into a single text frame and then
| | 01:26 | add spacing ourselves.
| | 01:27 | So here is a little side tip, by the way, to
quickly get unthreaded text frames into
| | 01:32 | one frame, rather than copying
and pasting, or cutting and pasting.
| | 01:35 | First make sure that all the
frames end with the paragraph return
| | 01:38 | so we don't have paragraphs running
into each other. And then just select the
| | 01:42 | very first one, and click on the outport.
Hold down the Option, or the Alt key on
| | 01:47 | the PC, and click in the other
frames that you want to thread.
| | 01:51 | And I'm just keeping that button held
down and click, and click, and then release
| | 01:56 | the button. Select the Selection tool
and now these frames are threaded, but we
| | 02:00 | still have the same content.
| | 02:02 | Now that all the frames are threaded I
can select these final last three frames
| | 02:06 | and press the Delete key, and then
just expand the first one. There we go.
| | 02:10 | There, there is a bonus tip.
| | 02:12 | Okay, so we want to add some
space in between these paragraphs.
| | 02:16 | So let's try this way, like that.
| | 02:18 | I know you're saying no-no!
Don't do that; it won't work.
| | 02:22 | And you know what? You are absolutely
right, but let's see what happens anyway.
| | 02:25 | Export this to EPUB, I'll Replace the
existing one. Accept the same defaults; same thing.
| | 02:31 | Paragraph return runs are ignored;
they're all collapsed back to one paragraph
| | 02:35 | return, which I did talk about
in a previous video as well.
| | 02:38 | No matter how many returns you put in,
you know, it's not going to be maintained.
| | 02:42 | So if you want to see in InDesign
what this is going to look like in EPUB and then
| | 02:48 | fix it, you need to get rid of this
run of paragraph returns, and replace them
| | 02:52 | with actual formatting for the paragraphs.
| | 02:55 | So for Ella M. Sexton here I would
actually add space above in the Paragraph
| | 03:01 | panel. Right here add 8 picas
above, and now this would be maintained.
| | 03:11 | And now it will be maintained when I
export to EPUB if I remember to enable
| | 03:16 | Maintain Local Overrides in the
Export to EPUB dialog box. Because this was
| | 03:21 | actually just, you know, a
manually applied formatting.
| | 03:24 | Better would be to actually create
a style with space above and below.
| | 03:28 | Because that way even if I don't turn
that on -- which is usually not a good idea
| | 03:31 | to turn on Maintain Local Overrides,
it just makes the code really messy --
| | 03:34 | have everything done with the paragraph
or character style then it's much easier
| | 03:38 | to work with in the final EPUB.
| | 03:40 | I've already done that in this
document called calif-titlepg-after.
| | 03:43 | So if I click in this paragraph, for
example, and look in Paragraph Styles, I've
| | 03:49 | created a paragraph style called author
_name, and we are looking under Indents
| | 03:53 | and Spacing. You can see I added 2 picas
Before and 8 picas After. And I did the
| | 03:59 | same thing for other important paragraphs here.
| | 04:02 | Now let's export this one to
EPUB, to the Desktop. Same settings.
| | 04:09 | Ah, there we go, much better.
| | 04:13 | So in your InDesign documents if you
have a document that looks like this with a
| | 04:22 | number of frames that are stacked on
top of each other you should know now that
| | 04:26 | this is not how they're going to come on EPUB.
| | 04:28 | You need to concatenate them into
single frame, and then use space above and
| | 04:32 | below the paragraphs to
maintain that spacing in the EPUB.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Fixing EPUB text issues with Find/Change| 00:00 | Depending on the state of your
InDesign documents, you may have quite a bit
| | 00:04 | of cleaning up to do.
| | 00:06 | As you have learned by now, one thing
you need to do is get rid of space runs
| | 00:11 | and character return runs. Because
these are going to be ignored during the
| | 00:15 | Export to EPUB, you want to a good
idea of what the document is going to look
| | 00:18 | like in InDesign before that so you can
add space above or space after to your
| | 00:23 | paragraph styles, and so on.
| | 00:24 | So to get rid of these kind of things
you can go through a document, you know, select
| | 00:29 | delete, select delete, select delete.
And here are some space runs, select
| | 00:34 | delete, select delete. How boring is that?
| | 00:36 | So of course any InDesign user worth
their salt knows that is not the way to do
| | 00:41 | it. Instead you are going to use Find/Change.
| | 00:42 | You go to Edit and choose Find/Change.
And it's very simple to search for space
| | 00:48 | runs and replace with a single space.
Like I can just type a bunch of spaces,
| | 00:53 | replace with a space, and search the
entire document, so I am going to get
| | 00:57 | rid of these. Or to search for two or
more End of Paragraph returns in a row,
| | 01:03 | and replace with one paragraph return.
Right, or you could even use the grep of
| | 01:09 | Find/Change Multiple Returns to a
Single Return. But in addition to space
| | 01:14 | runs, tab runs, and carriage return runs,
there are other things that you need
| | 01:17 | to Find/Change as well.
| | 01:19 | For example, let's get out of here for a second.
| | 01:21 | Let me zoom in a bit.
| | 01:24 | There are characters that you might
not realize could cause problems in the EPUB.
| | 01:29 | And even if the EPUB looks perfectly
fine and you try to validate it, then it
| | 01:33 | might come back with errors, because
some of the characters are not allowed.
| | 01:37 | One example of a special character that
doesn't make much sense in an EPUB is a line break.
| | 01:43 | So this character right over here;
it forces the start of a new line.
| | 01:46 | Because remember, we have no control over
the width of the device that the user is using.
| | 01:51 | They might be reading this on an iPhone,
and may have really ramped up their
| | 01:54 | font size really large, so they're only able
to fit A Spanish story written, in one line.
| | 01:59 | So you normally want to get rid of
soft returns, or forced line breaks as they
| | 02:04 | are called. And something else that I
can see here is, it's really hard to
| | 02:08 | tell, but to a practiced eye you can
see this little red line happening right
| | 02:14 | before the word supposed.
| | 02:15 | Now this is actually a discretionary
hyphen, which is a special character that
| | 02:19 | you use whenever you want InDesign to
have the choice of to break it here, or if
| | 02:24 | it doesn't have to break, to remove the
hyphen whatsoever. But people know that
| | 02:28 | there's a trick that you can insert a
discretionary hyphen in front of a word,
| | 02:31 | to prevent it from breaking ever.
| | 02:34 | So I can start typing some spaces and
the word supposed won't break; it will
| | 02:39 | just go to the next line.
| | 02:40 | Of course, you could use other ways to do
that, but that is a common trick that people use.
| | 02:47 | Here we have another soft return, and
then down here we have these little red
| | 02:51 | squiggles. What are these?
| | 02:53 | Those are actually non-breaking spaces.
| | 02:56 | So what you're saying is that in this
document, while you're editing it, you
| | 02:59 | really don't want this name
to break at the end of a line.
| | 03:03 | But again that might look really dumb
in EPUB when you are reading it on a
| | 03:06 | device. So you normally want to get rid of that
and then just let the device break the
| | 03:10 | lines where it needs to.
| | 03:12 | So you can use Find/Change to get rid
of those as well. You can come up back
| | 03:16 | over here to Text, and search for
Hyphens, and find a Discretionary Hyphen, and
| | 03:21 | replace with nothing and so on. But
there is a faster way to do all of these
| | 03:26 | Find/Changes and more. And
its name is FindChangeByList.
| | 03:31 | It's a free script that comes with
InDesign, and it's easily used. All you need
| | 03:36 | to do is double-click it.
| | 03:37 | So you can find it by going to the
Window menu and opening up your Scripts panel,
| | 03:41 | which is under Utilities here. And inside
the Application folder, twirl that open,
| | 03:49 | you will see a folder called Samples.
| | 03:51 | Don't worry about My Scripts; I will
get to that in a second. On a Mac
| | 03:56 | you will have AppleScript and JavaSript, and
on a PC you will have VBScript and JavaScript.
| | 04:00 | The JavaScript is cross
platform; let's just look at that.
| | 04:03 | So here's the script FindChangeByList.
And essentially, FindChangeByList is a
| | 04:08 | sequence of different Find/Changes
that have all been saved to the same file.
| | 04:12 | If you double-click it, it just wants to
know if you want me to do this in
| | 04:15 | the entire document, or just the selected story.
| | 04:18 | Now if you are wondering, well, what
exactly is it going to change? Then you
| | 04:22 | need to look a little further.
It's not really well documented, but
| | 04:26 | FindChangeByList actually looks for
instructions in this Text file. It is easily
| | 04:31 | visible and understandable to a
normal carbon-based life form.
| | 04:35 | If you just right-click on it you
can get to Reveal in Finder, or Reveal
| | 04:39 | in Explorer on a PC.
| | 04:40 | Now it'll become selected in your OS; you can
double-click it, and edit it with any text editor.
| | 04:45 | Now the instructions for how to use it
are detailed up here in these comments.
| | 04:50 | We're not going to go
through this in very much detail.
| | 04:52 | But I just want to call your attention
to this sequence of where it says grep,
| | 04:56 | and then where it says text.
| | 04:57 | These are the different Find/Changes
that FindChangeByList does. And there is a
| | 05:01 | little clue at the end of each one of
these instructions that tells you what the
| | 05:05 | preceding line will do.
| | 05:07 | So this findWhat changeTo will find all the
double spaces, and replace with a single space.
| | 05:13 | Or we come down here, this one right
here will Find all space-dash-space and
| | 05:18 | replace with an en dash, and so on.
| | 05:20 | So these are all of things that it will
Find/Change, and by reading instructions
| | 05:24 | it's easy to see how you can copy and
paste these, and then tweak them so that it
| | 05:29 | finds things that you need to find
that aren't part of the script, and changes
| | 05:32 | them what you want to need to change to.
| | 05:34 | Like it could find every
instance of AMC, and change it to Anne-Marie
| | 05:37 | Concepcion if I wanted it to.
| | 05:38 | Simply by copying and pasting one
of these lines and typing that in.
| | 05:43 | I've done a lot of that work for you
though; I made one just for EPUBs.
| | 05:47 | So it's in the Exercise folder. You
will find a folder called epub under
| | 05:53 | Scripts. And if you copy and paste
that epub folder into your Scripts folder,
| | 05:58 | without even restarting InDesign, when
you come back to Scripts folder you'll
| | 06:02 | find it right there.
| | 06:03 | Now if you create another folder
called My Scripts and paste it inside there,
| | 06:06 | that's where it will be. Otherwise it
will just float inside your Application
| | 06:09 | folder. And, by the way, if you don't
know where the Scripts folder is, like where
| | 06:12 | are you supposed to bring the epubs
folder in, all you need to do is open up
| | 06:16 | your Scripts panel, right-click on
let's say Samples here, choose Reveal in
| | 06:22 | Finder, or Reveal in Explorer, and there it is.
| | 06:25 | So you can just drop the epub folder
right inside here if you wanted to,
| | 06:29 | Anywhere inside here.
| | 06:32 | So what I did my special EPUB,
FindChangeByList, you can see it's
| | 06:37 | FindChangeByList-epub, is this script
looks for this Text file. And I had edited
| | 06:45 | this text file -- dash epub -- to add a
few more things that can give a lot of
| | 06:52 | EPUB readers heartburn.
| | 06:55 | So things like nonbreaking spaces,
discretionary hyphens; it will go through
| | 07:01 | and remove all discretionary hyphens
and just get rid of them. But if it finds
| | 07:06 | a nonbreaking hyphen, it will replace it
with a regular hyphen. Those kinds of things.
| | 07:10 | So again, this is all editable, but these
are some of the most common errors that
| | 07:13 | pop up from special characters in
InDesign files when you export to EPUB.
| | 07:18 | So to run that script, just run it like
the other one. Just double-click and we
| | 07:22 | will go ahead and fix this
entire document. Here you go.
| | 07:24 | It just looks like it brought up a
paragraph that we could, you know, change the style. But
| | 07:31 | let's take a look at some of
the other things that it fixed.
| | 07:33 | It got rid of our discretionary
hyphen and our nonbreaking hyphen.
| | 07:40 | Let's take a look at this side.
| | 07:41 | It got rid of all the space runs; all
the instances of a multiple carriage
| | 07:49 | returns. It got rid of the
nonbreaking spaces; that guy's name.
| | 07:53 | So it's a nice fast clean up
that you can do with Find/Change
| | 07:56 | or FindChangeByList.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Applying paragraph and character styles| 00:00 | When you convert an InDesign document to
an EPUB document, part of what InDesign
| | 00:05 | does is it takes all of the style
information that's been used in the document,
| | 00:10 | all of the paragraph styles and any
character styles that you may have
| | 00:13 | created and applied to text, and it
converts those to a single Cascading Style
| | 00:21 | Sheet or CSS document.
| | 00:23 | So all of the style names, along with
all their specifications, as much as it can
| | 00:29 | to what CSS supports.
| | 00:31 | Remember CSS is the way that Web pages
are formatted and an EPUB is essentially
| | 00:37 | a miniature web site
zipped up into an EPUB file.
| | 00:41 | Now if you have never seen CSS
before do not worry about it.
| | 00:45 | You don't need to be a CSS expert in
order to properly prepare your InDesign
| | 00:50 | files for optimum EPUB looks. And I'll
definitely be talking more about CSS files
| | 00:55 | and how to tweak them in a future chapter.
| | 00:57 | Right now, I want to talk about the
very basics which is how important it is to
| | 01:01 | use paragraph and character styles in
your document so that you can later on
| | 01:06 | tweak them and edit them in the CSS.
| | 01:09 | We have here a very simple document with
some formatting. You can see a lot of
| | 01:13 | paragraph styles have been
applied. And we also have some overrides.
| | 01:18 | So like this, San Francisco Bay, has
been made into a Bold Italic just by
| | 01:23 | selecting the text and making it Bold Italic.
| | 01:25 | All right, so it's not using a Character
Style. Neither is that; neither is that.
| | 01:31 | We have just Italic here;
we have Small Caps over here.
| | 01:34 | Now let's go ahead and export this
to EPUB and find out what happens to
| | 01:39 | this kind of formatting.
| | 01:42 | We're going to Export it right to the Desktop. And
in Contents -- you can leave everything here as is.
| | 01:48 | In Contents, we are going to keep the
default CSS options turned on. So
| | 01:52 | it's going to include the style
definitions for all the paragraph styles that
| | 01:55 | were used in the document. It's going
to Preserve Local Overrides that I just
| | 02:00 | pointed out. And it also going to
Include Embeddable Fonts. Fonts are not
| | 02:04 | part of what we are talking about in this video.
| | 02:06 | Mainly, we are looking at
the styles and the overrides.
| | 02:09 | So I will say OK, and then it opens up
and you can see, yeah, for the most part
| | 02:13 | that they were maintained.
| | 02:14 | It didn't maintain the small caps line,
but that's something that EPUBs
| | 02:17 | always have difficulty with,
and you have fix later in the CSS.
| | 02:20 | So you're saying, okay, well, so what's the problem?
| | 02:23 | The problem is when you go to edit
something that has local formatting. I am
| | 02:27 | actually going to open this up in a
little editor that we will be getting very
| | 02:32 | familiar with later on, called
TextWrangler, that lets us peek at the contents of
| | 02:37 | an EPUB without having to
actually unzip it first.
| | 02:42 | If we open up the HTML file containing
the story you can see that where it says
| | 02:50 | major port, it doesn't have a nice
emphasis, or Italic, or anything like that.
| | 02:55 | It's says character-style-
override-3. And this one was
| | 02:58 | character-style-override-2. And you can
imagine if you have a 50 chapter document
| | 03:03 | with 500 pages, it would be insane the
number of character-style-override that
| | 03:06 | you would have to keep track of.
| | 03:09 | It is far, far better to use a
character style instead of manually applying
| | 03:14 | this kind of formatting.
| | 03:17 | If we look at the CSS document, you
can see that it also has all those
| | 03:21 | span-character-style-overrides. There
is the Italic Bold, here is the Normal
| | 03:25 | Bold, here is the Small Caps that you
would have to edit individually, and this
| | 03:29 | could number up into the hundreds
if you had a really long document.
| | 03:32 | So this is not what you want to do.
| | 03:34 | Let's come back here to InDesign. This
time let's export the document to EPUB.
| | 03:39 | We will replace the existing one, but
in Contents we are going to turn off
| | 03:44 | Preserve Local Overrides.
| | 03:48 | So the document comes through but
we've lost all of the local overrides
| | 03:52 | right? No surprise.
| | 03:54 | The solution, then, is to go through your
documents and look for any instances of
| | 03:58 | local overrides, and replace them with
true paragraph styles, and character styles.
| | 04:03 | And that can be pretty onerous but
it's going to be worth it in the long run.
| | 04:06 | I am going to show you a fast way to do that
in this video. Actually a couple of fast ways.
| | 04:11 | First of all, you can always
select everything in the entire story.
| | 04:15 | I am going to click in here and
press Command+A or Control+A. And then in
| | 04:19 | Paragraph Styles, if you click this
little icon down here, this will clear
| | 04:24 | any overrides in this selection.
| | 04:25 | I will just go ahead and click it, and
then click here, and now you can see that
| | 04:30 | everything that had been formatted
manually, rather than from a style, is gone.
| | 04:35 | So it's not really helpful to maintain
that kind of formatting, but if you ever
| | 04:39 | need a way to just clear everything out
to see what you are really working with
| | 04:43 | that's a cool way, and you can always undo.
| | 04:45 | So let's go ahead and do that.
| | 04:46 | Undo Clear All Overrides, and we
are back to where we started.
| | 04:50 | Now another thing you do to convert
this local formatting to actual character
| | 04:55 | styles would be to use Find/Change.
| | 04:58 | So we go to Edit and choose Find/
Change, and let's clear out any previous work
| | 05:05 | that we have done here.
| | 05:05 | So what we want to do is, we don't want to
change any text, so we leave Find
| | 05:09 | what and Change to Empty. Instead we
want to Find Format and Change Format. So you
| | 05:14 | want to Find anytime that there is
something that is Italic, and then you want
[0005:23.17]
to Change it to a Character Style
called Italic, and if you don't have a
| | 05:29 | Character Style called Italic, you
can create one and specify it here.
| | 05:32 | But we are going to back out of here
because you can see though this is
| | 05:36 | possible to do it this way, this can also
get very tedious, and there is a faster way.
| | 05:41 | There is a third party script that I
have installed, and we will put up a little
| | 05:44 | banner here that tells you where to
download it from, called Prep Text that was
| | 05:48 | written by a wonderful man who helps us
out a lot on indesignsecrets.com blog.
| | 05:54 | He just writes lots of great scripts,
and this is a free script that works in
| | 05:58 | CS 5.5 perfectly fine.
| | 06:00 | I have installed it by dropping it into my
Scripts folder, and you should do so as well.
| | 06:05 | Find your Scripts folder on your
hard drive, and drop it in there.
| | 06:08 | I explained how to do
that in the previous video.
| | 06:11 | I have already done that in My Scripts.
I keep all my EPUB related scripts
| | 06:15 | inside an EPUB folder so
I can quickly find them.
| | 06:17 | And there is preptext. His name
is Jongware; that's a screen name.
| | 06:22 | All Prep Text does is it goes through the
document, it looks for any instance of
| | 06:26 | overridden styling, and creates a character
style, then automatically applies it to that text.
| | 06:33 | Is that cool or what? so watch it.
| | 06:34 | I am going to open up the
Character Styles panel and watch the magic.
| | 06:38 | I double-click. Bam, bam,
bam: it applied those styles.
| | 06:42 | Now it doesn't create a character
style for every single instance of manual
| | 06:46 | formatting you may have applied. Perhaps
you made a pink diamond bullet, for
| | 06:49 | example, it's not going to
automatically create a character style called pink
| | 06:52 | diamond bullet, though that would be cool if it did.
| | 06:55 | But it will create and apply character
styles like Bold, Bold Italics, Small
| | 07:00 | Caps, Superscript, and so on.
| | 07:02 | So if I click inside one of these, you
can see that it actually applied Bold
| | 07:07 | Italic, and Bold, and Small Caps.
| | 07:12 | Now let's go ahead and export this to
EPUB again; replacing the existing one.
| | 07:19 | Once again we want to keep
Preserve Local Overrides turned off.
| | 07:23 | I call this in case of emergency.
| | 07:24 | You need to rip out really quick EPUB that
maintains the formatting then turn that on.
| | 07:29 | But for actual EPUB that you are going to
sell you normally never want to turn this on.
| | 07:33 | You want to create a quality EPUB
that's formatted completely with character
| | 07:36 | and paragraph styles.
| | 07:39 | Click OK. And now because these were applied
with character styles they are maintained.
| | 07:44 | Now as I said, we are not seeing Small
Caps because CSS has an issue with small
| | 07:47 | caps. You actually need to get in
there in the CSS and edit it yourself. But
| | 07:51 | everything else is maintained and this
will be a lot easier to edit should we
| | 07:54 | need to do so in the CSS and HTML files.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Mapping paragraph styles to CSS tags| 00:00 | I'll be honest with you: I struggled
with the idea of, should I include this
| | 00:05 | video in the title at all. Because
it's a little out there for people who are
| | 00:10 | coming from a print background, and I
imagine that many of the people watching
| | 00:13 | this title are trying to figure out
how to convert their print documents to
| | 00:16 | EPUBs. But I thought, you know,
there's a lot of you out there who have been
| | 00:20 | doing it for awhile and need some help.
And let me show you this great feature
| | 00:24 | in CS5.5 that you might find extremely helpful.
| | 00:27 | The feature I'm talking about is the
ability to map paragraph styles to CSS styles.
| | 00:33 | Now, you already know that that
is what InDesign does by default.
| | 00:37 | It maps the paragraph and character
styles that you have to CSS styles.
| | 00:41 | We've talked about that many times;
| | 00:42 | we'll be talking about it even more in
future chapters. But there is a glitch to
| | 00:47 | how InDesign does this that the
ability to map styles can help fix.
| | 00:52 | Let's see the default results.
| | 00:54 | I've already exported this with default
settings to EPUB, and I have it open in
| | 00:59 | Adobe Digital Editions.
| | 01:00 | I reduced the Font size up here a little
bit so we can see a two-page spread, and
| | 01:05 | I think it basically looks pretty good.
| | 01:07 | We've got a drop cap, and we have our
body copy with the first line indent, we've
| | 01:11 | got a little pull quote,
we've got a caption. Looks fine.
| | 01:14 | But I've also opened up this EPUB in
TextWrangler, one of a variety of EPUB
| | 01:20 | editors that I'll be talking about in
the next chapter, to show you what's
| | 01:24 | happening behind the scenes. To show you
how the sausage is being made, as it were.
| | 01:28 | The problem here is that if you ask
any professional Web site designer, or a
| | 01:33 | coder, to ask them to take a look at the
CSS file and they will blanch, because
| | 01:37 | though it will work, it's very messy.
| | 01:40 | You can see that for every single
instance, so let's actually take a look at
| | 01:43 | the file, for every single instance of
a body paragraph, InDesign adds a class
| | 01:50 | called body to it. And there is a
paragraph class Pull-quote, now that makes
| | 01:55 | sense. But body, after body,
after body; that doesn't make sense.
| | 01:59 | This is called classitis.
| | 02:02 | A professional Web designer, or coder, or
somebody who is very familiar with HTML
| | 02:07 | and CSS, would instead just call this a
paragraph tag. They'd just say p on here,
| | 02:12 | and they would declare in the CSS file
what the paragraph element, the p, what
| | 02:17 | that should look like by default.
| | 02:19 | Print designers can get their head
around this if you understand that Web
| | 02:21 | sites should be designed like you modify
the default paragraph style to be
| | 02:26 | how you want all of the text to look
by default, and then you use occasional
| | 02:31 | instances of different paragraph styles or
different character styles to tweak that basic look.
| | 02:36 | When instead, InDesign will export
everything as though you would apply a
| | 02:40 | paragraph style, and then a character
style on top of the entire paragraph. And
| | 02:45 | it defines settings for every single
item, which makes it very difficult to use
| | 02:50 | the cascading nature of CSS,
because every attribute has been declared.
| | 02:56 | So as I said, I hesitated to include
this because it gets a little advanced.
| | 03:00 | The idea is that you want to use
clean HTML and CSS code. And by default
| | 03:05 | InDesign does not create clean HTML and CSS code.
| | 03:09 | It looks good, but if you ever need
to get in here and edit it, or say that
| | 03:13 | you're doing a series of books that all
need to have the same look, this can be
| | 03:16 | a lot of work to fix and to tweak.
| | 03:19 | Instead, you want to end up with a
very clean CSS file with just a minimum
| | 03:24 | number of attributes, only the ones
that are required, so you can quickly
| | 03:27 | format and tweak the formatting of your EPUB.
And that is where map styles to CSS tags comes in.
| | 03:34 | So let's close this and just
let me show you that in InDesign.
| | 03:39 | Let's say, for example, this
paragraph right here: this is Pull quote. This
| | 03:45 | could very well be the
normal HTML tag of block quote.
| | 03:50 | A block quote in HTML is an indented
paragraph, indented on both sides, meant to
| | 03:56 | do the work of a pull quote.
| | 03:58 | So if you wanted to map this to a block
quote, you wanted to export with a block
| | 04:03 | quote tag, and not the pull quote
tag, you can do that in InDesign.
| | 04:06 | We're going to Edit this style, Edit
Pull quote, and at the very bottom of the
| | 04:11 | list choose Export Tagging. So this
applies to both EPUB, and if you're
| | 04:16 | exporting to HTML, to HTML as well.
| | 04:19 | What it's showing us here is that the
Style Name Pull quote will automatically
| | 04:22 | be tagged with Pull quote, the class,
attached to the p element, the basic p for
| | 04:28 | paragraph element. And the class
will include all of these attributes.
| | 04:33 | This is exactly what we
just saw in the CSS file.
| | 04:36 | There is a dropdown menu here that
offers to replace the Automatic tagging.
| | 04:43 | Let's just say that we wanted it to be
a plain old paragraph, just a p. You see
| | 04:49 | that we would lose all this formatting,
but the idea is that in the CSS file we
| | 04:52 | would have defined the paragraph to match this.
| | 04:54 | Now, this is probably not what we want.
| | 04:56 | We don't want the pull quote to be just
like a regular body paragraph. We want
| | 04:59 | it to look indented. We want it to map
to block quote, but block quote is not
| | 05:03 | one of these choices. Aha!
| | 05:05 | Few people realize that this
is completely editable in here.
| | 05:09 | So I could type blockquote if I wanted
to, and it will go ahead and export this
| | 05:15 | as a block quote around it.
| | 05:17 | So I am going to go ahead and click OK.
| | 05:19 | Now, if you want to do this to a number
of styles, you can go to the Paragraph
| | 05:23 | Styles flyout menu, and choose Edit
All Export Tags. And here is a little
| | 05:28 | familiar interface from InDesign.
| | 05:30 | You can select any or all of your
paragraph or character Styles, and assign
| | 05:37 | them to a specific tag.
| | 05:41 | I might take body, for example, and
under Tag assign it the plain old p quote.
| | 05:47 | I could do that for any other
of these kind of styles here.
| | 05:50 | I am going to click OK, and now let's go
ahead and export this to EPUB. So it's
| | 05:57 | not the default. This is actually mapped.
| | 06:03 | And under Contents we're
going to leave it as is.
| | 06:06 | The best way to use this feature though
is to actually create your own CSS file
| | 06:11 | that defines what a paragraph element
should look like, and then you can link to
| | 06:15 | it here. And that makes for a very
automated workflow that will give you quality
| | 06:20 | results consistently.
| | 06:22 | For now, let's just take a look at what
InDesign does to the CSS. We'll click OK.
| | 06:27 | So it has lost some of the formatting
that we defined for body, and for Pull
| | 06:32 | quote. But if we open up this in
TextWrangler, that was mapped, and we start
| | 06:49 | scrolling, we can see that now this just
begins with a block quote and ends, and
| | 06:55 | then these paragraphs just begin with
a plain old p. So we don't have anymore
| | 06:59 | classitis happening.
| | 07:00 | What you do need to do though is you
need to go to the CSS file, and add the
| | 07:05 | elements p, and blockquote, and then add
the attributes here. Or the idea being
| | 07:09 | that you would already have a CSS
document that did that for you that you
| | 07:12 | would have linked to.
| | 07:13 | So that is what that whole
feature is all about in CS5.5.
| | 07:17 | Maybe it's not fully baked yet, this is
the first time that we've been able to
| | 07:21 | see it in 5.5, but it's a big step
forward in creating nice, clean HTML and
| | 07:26 | CSS files.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Modifying tables| 00:00 | If your InDesign document contains a
table, the information in that table
| | 00:05 | will be included in the export to EPUB, and
it will be maintained in the table structure.
| | 00:10 | What you will lose though will be some,
maybe even most, of the table formatting.
| | 00:15 | Especially things like
the Strokes and the Fills.
| | 00:18 | However, these can be easily
reconstituted in the CSS file after the fact.
| | 00:23 | So let's take a look at how
this table will export to EPUB.
| | 00:27 | I'm going to switch back to Normal
view. And just to review that tables are
| | 00:31 | always part of a textframe, so there's
usually not a problem with worrying that
| | 00:35 | the table will appear in the correct
order when you export even if you're just
| | 00:39 | using based on page layout.
| | 00:41 | Of course, if the table is in a stand-
alone frame that you have dragged in here,
| | 00:45 | then you are going to need to
manipulate the layout, or use the Articles panel,
| | 00:49 | to make sure the table appears in
the correct location when you export.
| | 00:53 | But other than that there's really
nothing special you need to do to tables.
| | 00:56 | I've applied a table style to this
table, and the table style uses specific
| | 01:01 | paragraph styles for the Contents of most of
the cells. That's about all that is new here.
| | 01:06 | Let's go ahead and export to EPUB. So
we're going to export directly to the
| | 01:13 | desktop and I will click Save.
| | 01:16 | We are going to use the default
settings under Contents. Just to make sure that
| | 01:20 | at least Include Style Definitions is turned on.
| | 01:24 | You don't have to have the
other two turned on unless you want to
| | 01:26 | actually preserve local overrides, and we
are not dealing much with fonts in this video.
| | 01:30 | So let's just click OK, and make this larger.
And there is our table in all its glory.
| | 01:40 | So you do see the formatting, I mean
the text here is blue just as it was in
| | 01:44 | InDesign. The text here is blue, because
that's part of the paragraph style for that text.
| | 01:50 | We see the stroke on the outside and
that things are aligning more or less.
| | 01:55 | Now remember we are using Adobe
Digital Editions. Your table might look
| | 01:59 | different depending on the device
that you are formatting this for.
| | 02:02 | So, for example, in Firefox you can
install a plug-in that will open up EPUBS,
| | 02:07 | which I talked about in previous video.
So I have jumped to Firefox and we are
| | 02:11 | going to open up that same EPUB
right here in Firefox. Oh, look at that.
| | 02:16 | So we are getting the
code that InDesign creates.
| | 02:20 | Firefox can understand that this stuff
is supposed to be green filled in these
| | 02:24 | rows. But sometimes it's just the
fault of the EPUB reader software. But of
| | 02:29 | course that is the challenge. That's what
they pay us the big bucks for, right? To
| | 02:33 | format text and tables so that they
look the best in every single reader that
| | 02:37 | our customers will be using.
| | 02:39 | I want to show what this looks
like in an editor, so I'm jumping to
| | 02:44 | TextWrangler, which will let us peek at the
innards of an EPUB. And here is the actual text.
| | 02:51 | Let's make this a little
larger here. All right!
| | 02:55 | So this is the HTML file that was
exported, and here are the table tags.
| | 03:00 | So if you have ever created a table in a
web page this looks very familiar to you.
| | 03:04 | Starts the table right here and you can
see the class is "doctor-table." That is
| | 03:09 | the name for the style for the table.
| | 03:11 | With table row, table data means a
cell, and then here is the first paragraph
| | 03:16 | called Degree with the correct
paragraph style applied. Then that's the end
| | 03:21 | of that cell, beginning of the next cell, and
so on. The end of that row, and it continues.
| | 03:28 | Even if you have merged cells,
that is maintained as well.
| | 03:33 | So you can see over here it says,
table data colspan = "2", and somebody
| | 03:39 | apparently applied manual
formatting to this text where it says Unknown.
| | 03:43 | So this is what it's referring to in the
InDesign file is this block right here.
| | 03:47 | So you see these two cells were merged
and then somebody overrode the paragraph
| | 03:52 | style and made this centered. But
you can see that came through as well.
| | 03:59 | If you look at the CSS, you can go ahead
and edit table head, table body, and you
| | 04:06 | can add your own tags for tds and
trs to make sure that the fills and the
| | 04:12 | strokes appear correctly.
| | 04:14 | So it takes some CSS digging, and
hopefully with every new version of
| | 04:18 | InDesign we will get closer and closer to
maintaining the actual formatting in the end result.
| | 04:24 | Now what you might also think about
though is that a table created for print
| | 04:29 | might not work well on EPUB.
| | 04:31 | This is a pretty wide table.
| | 04:32 | If we look at this in Digital Editions,
it did lose some of its table geometry,
| | 04:38 | but let's say that we're looking
at this in a very small reader.
| | 04:46 | It starts to get cut off; it
doesn't automatically resize.
| | 04:49 | So you need to think about the
content that you have in those tables.
| | 04:54 | Maybe it's not suitable for an EPUB,
because tables really don't reflow.
| | 04:59 | You might want to reduce the size, or
break this up into two tables or three
| | 05:03 | tables with a fewer number of columns.
| | 05:06 | Another thing you could do would be to
turn this entire table into an image, and
| | 05:11 | that way when you resized the page, or
the screen, or you are reading this EPUB
| | 05:16 | on a small screen versus large-screen,
you can have images automatically resize
| | 05:21 | to fit, resize proportionally. So
people could actually see the table there.
| | 05:24 | It might be very hard to read, and of
course, once you turn a table into an
| | 05:28 | image, you can't search on it;
| | 05:29 | you can't search for text within
it, because it's no longer text.
| | 05:32 | It's just pixels in an image.
Something to keep in mind, but that's the
| | 05:36 | trade-off that we have at this point.
| | 05:37 | Now, I'm going to show in the next
video how to convert InDesign artwork,
| | 05:42 | including tables, into artwork
very easily in InDesign CS5.5.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Converting InDesign objects to images| 00:00 | When you export an InDesign document to
EPUB, you know that all of the text on
| | 00:04 | the live document pages, and all of the
placed images or placed PDFs, those also
| | 00:09 | get exported and included in the EPUB.
But what doesn't get included are any
| | 00:14 | elements that you created in InDesign
that aren't strictly text or images.
| | 00:19 | Like, for example, these blue
triangles at the top would get dropped out, or
| | 00:23 | these red lines and
circles would get dropped out.
| | 00:27 | If we have this text on a path, but
only the text would appear not the path.
| | 00:33 | So let's actually take a look at that
and see what happens if we export this
| | 00:36 | as is to EPUB, indesign art, I just pressed
Command+E or Control+E, which is the keyboard shortcut.
| | 00:42 | We're going to accept all of the
default settings. Make sure View EPUB after
| | 00:46 | Exporting is enabled. And we can just
leave these at the default, and click OK.
| | 00:52 | So the text came through.
| | 00:54 | Here is the text on the path.
| | 00:56 | She is the sweetest dog in the world!
| | 00:57 | But the path itself didn't come through.
| | 01:00 | There is the headline, the byline, the
body copy. And then text from the little
| | 01:04 | call-outs; Ears at high alert, Tail is
relaxed. And then just a picture of Zoey,
| | 01:09 | my dog. But we're not seeing the
arrangement of these things actually calling
| | 01:14 | out of the red lines, or what
happened to the blue triangles?
| | 01:17 | If you want to include artwork that you
created in InDesign you need to convert
| | 01:22 | it to actual placed artwork by
exporting it to say JPEG or GIF for something
| | 01:28 | from the Export dialog
box, and then replacing this.
| | 01:30 | Or the better, slicker way to do this,
though I think it's an undiscovered
| | 01:35 | feature in InDesign, is actually to
convert it to a graphic upon export.
| | 01:40 | And the beauty of that is that first
of all, it's easier: you don't have to
| | 01:44 | replace anything or link anything.
| | 01:46 | And second, the objects are
completely editable in InDesign while they are
| | 01:50 | there. It's only when you export to EPUB that
they're converted to graphics. Isn't that cool?
| | 01:53 | Let me show you how you do that.
| | 01:56 | Let's start with just this.
| | 01:57 | She is the sweetest dog in
the world, yes she is.
| | 01:59 | I am going to zoom in a bit.
| | 02:00 | This is just plain old text in the path.
| | 02:02 | I select the object with my Selection
tool, and I go to the Object menu and
| | 02:07 | choose Object Export Options.
| | 02:10 | This is a very interesting dialog box
that we'll be revisiting a few times in
| | 02:14 | this chapter. But in this case what
it's really good for is you can click on
| | 02:19 | EPUB and HTML, this tab over here,
and then turn on Custom Rasterization.
| | 02:25 | Whatever you have selected in the
layout will be rasterized: that is, converted
| | 02:30 | to artwork when you export to EPUB or to HTML.
| | 02:35 | If you want to match the settings of
any typical kind of image, the default
| | 02:39 | settings from when you export to EPUB
in the dialog box, then you want to set
| | 02:43 | the Size to Fixed, the Format to JPEG,
the Resolution to 150, the Quality to
| | 02:49 | High, and Method Baseline.
| | 02:50 | Of course this is Custom Rasterization,
right, custom, so if you want to convert
| | 02:56 | it to a graphic that's slightly
different than what the default graphics would
| | 02:58 | be, you could choose Relative to
Page Width, which means that as somebody
| | 03:03 | resized the page, say that they are not
reading it on a device, but in say Kindle
| | 03:07 | Reader for the PC that actually has a
window that you can resize, then the
| | 03:11 | graphic would actually resize
proportionally as the window is resized. Otherwise
| | 03:16 | graphics stay the same size
even if you make the window smaller.
| | 03:19 | Or you could choose a higher resolution
or a lower resolution. It's up to you.
| | 03:23 | But let's just leave them at the
default right here, which is Relative to Page
| | 03:27 | Width -- actually let's make it
Fixed, we want Fixed, click Done.
| | 03:31 | And let's do the same thing for
these three graphics at the top.
| | 03:34 | So I am just going to drag a Selection
Rectangle over all of them, come back up
| | 03:38 | here, Object Export Options,
turn on Custom Rasterization.
| | 03:43 | And let's just leave this at Relative to
Page Width, and we can see the difference.
| | 03:47 | I'll click Done, and now I
will export this to EPUB.
| | 03:54 | We'll replace our existing one.
| | 03:56 | That's kind of interesting!
| | 04:01 | So we have some new elements here
that InDesign rasterized upon export.
| | 04:05 | If I resize the window, then notice how
the triangles get small, but the text on
| | 04:14 | the path stays the same size. Because
the text on the path is an object that is
| | 04:18 | set to be Fixed size, and the
triangles were Relative to Page Size.
| | 04:22 | So maybe this isn't the most
beautiful thing in the world, but you can of
| | 04:27 | course, tweak this, and try exporting the
different settings to get it exactly how you want.
| | 04:31 | Now, the reason the three triangles
are not all in a row across the top is
| | 04:35 | because we need to group them first.
| | 04:37 | So let's come back up here.
| | 04:38 | We still have these selected.
| | 04:40 | First I need to group them, Object>
Group, and now Object Export Options, and
| | 04:47 | turn on Custom Rasterization for the Group.
| | 04:51 | And let's do the same thing for this down here.
| | 04:53 | I am going to just select all of this,
and Group it, and then go to Object Export
| | 05:01 | Options, Custom Rasterization, Done. And
let's go ahead and export this to EPUB.
| | 05:07 | Replace, same settings as before. There we go.
| | 05:13 | So now the three triangles
appear in a row on the top.
| | 05:16 | And if we scroll down, so let's make
the type smaller so we can see this in a
| | 05:20 | couple of pages or one page, we can see
the actual image with all the call-outs.
| | 05:24 | So this is exactly the same as if we had
selected all those objects in InDesign,
| | 05:29 | exported it to JPEG via File>Export,
moved these objects over to the right in the
| | 05:35 | pasteboard so they weren't actually
included, replaced it with the JPEG.
| | 05:39 | That's kind of a pain. But what's really cool
is that in CS5.5 we can just leave it as is.
| | 05:44 | This is still completely editable.
| | 05:46 | We can come in here and edit this
text if we want to, and then whenever
| | 05:49 | we export it, it's going to remember that
it's part of a group that gets rasterized.
| | 05:53 | Let me Revert this document and show
you another way that you might end up
| | 05:58 | getting InDesign artwork
converted it to graphics.
| | 06:01 | you may not want it converted to graphics,
but I want to bring this to your attention.
| | 06:05 | We've been exporting based on Page Layout Order.
| | 06:08 | If instead we use the other method
based on the Articles panel, which I talked
| | 06:13 | about in a previous chapter,
oftentimes objects will automatically get
| | 06:17 | rasterized when you export.
| | 06:18 | So let's open up the Articles panel,
it's the first one under the Window menu.
| | 06:22 | And I've Reverted, so nothing is grouped,
nothing has been set to be rasterized.
| | 06:27 | And I am just going to hold down the
Command or Control key and click the Plus icon
| | 06:31 | at the bottom, which will add
everything in the document to the Articles panel.
| | 06:35 | Now, notice that it also brought things
like path, polygon, polygon. That means
| | 06:41 | that these things are going to be
rasterized when it gets exported.
| | 06:44 | So I am double-clicking on these to
see what it's selecting, and then also
| | 06:48 | brought in a group. Line, line, line.
| | 06:50 | Let's just see what happens when we export this.
| | 06:53 | I like to play like this. It's a
really good way to get to know all the EPUB
| | 06:58 | Export Options as you work.
| | 06:59 | Remember to choose Same as Articles panel.
You don't want to choose Based on
| | 07:02 | Page Layout. And then click OK.
| | 07:04 | So you see, we didn't need to
visit Object Rasterization Options, it
| | 07:09 | automatically exported the type on a path.
| | 07:12 | It automatically converted these guys.
| | 07:15 | And it did export some parts of
this, not all of it. Let's go back.
| | 07:20 | If you really want to have complete
control using the Articles panel when you're
| | 07:25 | exporting out to EPUB, if you want to
have complete control over how things are
| | 07:28 | rasterized, here's a better way to do it.
| | 07:31 | Instead of adding everything,
I am just going to delete this.
| | 07:37 | Let's just actually drag things over.
| | 07:39 | So there's our dog Zoey.
| | 07:41 | We'll just call this story Zoey, title,
and byline, and now I am going to take
| | 07:49 | these three things and Group them;
| | 07:51 | I just press Command+G or Control+
G and put that at the very top.
| | 07:57 | This can come right on over. That did fine.
And actually before I bring the
| | 08:01 | story over, let's select this, Group
it with Command+G or Control+G, bring that
| | 08:06 | Group over like that, and
then the actual big story.
| | 08:12 | So first I've made sure that they are
in a group, and now that they are in a
| | 08:16 | group, I can hold down the Option or
Alt key, and double-click on the name of
| | 08:21 | this entry, and come right to Object
Export Options. And now I can say, yes, this
| | 08:26 | should be 150, and let's do
the same thing with this group.
| | 08:30 | This should be 150.
| | 08:33 | That's the picture with the call-outs.
| | 08:37 | And now, because I am using the
Articles panel, I have control over the order.
| | 08:41 | Do you remember how we kept getting the
type on a path appearing above the headline?
| | 08:45 | Now we don't need to worry about that.
| | 08:46 | We are going to have the
triangles above the headline.
| | 08:49 | This is the type on the path right here.
| | 08:52 | So let's see how this works.
| | 08:54 | Export to EPUB. Same as Articles panel.
| | 09:04 | There is My Dog, Zoey.
| | 09:06 | Let's make it a little bit smaller so we
can fit more in the page. There we go.
| | 09:10 | So we have everything that
we had on the InDesign page.
| | 09:12 | We don't have page geometry, which we
already know we can't get in the EPUB. But
| | 09:17 | we do have elements of the page that
we wanted to maintain the page geometry.
| | 09:21 | Those are completely intact as an actual image.
| | 09:24 | But the beauty of it is we actually
did not need to change the layout at all.
| | 09:29 | All we needed to do is add things to
the Articles panel, and apply Groups and
| | 09:33 | Custom Rasterization as we needed to.
| | 09:35 | So whether you're using the Articles
panel or Page Layout as the basis for the
| | 09:40 | reading order, you can use our friendly
little Object Export Options dialog box
| | 09:47 | to convert InDesign artwork and
groups to rasterized objects on export.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Manually optimizing images or using the Object Export options| 00:00 | All of the artwork, all the images,
that you place into your InDesign file and
| | 00:04 | that lie on the document pages will get
exported to EPUB, and will get converted
| | 00:10 | to RGB files at 150 ppi resolution by default.
| | 00:14 | So you don't have to worry if your
print document uses high-res CMYK images.
| | 00:19 | There is no reason, except for maybe a
little one that I'll show you in a little bit,
| | 00:23 | but normally there is no reason for you
have to create two different versions of
| | 00:27 | images: one for print and one for EPUB. Yay!
| | 00:31 | Let me show you some basics of how
images work between InDesign and EPUB, and
| | 00:36 | then a couple tricks.
| | 00:37 | So I've placed this image called Oak Alley
that I took myself in New Orleans. Isn't that
| | 00:41 | gorgeous? It's from a plantation down there.
| | 00:44 | So the image is called Oak Alley, and
down here in the Links panel you can see
| | 00:48 | that it is 180 resolution.
| | 00:52 | I'm going to scale it smaller by
holding down the Command+Shift key as I drag a
| | 00:58 | corner, or Control+Shift in a PC. And I
want to get it to 300 pixels across.
| | 01:04 | I'm looking at the Width field in my
Control panel. Can you see it? Kind of hard
| | 01:08 | to get exactly there.
| | 01:10 | So I am just going to undo, and instead in
the Scale field I am going to type in
| | 01:15 | 300 pixels, which is a cool little
trick that you can enter a measure in the
| | 01:19 | Scale field. There we go.
| | 01:22 | So it's exactly 300 pixels across.
| | 01:24 | Now that I've scaled it down, as you
know, if you knew InDesign 101, the
| | 01:28 | resolution has been increased to 492
pixels per inch. Because we just made the
| | 01:34 | pixels smaller, so more fit in an inch.
| | 01:36 | What you see in your InDesign
document is what you're going to get when you
| | 01:42 | export to EPUB. So if you made an
image that's 300 pixels across, then in your
| | 01:47 | EPUB you're going to
have a 300 pixel wide image.
| | 01:50 | And if you have the luxury of creating
a new InDesign document from scratch,
| | 01:55 | then you might as well create an
InDesign document that's going to be the
| | 01:59 | target size of the final EPUB. Like let's say
that you are doing it for an iPad or a large Kindle.
| | 02:03 | A good rule of thumb is just to make
an InDesign document that's 600 pixels
| | 02:07 | wide by 800 pixels tall.
| | 02:09 | So now I know if somebody is looking
at this on an iPad, that this image is
| | 02:13 | going to take up about
this much width of the page.
| | 02:15 | You see, there is a method to my madness.
| | 02:19 | And by the way, if you are
wondering, how did you get pixels in here?
| | 02:21 | I just changed the measurement system
from Preferences, or my favorite trick
| | 02:25 | is to right-click in the intersection of the
Rulers, and then choose Pixels right there.
| | 02:30 | Let's export this to EPUB
and see what it looks like.
| | 02:32 | I am pressing Command+E;
jump over to the Desktop.
| | 02:39 | We're just going to accept the
defaults. We're going to come back here in a
| | 02:42 | little bit. And there is the image, and
let me sort of move it over a bit so we
| | 02:48 | can look at them side by side.
| | 02:51 | You might be thinking wait a minute,
this looks a little bigger than the one in
| | 02:55 | InDesign, and that's because this isn't at 100%.
| | 02:57 | Let's change the View Scale to 100%,
and move it over a bit. So do you see? They
| | 03:06 | are just about exactly the same.
| | 03:08 | Except that this has been downsampled
by InDesign to 150 ppi from -- do you
| | 03:13 | remember what it was? 492.
| | 03:14 | Now if I rotate this image, just by
dragging here, and I add the required Drop
| | 03:24 | Shadow that is in the end-user license
agreement -- I don't know if you saw that;
| | 03:28 | That every document has to have at least
one drop shadow. And then I export this
| | 03:32 | to EPUB, and we'll replace the existing
one with the exact same settings. Then
| | 03:37 | you see that one is also
rotated with a drop shadow.
| | 03:42 | If I had a stroke on there,
you'd also see the stroke.
| | 03:44 | So that is good to know that what you
see in InDesign is what will happen in
| | 03:49 | the EPUB by default.
| | 03:51 | Now if you want to override that, you can.
| | 03:53 | You can take any one image in your
document, or any multiple images, go to the
| | 03:58 | Object menu, go down to Object Export
Options, and you can override what's
| | 04:03 | going to be the default settings by
choosing Custom Rasterization. And in fact,
| | 04:08 | even before we come here, let me close this,
and let's look at what are the default settings.
| | 04:14 | So we'll visit this panel.
| | 04:18 | The default settings are, first
of all, that it should preserve the
| | 04:20 | appearance from the layout.
| | 04:21 | This is what maintains your
scaling, your cropping, your rotation.
| | 04:25 | If this was turned off, then we
exported it to EPUB, no matter what it looked
| | 04:29 | like in InDesign, it would appear in
the EPUB really big, like how our image
| | 04:33 | first looked even before I scaled it.
| | 04:35 | So normally you want this turned on.
| | 04:37 | The resolution is 150.
| | 04:39 | In previous versions of InDesign it
was 72, but as eReader devices get higher
| | 04:45 | and higher resolutions, then there is no
reason to keep scaling everything back to 72.
| | 04:49 | 72 ppi images will still work; they
will just look a little softer. And if
| | 04:55 | you want, you can set this to 300. If
you have very detailed images and you
| | 04:59 | think that eReader devices that your
customers are going to be using will
| | 05:02 | have high-reses, and there are places to find
out what the resolution is for eReader devices,
| | 05:07 | then you can go ahead and increase
it. There is nothing wrong with that.
| | 05:09 | But the default is 150, which is a
nice average for the different kind of
| | 05:13 | devices that are out there today.
| | 05:16 | The Image Size is Fixed, meaning that
if the person is reading it in a way
| | 05:20 | that they can resize the Reader window,
like if they're using the Firefox EPUB
| | 05:24 | Reader Extension, or a Kindle Reader
for the Mac or PC, but there is actually
| | 05:29 | window that can resize,
| | 05:31 | this is saying that the image will
always remain the same size as fewer and
| | 05:35 | fewer words are able to fit in the
window. Or you could have it automatically
| | 05:39 | resize proportionally as the page is resized.
| | 05:42 | The default is Fixed. It's up to you.
| | 05:44 | There are lots of other settings here.
| | 05:46 | I am not going to cover them in detail
here. I will in the next chapter. But
| | 05:49 | a couple other defaults that you
should be aware of is that InDesign will
| | 05:53 | automatically convert all images to one
of these three formats that EPUB supports.
| | 05:59 | I can tell you that in my experience 99.96%
of all images will be converted to JPEG.
| | 06:06 | If they start out as a GIF,
then they will remain as a GIF.
| | 06:10 | If they start out as PNG,
they will remain that way.
| | 06:13 | Otherwise, if it's a TIF, if it's an EPS,
if it's an AI image, if it's a Place
| | 06:17 | PDF, if it's a PSD image: everything gets
converted to JPEG. Even if it's just, say,
| | 06:22 | a black square that you place from
Illustrator, which would make much more sense
| | 06:25 | as a GIF, it gets converted to JPEG.
| | 06:28 | The Image Quality for all these JPEGs is High.
| | 06:31 | So it's not the maximum.
| | 06:32 | If you want Maximum, you need to
choose that. That's not the default. And
| | 06:36 | everything else is, I think,
understandable for now. That's all we need to know.
| | 06:40 | Now that we've seen the defaults let's
look at how you can override the default
| | 06:45 | on a case by case basis.
| | 06:46 | So you select an image and like the
Find panel, this is something that you know
| | 06:50 | it's not like a completely modal dialog
box, you can actually move things around
| | 06:54 | while this is open.
| | 06:57 | You turn on Custom Rasterization. And
then you can, say, let everything else
| | 07:01 | be 150 when I export.
| | 07:03 | This one I want 300, or maybe you
want this one to be 72 for some reason.
| | 07:07 | You can change the Quality of the JPEG.
You can change the Method, You can
| | 07:11 | change the Size. This is interesting
that the default for the Object Export
| | 07:16 | Options is for the image to be relative
to the page width, not fixed like it is
| | 07:21 | in the EPUB default.
| | 07:22 | So keep an eye out for that.
| | 07:23 | So if you want it just to be higher res,
but everything else is the same as all
| | 07:28 | the other images, then you have to
change this back to Fixed. And then under
| | 07:32 | Format it doesn't do an automatic format.
You can actually say this one should
| | 07:36 | come out as a GIF, or this
one should come out as a PNG.
| | 07:38 | Okay, so now that you know the basics of how
images work, let me show you a couple of tips.
| | 07:44 | First of all a question I hear a lot is,
should I rely on InDesign's ability to
| | 07:49 | down sample all these images to 150, or
should I take the trouble and actually
| | 07:54 | do them myself in Photoshop, and sharpen
them up, and do things like that, and then
| | 07:57 | place those optimized images into InDesign?
| | 08:01 | So I thought, well, let's actually test that out.
| | 08:03 | So I made a document called image
tests, that's part of the exercise files,
| | 08:07 | and it's three copies of the same
image. Except, here's the original: it's a
| | 08:12 | high-res Photoshop file, PSD that I
scaled in InDesign, similar to what I did
| | 08:18 | with Oak Alley in this one.
| | 08:20 | So if we look at the Links
panel, it is 804 pixels per inch.
| | 08:26 | This one I opened up the original
Photoshop file in Photoshop, and then I used
| | 08:30 | Photoshop's Image Size command to
resample it to 150 pixels per inch, 300
| | 08:36 | pixels across. And whenever you
resample in Photoshop you have your choice of
| | 08:41 | re-sampling or sharpening algorithms,
and I chose the one that would sharpen up
| | 08:45 | a little bit, which is what you normally
want to do when you scale something smaller.
| | 08:49 | And then just to see what InDesign
would do to a low-res image, because I was
| | 08:52 | curious, would it sample it up to 150?
| | 08:55 | I created the same thing at 72 ppi.
| | 08:58 | So we'll export this to an EPUB
using the default settings. Image tests. In
| | 09:05 | Image we are going to leave it at 150, Fixed,
Automatic which we know means JPEG High.
| | 09:11 | The idea is, will these look
any different from each other?
| | 09:16 | So I am going to bring this out
wider so we can fit more. If you had a
| | 09:21 | high-resolution monitor, you would be
able to see all of these in one window, so
| | 09:25 | I am making the Type
smaller so we get two pages.
| | 09:27 | Here is a high-res PSD that we
scaled in InDesign, so InDesign did the
| | 09:31 | downsampling in this one.
| | 09:33 | This is the one that we optimize for
150, and then we place that one. So
| | 09:37 | theoretically InDesign should not have
needed to touch this at all. And then
| | 09:42 | here's the 72 ppi one.
| | 09:44 | I can see right off, it looks a
little softer than the other ones, but it's
| | 09:47 | still perfectly acceptable.
| | 09:48 | It's kind of hard to tell on this
monitor, or with Adobe Digital Editions, if
| | 09:53 | there is an appreciable
difference between these two.
| | 09:56 | So what I did for you is I took that
EPUB and I extracted the contents of it
| | 10:03 | into this folder. And inside the OEBPS
folder, we have a folder called images.
| | 10:10 | And here are the three images that it
created. Notice they are called JPEGs,
| | 10:14 | even that PSD. So the high-res original,
the 72, and the 150. And then I opened
| | 10:20 | these up inside Photoshop.
| | 10:23 | By the way, in case you are
wondering, why does this say format?
| | 10:25 | That's what InDesign does whenever you
say maintain the cropping and scaling: it
| | 10:29 | adds the underscore format
to the name of your image.
| | 10:33 | In Photoshop I have these three
open right next to each other.
| | 10:36 | Here is the one that InDesign resampled.
| | 10:39 | Here's the one that we
resampled, 150 optimized.
| | 10:43 | Let's look at them again.
| | 10:45 | That's the one that InDesign did.
That's the one that we did. And I think you can
| | 10:49 | see here that it's definitely sharper
in the one that we took a little time
| | 10:52 | ourselves, and fixed it, and scaled it
ourselves in Photoshop. And that makes
| | 10:56 | sense because InDesign doesn't do
bicubic sharpening, and all that hoo ha. It
| | 11:00 | just does nearest neighbor kind of
algorithms whenever it does any kind of resampling.
| | 11:05 | So you can see it here, you can see it
in these lines by the light house, you
| | 11:09 | can see it in the vertical lines in
the bridge, that in the one that InDesign did
| | 11:13 | we're losing a lot of detail. In
the one that we did it comes back.
| | 11:17 | Now this is only for a very sharp eye, right?
| | 11:20 | So if this book was all about bridges,
then obviously I want to spend a lot of
| | 11:25 | time on the images. But if it was
mostly a tour of California, then I probably
| | 11:30 | wouldn't need to spend that much
time making this picture perfect.
| | 11:33 | So it's really up to you.
| | 11:34 | Now if you're curious, here is
what the 72 ppi image looks like.
| | 11:38 | So that looks okay at 72, and then
the eReader needs to bring it up to reach
| | 11:43 | 300 pixels across in the eReader.
| | 11:45 | So the answer is, do spend time in
Photoshop if the imagea are critical, because
| | 11:50 | there is a difference.
| | 11:52 | One last tip I want to tell you about,
especially people who are creating an
| | 11:55 | eBooks specifically for the iBookstore
on the Apple iPad. And that is, people have
| | 12:02 | discovered that you can create an
image that is the exact height and width of
| | 12:08 | the entire iBook page if you resize it
to exactly these measures: 860 pixels
| | 12:14 | high by 600 pixels wide.
| | 12:17 | I've heard it called the magic
dimensions because it effectively acts like a
| | 12:22 | Chapter Break or a Page Break.
| | 12:24 | This will always appear
completely on its own page.
| | 12:28 | The iPad will never break it up into
two pages, like it sometimes does with
| | 12:31 | larger images, or images of a
different resolution. And so an image that's
| | 12:36 | exactly half of this, like 600 pixels
wide by 430 pixels tall, like this image,
| | 12:43 | will take up exactly half a page.
| | 12:45 | Now if you want to do this to your
images in InDesign what you do is -- let me
| | 12:50 | make this back to 0 -- is that you come
over here to the Width and the Height,
| | 12:56 | and you enter exactly 600 wide by 860 tall.
Of course in pixels, all right, or points.
| | 13:05 | So all we've done is resized the frame.
And then you go to the Object menu,
| | 13:09 | Fitting, and choose Fill Frame Proportionally.
| | 13:13 | So now this image is exactly 600 x 860,
and of course you can move the image
| | 13:18 | around within these dimensions to get
it to fit better, or to do a better crop.
| | 13:23 | I went ahead and exported this document,
starting from up here, to EPUB. And
| | 13:29 | then I put it on my iPad and took
screenshots so you can see what it looks like.
| | 13:33 | So looking at it in normal portrait
orientation, this is page 1. And then when
| | 13:38 | you flip the page, this is page 2, so
that large image took up the entire page.
| | 13:43 | And there is page 3.
| | 13:44 | So if you want to have an image
separate chapters, for example, you could do it
| | 13:48 | this way; by inserting that large
image in between sections of type.
| | 13:52 | Here is the half page image; that looks
pretty good. And even if you rotate the
| | 13:57 | iPad so that the orientation is landscape,
here is page 1, here is page 2, looks
| | 14:04 | pretty cool, huh? And
there is the half-page image.
| | 14:07 | So those are some tips for optimizing
your images in your InDesign document
| | 14:11 | before you export to EPUB.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a cover image| 00:01 | Every EPUB that you are going to sell or
distribute should have a cover, because
| | 00:05 | just about every library application or
eReader device lets the user see all the
| | 00:11 | covers of all the EPUBS
they've collected or purchased.
| | 00:13 | So you want your cover to look really nice.
| | 00:16 | There are some rules to eBook covers.
| | 00:18 | One of the primary rules is
that it has to be an image;
| | 00:21 | can't be any text combined with it.
| | 00:23 | So it has to be one flat JPEG image.
And that's pretty common whether you are
| | 00:27 | going to sell it through the iBookstore,
or Kindle, or be in a NOOK, or even from
| | 00:33 | your own Web site, is that you
want the cover to be one image.
| | 00:36 | Now InDesign makes it really easy to
create a cover for your InDesign files, or
| | 00:41 | to attach a cover that, maybe, your
cover designer created in Photoshop or
| | 00:45 | something like that.
| | 00:46 | And I'll show you how that's done here.
| | 00:48 | We have a document open called calif-stories;
| | 00:50 | that's, you know, not that many pages long.
| | 00:52 | It's got a cover made up of a placed
image with a drop shadow, and a background,
| | 00:57 | and a couple blocks of editable text.
And then there is a blank page, and
| | 01:01 | then the title page.
| | 01:03 | Obviously the blank page
| | 01:04 | is going to be skipped when we
export this to EPUB. And then the Content.
| | 01:10 | So if we want to include this image as
the cover all you need to do when you
| | 01:17 | export to EPUB is go to File>Export,
and in the very first section called
| | 01:24 | General, down here you see this: EPUB Cover.
| | 01:27 | You can have it Rasterize the First Page,
and that in fact is the default setting.
| | 01:32 | It's still going to include the first
page in the EPUB itself, but it's going
| | 01:37 | to create a separate PNG file, I found
is what it usually creates, that's going
| | 01:41 | to be referenced in the important files inside
the EPUB as that is the PNG file that is the cover.
| | 01:47 | Because when an eReader device, or
software, or an eBook reseller looks at that
| | 01:53 | EPUB, they're going to look to see,
where is the reference to the cover?
| | 01:56 | So I know where to put the cover.
| | 01:58 | You can also say, no, I'm
not worried about a cover
| | 02:00 | in this file. You maybe already have one
created outside of InDesign, or maybe you
| | 02:04 | have an existing image file, and
| | 02:05 | if you do, you can choose it.
| | 02:07 | It's not going to import it or anything. It's
just going to include it in the EPUB package;
| | 02:11 | very important.
| | 02:12 | We're going to say Rasterize the First Page;
| | 02:15 | we'll leave it at the
default, and we'll click OK.
| | 02:22 | And so what do we get?
| | 02:23 | Where is the cover?
| | 02:25 | Well, that's kind of hard to see.
| | 02:26 | I think this is a bug,
actually, in Adobe Digital Editions.
| | 02:30 | The cover should show up here.
| | 02:31 | It's not showing us the actual first
page that was rasterized. It's just
| | 02:36 | showing us some text.
| | 02:37 | Now there is the title page, remember,
that had the little dingleberry here
| | 02:42 | because we didn't embed it correctly, then
it's not coming out in the correct order.
| | 02:46 | But this is what it's calling the first page.
| | 02:48 | It's exported all these separately just
as though it's based on page layout order.
| | 02:53 | I personally think that it's just a
failing of Adobe Digital Editions. But if
| | 02:56 | you really want to see it for sure,
here's what I do, is I come back here and I
| | 03:01 | will make sure that this first page
gets rasterized properly as a cover.
| | 03:06 | So I'm going to select everything on
the cover, and then group it, and then go
| | 03:13 | to Object Export Options, and
turn on Custom Rasterization.
| | 03:19 | I talked about this in a couple of other videos.
| | 03:21 | This cool little dialog box will let
you select any item or group of items,
| | 03:25 | it has to be grouped, and have InDesign
automatically convert that to an image on
| | 03:29 | EPUB or HTML export.
| | 03:31 | While it's in InDesign,
it's completely editable;
| | 03:34 | one of my favorite features in 5.5.
| | 03:36 | So Size, we'll just leave
at Relative to Page Width.
| | 03:39 | Let's leave the Resolution pretty high, at
300 ppi. And everything else is fine, so
| | 03:44 | I'll just click Done.
| | 03:45 | And now let's export this to
EPUB again, replacing the old one.
| | 03:51 | We'll still have it rasterize
the first page to create our cover.
| | 03:58 | And now the crazy Adobe Digital Editions
is showing it correctly, but we get a bonus.
| | 04:03 | Now normally this does not show the
cover, but I have found that a lot of users
| | 04:08 | would like to see the
cover inside the EPUB as well.
| | 04:11 | So if we make this smaller, let me
show you what I mean. You see the cover
| | 04:16 | opposite the title page, all right.
| | 04:18 | And that's only because we specified
that that first page is going to be artwork.
| | 04:23 | And so whenever you export a document
to EPUB, if there is artwork that you've
| | 04:27 | converted to an image, then
it gets included in the EPUB.
| | 04:31 | So here we have an external cover
that all the eReaders will know how to
| | 04:34 | read, but we also have an image of
the cover in the EPUB itself, which I
| | 04:37 | think is pretty cool.
| | 04:39 | Now if you're worried about the size
of your cover, you can't go wrong if you
| | 04:42 | do 600 pixels wide by 800 pixels high
at any resolution between 72 and 300;
| | 04:49 | even higher than that.
| | 04:50 | You can learn more about the specific
sizes and resolutions of different eReader
| | 04:56 | devices in case you're trying to really
optimize it for say the iPad, or for the
| | 05:00 | NOOK, by going to this wonderful
Web site called mobileread.com.
| | 05:05 | And I talk about this in a few
different videos in this title.
| | 05:08 | In addition to having fantastic
forums for anybody who is working on
| | 05:12 | creating eBooks, they also have some
of the best Wikis I've ever seen, which
| | 05:15 | is like a group encyclopedia.
| | 05:17 | They have these charts of every Web tablet
known to man or woman, along with all of their specs.
| | 05:22 | So like here are all the Web tablets
with dimensions, their resolutions, and so
| | 05:27 | on; more information than
you ever wanted to know.
| | 05:30 | But not just for Web tablets. They also
have them for any kind of eBook reader
| | 05:34 | that reads E Ink, and they have
all sorts of different things.
| | 05:37 | So if you ever want to find out what
is the actual resolution that the Sony
| | 05:41 | Portable Reader uses for its cover images
or for its pages, you can find out here.
| | 05:45 | Couple of other things I want to
mention, and I'll cover this in a little bit
| | 05:48 | more detail in the final chapters where
I talk about actually selling your EPUBS
| | 05:52 | and getting them into the iBookstore
and so on, is that just about every EPUB
| | 05:56 | reseller has regulations about
what you can include on your cover.
| | 06:00 | You don't want it to be exactly what the
print cover did. Like you don't want to
| | 06:03 | have any kind of information
about pricing on the cover.
| | 06:07 | They'll also reject it if you have
any information like about where to
| | 06:11 | download this from other Web sites
or from other resellers like, Get the
| | 06:15 | Kindle Edition here, or
| | 06:16 | can't read this, then here's our PDF
where you can download it! Kick that out.
| | 06:19 | You just want to have artwork, the
name of the book, the name of the
| | 06:23 | author, and maybe a couple other
things. But you don't want to have any
| | 06:26 | kind of information that could possibly force
your EPUB to be rejected from a reseller site.
| | 06:32 | So that's about it. With InDesign
it's far easier than ever before to add
| | 06:37 | covers to your EPUBS.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding a custom TOC as the first page of the EPUB file| 00:00 | Most times whenever you're reading an
EPUB you want to be able to have this
| | 00:03 | navigational table of contents on the left.
| | 00:06 | I talked in other videos
about how to create this.
| | 00:08 | It's actually not part of the HTML
files that make up the content of the EPUB.
| | 00:13 | It exists as a separate file, and
we'll get to know it in an upcoming video.
| | 00:17 | But InDesign does create it,
called the navigational TOC.
| | 00:20 | It's something that no matter which
program or device you're using, you should be
| | 00:24 | able to hide it. Like here I'm
choosing Hide Navigation Pane in Adobe Digital
| | 00:29 | Editions so you can see more
content, and then you can recall it.
| | 00:33 | You know, if you're using an
iPad, it's a little button;
| | 00:36 | if you're using a Nook it's some sort
of weird icon. And the thing is that for
| | 00:40 | me I almost always want to hide the
navigational table of contents, or their
| | 00:44 | usually hidden by default.
| | 00:45 | But then when I want to get to them again
I can never remember which little icon is it.
| | 00:50 | Is it the gear? Is it the arrow? Is it
the stack of horizontal lines? Which one
| | 00:55 | opens up the navigational table of contents?
| | 00:57 | Luckily, in Adobe Digital Editions,
which I actually never used to read EPUBs,
| | 01:01 | it's a simple menu command.
| | 01:02 | So what I'm saying is that for readers
of EPUBs, they like to have a second way
| | 01:08 | to navigate the EPUB.
| | 01:09 | If the dropdown navigational table of
contents isn't available it's usually
| | 01:14 | pretty simple for them to swipe all
the way to the left, or jump to page 1, or
| | 01:18 | drag the scrollbar up to get to the
beginning of a document, and find a TOC.
| | 01:23 | They would love that.
| | 01:25 | It's called an internal TOC, a document
TOC, a linked TOC. I've seen it, you know,
| | 01:31 | called several things.
| | 01:33 | But essentially it's a duplicate of the
navigational TOC, and you can customize
| | 01:38 | it further, and you can have different
things like list of illustrations, and so
| | 01:42 | on. And they are all linked, and
they jump you to the quick page.
| | 01:46 | So that's what I want to talk about is
creating an internal TOC in your EPUB.
| | 01:49 | I'm going to go back to InDesign.
| | 01:52 | This is the document that
I created that EPUB from;
| | 01:55 | it's just not too long Stories of California.
| | 01:59 | So when I exported this to EPUB I had
InDesign create that navigational table of contents
| | 02:06 | by making sure to specify Use InDesign
TOC style>Basic TOC. And I talked about
| | 02:12 | this in a previous video; that you need
to create a custom TOC style, and then
| | 02:16 | specify that when you export to
EPUB. And InDesign will build that
| | 02:21 | navigational TOC based on this.
| | 02:24 | If you also want to break the document,
chunk it up into page breaks, then you
| | 02:28 | can choose this option as well.
| | 02:29 | But what we haven't done is we haven't
actually placed the TOC. We're just sort
| | 02:34 | of using it to create the navigational TOC.
| | 02:38 | If you want to create a linked
internal TOC, the easiest way is simply to use
| | 02:43 | InDesign's own table of contents.
| | 02:45 | So go to Layout>Table of Contents.
Choose your TOC Style that you created up
| | 02:50 | here, so it's going to create
a table of contents for these.
| | 02:54 | If you have multiple TOCs, that's fine, just
you choose the one that you want to use.
| | 02:57 | For ones I do for EPUBs it makes no
sense to include page numbers or tab
| | 03:01 | leaders, so I always turn that off, and
then I'll click OK. And then your cursor
| | 03:06 | is loaded, and click.
| | 03:08 | So let's export this to EPUB, replacing
the existing one, using the same options
| | 03:15 | up here, and now you can see that we
have a linked table of contents. So I can
| | 03:21 | click Story of the Missions, and
then come back to the beginning.
| | 03:25 | Even if I hide the Navigation pane I
still have a way to move around the document.
| | 03:29 | That's the simplest way to do that.
| | 03:31 | I want to show you that when you
place a TOC that InDesign automatically
| | 03:36 | generated, it's not just plain old text.
| | 03:38 | If we open this up in the Story Editor,
if we go to Edit>Edit in Story Editor,
| | 03:43 | you can see that the links are already there.
| | 03:45 | I mean InDesign already
creates the links for you.
| | 03:47 | That's how they are appearing.
| | 03:48 | That's what these little icons mean.
| | 03:50 | Now let's say that in addition to
creating an internal table of contents that was
| | 03:55 | the same as the navigational table of
contents, you would like to include some
| | 03:59 | other kind of TOC, like, for example,
a list of illustrations, a list of recipes.
| | 04:03 | Something like that. And I have
actually created something like that.
| | 04:06 | If we go to the Layout menu and go to
Table of Contents, I have something here
| | 04:12 | called List of images, and
there's just a couple images.
| | 04:14 | I'm just doing this on the fly. I've
used Caption as the trigger here, and I'll
| | 04:19 | click OK. And I'm just going to
place it over here to the left.
| | 04:22 | That looks kind of dumb, but I think you
get the idea. And it is an actual linked TOC.
| | 04:26 | If we open this up in the Story
Editor you can see the links there.
| | 04:30 | And now let's export this to
EPUB and see what it looks like.
| | 04:32 | So I'm going to replace the existing one,
and in Contents we still want the Basic
| | 04:38 | TOC to be the navigational TOC,
so we're going to leave that there.
| | 04:42 | We wouldn't want the navigational TOC
to show the two captions for the two
| | 04:45 | images, right. And we're going to
continue to break the document at the chapter
| | 04:50 | number paragraph style, and then click OK.
| | 04:52 | So what do we have here?
| | 04:54 | It looks like a Holy mess.
| | 04:55 | We have the linked TOC still working but
this other TOC that I added is just
| | 05:01 | plain text; it's not linked.
| | 05:02 | Now the fact that they're not breaking
and starting at the tops of pages, that is
| | 05:06 | another issue that is not
really germane to this one.
| | 05:08 | What we're trying to see
is why aren't these linked?
| | 05:11 | And the answer is that as of now InDesign's
limitation is to only include one linked TOC.
| | 05:17 | So it's a great feature request
for the next version of the software.
| | 05:21 | But there's more than one way to
skin a cat. You can do this manually.
| | 05:24 | You can actually make any kind of
list. You can have the TOC feature
| | 05:28 | generate the list for you, and then
you can actually link to those pages or
| | 05:32 | those elements manually.
| | 05:34 | Now remember, cross-references and
hyperlinks are supported when you export to EPUB.
| | 05:39 | So you would go to the Window menu
and find the panel for Cross-references
| | 05:44 | and Hyperlinks, and what we want to do is
we want to make Natural Bridge, Santa Cruz;
| | 05:50 | I'm just going to have it cross-
reference to the image on that page.
| | 05:53 | But what's happening? Everything is dimmed.
| | 05:55 | Well, the problem is that when you
have a linked TOC, remember this is linked,
| | 06:00 | then the hyperlinks and cross-
references just ignore it.
| | 06:03 | So we're going to have to get rid of the links.
| | 06:05 | Now we could have just manually deleted
all those links in the story editor, or
| | 06:09 | a faster way is simply to export this
story to plain text or RTF which will
| | 06:14 | maintain its formatting, and then bring it right
back in, and that strips out the hyperlinks.
| | 06:19 | So make sure that your cursor is blinking
inside of the text frame, and then go to Export.
| | 06:26 | It won't work if you just select it
with the Selection tool because you won't
| | 06:29 | see RTF as one of the choices.
| | 06:31 | Here it is. Save, and now I'll just put
one right down here so we can compare
| | 06:36 | them, and we'll place that RTF
file into that new text frame.
| | 06:41 | I will actually need to create the
frame, but they look exactly the same.
| | 06:45 | When I open up this one in the Story
Editor, you can see that the links are gone,
| | 06:49 | and if I make a selection,
then these are enabled.
| | 06:53 | I don't want to go into how to make
cross-references and hyperlinks. That is
| | 06:58 | completely covered in many other
videos on Adobe InDesign, such as David
| | 07:03 | Blatner's Essential Training for Adobe
InDesign. But you would just select this,
| | 07:07 | and then click Create new cross-
reference, and then locate where that is.
| | 07:10 | Then these would all
come through linked as well.
| | 07:12 | So you can create as many links as you want.
| | 07:15 | You can use the TOC to generate the
list for you. It's just that you are going
| | 07:19 | to strip out the links that InDesign
added on its own, and then you have to
| | 07:23 | recreate them manually.
| | 07:24 | At least, though, we do have the fact
that the links in the table of contents
| | 07:29 | come through perfectly fine.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding metadata to the InDesign file or book| 00:00 | Metadata is information saved with the
file that's not really visible in the
| | 00:05 | content of the file itself; just sort
of saved with it, such as a file name
| | 00:10 | right, or a modification date, or creation
date of the file. That's part of the metadata.
| | 00:14 | Now within EPUB,
metadata is extremely important.
| | 00:18 | Because you can imagine if you're
searching for a book on the Amazon Kindle
| | 00:21 | store, or in the iBook store, often
you're typing in keywords, or publisher
| | 00:27 | name, or author name.
| | 00:28 | So it's kind of like, it's part of
making sure that your book will be found.
| | 00:32 | And there are places that you can insert
metadata into your file in InDesign and
| | 00:37 | have it come through in the EPUB. A
lot easier than adding it after the fact.
| | 00:41 | So I've opened up a simple EPUB that
shows some examples of metadata. For
| | 00:46 | example, the title: A Brief History of San
Francisco, and the author, which is unknown.
| | 00:51 | The author is actually Anonymous, because
the content was pulled from somewhere else.
| | 00:55 | So that's just some simple examples,
but there's other things that we can't get
| | 00:58 | to in Adobe Digital Editions that some
resellers require, and in fact for the
| | 01:03 | EPUB to pass validation.
| | 01:05 | And I'll be talking more about
validating in a later chapter, but let's see what
| | 01:10 | an EPUB looks like without
any metadata to speak of.
| | 01:13 | I have here a very simple file called
History text, that's all. Right, and I've
| | 01:17 | already created a default TOC for it.
| | 01:21 | Go ahead and export this to EPUB.
| | 01:24 | And under Contents, we're going to Use
the InDesign TOC Style EPUB, and we're
| | 01:31 | going to Break it at the Subhead.
| | 01:33 | Let me jump back here to General, and
you see that there is option to Include
| | 01:38 | Metadata, but it is always empty by default.
| | 01:41 | Now if you leave Unique Identifier
empty, InDesign will always add its own
| | 01:46 | random string of digits to it.
| | 01:48 | This is usually used for your
ISBN, and you can also include your
| | 01:52 | Publisher Entry here as well.
| | 01:54 | So let's go ahead and do that.
| | 01:56 | The Publisher will be AMC Inc.
| | 02:00 | and for the Unique identifier
we'll just say my ISBN number is 12345.
| | 02:05 | We've only entered the metadata
asked for in the EPUB Export Options.
| | 02:10 | Let's go ahead and see what this looks like.
| | 02:12 | So we don't have a title,
and we don't have an author.
| | 02:15 | Now we didn't see those
fields in that dialog box, did we?
| | 02:17 | So how do you get that information in there?
| | 02:19 | Well, come back to InDesign and don't
look forward in that dialog box. Instead
| | 02:24 | go to the File menu, go down to File
Info, and here you would enter information
| | 02:29 | for this InDesign document itself.
| | 02:31 | When InDesign exports to EPUB
it carries along this information
| | 02:34 | as long as you have
checked to include the metadata.
| | 02:37 | So we'll say this is called History of San
Francisco, by AM Concepcion, I am HerGeekness.
| | 02:48 | Description is, and you can
type a wonderful description.
| | 02:51 | Now a lot of this won't show up in the
eReader, but again this is going to be
| | 02:54 | internal in like a sidecar file, and
it's going to be one of the extra files
| | 02:57 | that's part of the EPUB that eReading
systems and EPUB resellers will look
| | 03:03 | for, and will pull from.
| | 03:04 | You might say san francisco,
and california, history, so on.
| | 03:11 | You can type your Copyright Status
with 2011, All rights reserved, and so on.
| | 03:18 | This is the main panel that you want
to fill out. And the bare minimum
| | 03:22 | that you want to add is Document Title,
and Author, because otherwise it's not
| | 03:26 | going to pass validation.
| | 03:27 | Click OK, and it's saved.
| | 03:29 | Now if you're exporting a book, an
InDesign book file, a collection of
| | 03:32 | multiple InDesign documents, you
want to add this to the style source
| | 03:36 | document: to the main document.
| | 03:38 | It doesn't have to be added to
every single document in the book.
| | 03:41 | Let's export this to EPUB again.
| | 03:44 | We'll Replace the old one.
| | 03:45 | There we go. History of San Francisco, AM
Concepcion. So there is our book name:
| | 03:51 | History of San Francisco, and there is
our author: AM Concepcion. We don't see the
| | 03:55 | keywords here in this reader, specifically.
| | 03:58 | Now there is one more bit of
information that every EPUB has to have, otherwise
| | 04:03 | it won't get validated, and
that is the date of publication.
| | 04:07 | In InDesign CS5.5, even though you
don't see a field for it -- we all thought
| | 04:13 | that we'd seen other field right
here for date of publication, because this
| | 04:16 | was the one thing that in previous
versions of InDesign would cause an EPUB to
| | 04:19 | fail, because there is no place to insert it.
| | 04:21 | In 5.5 they fixed that.
| | 04:23 | The publication date will be
in every EPUB that you export.
| | 04:27 | However, InDesign is doing it behind
the scenes. It's adding it as the day
| | 04:31 | that you export to EPUB.
| | 04:33 | So at least it will pass validation.
| | 04:35 | If you really want to change the
publication date to the date with the what was
| | 04:38 | actually published you'll have to go
in there and tweak the internal files of
| | 04:43 | the EPUB yourself which is actually not
that hard to do, and you'll how to do it
| | 04:46 | in this video title.
| | 04:47 | So there you go. With InDesign CS5.5,
it's very simple to add metadata, and get
| | 04:52 | all the required information in order
to pass validation with EPUB checker.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding alt tags to images in InDesign| 00:00 | One element of EPUBs that doesn't get a
lot of attention, but really should, is
| | 00:05 | the issue of Alt tags, meaning alternate
text. And that's because, like metadata, it
| | 00:11 | is something that is saved with the
file that's not immediately visible. But
| | 00:14 | it's very useful for people who are
doing searches on eBook databases, and of
| | 00:19 | course it's extremely important
for people who are visually impaired.
| | 00:22 | So if you are trying to make an
accessible EPUB you really want to add
| | 00:26 | descriptive Alt tags to your images so
that as the eReader is reading aloud the
| | 00:31 | story, when it comes to the image it
won't say the name of the image, which is the
| | 00:36 | default Alt tag that InDesign adds.
Instead it'll read the description of the
| | 00:40 | image that you can add yourself, or
that maybe the photographer has added in
| | 00:45 | Photoshop, or Bridge, or Lightroom.
| | 00:47 | In addition to that, any kind of
elements that you convert to an image, like I
| | 00:50 | described in a previous video, such as
InDesign artwork, you could also add Alt
| | 00:55 | tags to that as well.
| | 00:56 | Let's take a look at this document and
see where we might decide to add our own
| | 01:00 | custom Alt tags, and how we would do that.
| | 01:02 | It's a really simple three-page
document, and I have here a custom headline.
| | 01:07 | Now when I exported this to EPUB it
opens up with his big honking blue headline
| | 01:13 | which is trying to pick up the
overridden paragraph style of that type. But of
| | 01:17 | course it can't pick up that typeface,
and normally you don't want to embed
| | 01:21 | typefaces because often it will
fail validation. Plus this might be an
| | 01:25 | unembeddable typeface.
| | 01:27 | But let's say for some reason I really
wanted to use this typeface in my EPUB.
| | 01:31 | Well, then the only solution would
be to convert this into an image, and I
| | 01:35 | talked about how to do that in the previous
video, so I am just going to jump right to it.
| | 01:38 | I will select this image, go to Object,
down to Object Export Options. And I am
| | 01:44 | going to say when this is export to
EPUB or HTML I want it to be rasterized. And
| | 01:50 | I'd like it to resize according to
the width of the page, JPEG is perfectly
| | 01:55 | fine. And the Resolution,
I think I'll keep at 300.
| | 01:58 | Notice there's another tab here called Alt Text.
| | 02:02 | So a good idea if you're ever
rasterizing any text elements, as we are doing
| | 02:06 | here, is to add your own custom Alt Text that
is the same text as what you are rasterizing.
| | 02:13 | If I were smart I would have copied and
pasted, but I am not so, San Francisco.
| | 02:20 | Now what will happen when the e-reader
reads this aloud, it will come to this
| | 02:25 | element and it will say, An
Illustrated History of San Francisco Image.
| | 02:30 | So you might want to add something like Title.
| | 02:32 | So if you're rasterizing some sort of
text, you might want to add a little
| | 02:36 | descriptor before it.
| | 02:37 | Now you don't have to purchase anything
special, by the way, to test this out.
| | 02:40 | If you have an iPad, you can turn on a
new feature called VoiceOver in iBooks
| | 02:45 | that will automatically read anything
that you point to, and if you tap on an
| | 02:49 | image in an EPUB it will read the Alt Text.
| | 02:53 | So that one is done, and then we can
do the same thing for these images.
| | 02:56 | If we want, we can select an image
and go to Object>Object Export Options.
| | 03:01 | This will already be rasterized,
| | 03:03 | so we don't have to come to this tab.
But here we can enter some Alt Text.
| | 03:07 | We can type in something ourselves.
| | 03:09 | We don't have to type in the caption,
because the e-reader would read aloud the
| | 03:11 | caption assuming that we are
going to export the caption as well.
| | 03:14 | But look at this thing, From
Structure, what's that about?
| | 03:17 | From Structure refers to the XML structure.
| | 03:20 | If we were adding Alt tags to this
image in an XML workflow it would pull it
| | 03:25 | from there. Or you could choose it from
the embedded metadata that's already in
| | 03:29 | the image, such as its title, or
description, or headline, or from some other field.
| | 03:34 | Now that would be really cool if we
could get this to automatically populate, and
| | 03:38 | actually it's very easy to do.
| | 03:39 | I will close out of here, and in the
Links panel -- the Links panel shows you the
| | 03:44 | links to all of the placed
images, or PDFs, or whatever.
| | 03:48 | You select an image, whether it is
floating or anchored in the text flow as
| | 03:53 | this one is, and it will become
highlighted in the Links panel. And then you can
| | 03:57 | right-click and say Reveal in Bridge.
And when you do that, that image becomes
| | 04:02 | selected in Adobe Bridge.
| | 04:04 | It might take a second for it to start
up, because mine was already running.
| | 04:07 | Now we have a number of videos here at
lynda.com that talk about Bridge. But the
| | 04:11 | cool thing for us is that you can
select any image and here in the Right panel
| | 04:16 | under Metadata you can enter some metadata.
| | 04:19 | So like under IPTC Core, under
Description, we will type in, An old time
| | 04:26 | postcard showing Market Street.
| | 04:30 | Let's just leave it like that. And
you can enter anything else that you'd like. Your
| | 04:33 | headline, and so on.
| | 04:34 | And in a typical workflow, the
photographer, or an assistant, or the lucky intern
| | 04:38 | who can apply all the metadata and
keywords to all of these, and you can do
| | 04:42 | multiple images at a time.
| | 04:43 | Let's actually do a few.
| | 04:44 | So we will take this one:
yes, we want to apply that.
| | 04:48 | This is San Francisco area
before it was settled by Europeans.
| | 04:56 | San Francisco area before it was
settled by Europeans>Apply. And then there is
| | 05:02 | Castro Street; it already has some
keywords I see here, because our friend
| | 05:06 | Nigel is the one who took the
picture and he is very careful about adding
| | 05:10 | keywords and identifiers. He is great.
| | 05:12 | But I will just write Castro Street
sign in San Francisco, and apply that one.
| | 05:21 | So when we come back to InDesign these
three images have all been updated. So I
| | 05:26 | am going to Shift+Click all of them
and say Update the links. And now for this
| | 05:31 | image we can go back to Object Export
Options, and say From Description, and it
| | 05:37 | automatically populates it.
| | 05:38 | Let's do that to the other two images.
| | 05:41 | I am sure that once more people become
aware of this very cool feature that some
| | 05:45 | wonderful scripter will come up
with a script that will automatically
| | 05:49 | populate all of these images with
whatever XMP information you want it to. In
| | 05:54 | the meantime we have to do each
one individually. There you go!
| | 05:57 | So remember you can choose an XMP bit
of data that is built into the image, or
| | 06:01 | you can choose custom and type out your own.
| | 06:03 | Now we will Save this and export it to EPUB.
| | 06:06 | We will do version 2, and there is
nothing special that you need to do in EPUB
| | 06:12 | Export Options to retain those.
| | 06:15 | Click OK, and now we have our beautiful
illustration, but if somebody is doing
| | 06:20 | a search in this EPUB and they say,
gee, do I have anything that's says, an
| | 06:24 | illustrated history? This would be a
hit because it would match the Alt tag.
| | 06:28 | And then let's actually preview in
TextWrangler and we can look at the very first block.
| | 06:33 | Here's the block that we had rasterized.
| | 06:35 | It turned into a JPEG.
| | 06:37 | Now if we hadn't added our own Alt tag, Title:
| | 06:40 | An Illustrated History of San Francisco,
the Alt tag would have been 505.jpg image.
| | 06:45 | So this is much better for anybody who
is actually reading it or searching it.
| | 06:49 | And here's one of the other images:
Market Street San Fran, and the Alt tag:
| | 06:53 | an Old time postcard showing Market Street.
| | 06:55 | So you can see how easy it is with
InDesign CS5.5 to enhance your EPUBs
| | 07:01 | with descriptive text for anything
that's going to be rasterized after the
| | 07:04 | EPUB process.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Exporting from InDesign to EPUBChoosing general EPUB export options| 00:00 | The EPUB Export Options dialog box is kind of
intimidating the first time you go through it.
| | 00:06 | But I think by the time you are done
with this chapter it'll be a no-brainer.
| | 00:09 | Let's go over what's in the General section.
| | 00:12 | At the very top, and what we are
looking at, by the way, are all the default
| | 00:15 | settings. So I haven't changed anything
here, and this is what it would look like
| | 00:18 | if you have never exported
the document to EPUB yet.
| | 00:21 | Include Document Metadata is turned on,
and that means it's going to include the
| | 00:26 | document metadata not just here, but
also the metadata that you might have added
| | 00:30 | in the File, File Info dialog box that
I talked about in a previous chapter.
| | 00:35 | So things like the Book
Name, and the Author Name.
| | 00:38 | Here you would enter your Publisher
Name, so Acme Publishing, and the Unique
| | 00:42 | Identifier is for your ISBN number.
| | 00:45 | If you have not yet gotten an ISBN number,
go watch that video, then go get your
| | 00:49 | ISBN number, or you can
enter any number that you like.
| | 00:52 | Every EPUB that is distributed
needs to have a Unique Identifier.
| | 00:56 | If you don't enter anything here and
you have Include Document Metadata turned
| | 01:00 | on, InDesign will generate a random
long string of numbers for you, and that
| | 01:05 | will be included in the EPUB.
| | 01:07 | For the EPUB cover, the default
is to Rasterize the First Page.
| | 01:11 | It is going to look at the First Page
of your Document, and assume it's the
| | 01:13 | cover. And it will put a copy of that
Rasterized cover in the EPUB file, and it
| | 01:19 | will show it whenever you're looking at
your library of EPUBS. That will be what
| | 01:23 | it looks like for the cover.
| | 01:24 | If your first page is not actually the
cover, if the cover exists as a separate
| | 01:28 | document, then normally you don't
want to Rasterize the First Page, right?
| | 01:32 | So you just say, No Cover Image.
| | 01:33 | Leave it alone. Or if you are about
to upload this EPUB, and you do have an
| | 01:39 | external image that a designer has
created for you, for example, then you
| | 01:43 | might choose Use Existing Image File, click
Choose, and then locate it on your hard drive.
| | 01:47 | Now there is nothing wrong, by the way,
while during production with leaving it
| | 01:51 | at Rasterize First Page.
| | 01:53 | It doesn't mean it's going to,
make the first page inaccessible.
| | 01:56 | If your first page happens to be the
opening page of Chapter 7, for example, it
| | 02:00 | will just be a picture of Chapter 7 is
the cover for the EPUB. But the first
| | 02:05 | page of Chapter 7 will still appear
in the EPUB. You can still read it and
| | 02:09 | select the text, and it will
be reflowable, and so on.
| | 02:12 | The Ordering section refers to how do
you want InDesign to order the content in
| | 02:17 | this InDesign document in the final EPUB?
| | 02:20 | Should it be Based on Page Layout?
That's the first option. And that means it
| | 02:23 | starts at Page 1, it looks at which
object is the furthermost left at the top
| | 02:28 | of Page 1, and it exports
the contents of that object.
| | 02:31 | If it's an image, an image will
be the first thing in the EPUB.
| | 02:34 | If it's text, then the text will
be the first thing in the EPUB.
| | 02:38 | If that text starts on Page 1 and
jumps to Page 95, you are going to see the
| | 02:43 | entire story on Page 1.
| | 02:44 | So it's the contents of the
frame, or threaded textframe.
| | 02:48 | Then it goes left to right, top to
bottom, page by page throughout the entire
| | 02:52 | document; that's based on Page Layout.
| | 02:54 | If you have tagged any of your
objects with XML tags, then this option
| | 03:00 | will become enabled.
| | 03:01 | Same as XML Structure. And you could
choose this instead, which means that
| | 03:05 | InDesign will only include the things
you have tagged with XML tags, in the
| | 03:10 | order that you've arranged
them in the Structure panel.
| | 03:13 | If you have used the Articles panel at
all to add content and to reorder it, then
| | 03:18 | this option will become enabled, and
you could choose Same as Articles
| | 03:27 | you have added to the Articles panel
will be in the EPUB. And they will be in
| | 03:31 | the order that you arrange
them in the Articles panel.
| | 03:34 | You can't mix and match these guys.
| | 03:36 | If you decided one section will be
easier to arrange as the Articles panel, and
| | 03:41 | everything else is Page Layout,
unfortunately we are not there yet.
| | 03:44 | So it's either all Page Layout, or all
Articles panel, or all XML Structure.
| | 03:49 | Down here under Formatting Options you
have the option to include a Book Margin
| | 03:54 | in a certain size, and this is the only
place, I think, in the entire program where
| | 03:58 | the measuring unit Ems appears.
| | 04:01 | And Ems is a really cool measuring unit.
| | 04:03 | It is a flexible measuring unit, and
it means the width of the type size.
| | 04:09 | So as the type size goes up, this
measuring unit goes up as well. So it is
| | 04:13 | like a dynamic size.
| | 04:14 | It's not a straight absolute size.
| | 04:16 | What it's saying is that a half of
an Em will be added all around the four
| | 04:21 | edges of every page, "the screen", we'll call
it that, so that the text is indented a
| | 04:26 | bit from the screen.
| | 04:27 | It's a little controversial, like do
you really need it, because just about
| | 04:30 | every EPUB Reader already indents the
text. You are not seeing text run up
| | 04:35 | to the very edge of the screen in
most eReaders. Though, maybe there are a
| | 04:39 | couple. Probably Adobe Digital Editions.
And also some eReaders ignore the CSS
| | 04:44 | that's created when you turn this on.
| | 04:46 | So it's a first attempt at adding some
control over Book Margins, and we will be
| | 04:51 | talking more about this when I
talk about editing your CSS files.
| | 04:55 | If you have lists of Bullets or Numbers
that you created with the Auto Bullet or
| | 05:00 | the Auto Numbering features in InDesign,
then you have the option to convert
| | 05:04 | those lists to their equivalent in HTML land.
| | 05:08 | So a list of Bullets is called an
Unordered List, and a list of Numbers is
| | 05:13 | called an Ordered List.
| | 05:14 | This means it's going to use the
default Bullet or the default Number
| | 05:18 | that every eReader uses.
| | 05:20 | So if you have a custom
bullet it's not going to work.
| | 05:22 | In that case you might want to Convert
to Text, and hope that your custom bullet
| | 05:26 | comes through as a gliff,
or as an inline object.
| | 05:30 | And finally, this is turned on by default,
View EPUB after Exporting, so you can
| | 05:34 | give it a quick check. And
that's it for the General panel.
| | 33:22 | Panel. And that means, like the XML
Structure option, that only those items that
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| Choosing EPUB export options for images| 00:00 | So now we are in the Image panel of
EPUB Export Options and there's lots of fun
| | 00:04 | stuff to play with here.
| | 00:06 | I talked about some of this in a
previous video when I talked about
| | 00:08 | modifying and managing the images in
your EPUB doc, but now let's take a close
| | 00:12 | look at all these options.
| | 00:14 | First, turned on by default is
Preserved Appearance from Layout. And that means
| | 00:19 | that if you scaled, or cropped, or
rotated, or applied a drop shadow, or other
| | 00:24 | effects, to an image then this
will maintain that in the EPUB.
| | 00:29 | If you turn this off, then that means
that the images will revert to as though
| | 00:32 | you would just placed them directly from
the hard drive without doing any kind of
| | 00:37 | formatting to them. And that's usually a shock,
| | 00:39 | so I can't ever imagine why you would want
to not preserve the appearance in the layout.
| | 00:43 | The resolution is 150 pixels per
inch, which is new for InDesign.
| | 00:48 | It used always export at 72. And one of
the reasons that they have bumped this up
| | 00:54 | to 150 -- and it's not the
highest it can go, by the way,
| | 00:56 | it can go to 300 -- is because they are
realizing that devices are getting higher
| | 01:01 | and higher resolution screens. And in
fact, even in their Help file they say that
| | 01:05 | while most computer operating systems
are either 72 or 96 pixels per inch that
| | 01:11 | mobile devices go from 132 pixels per
inch, like the iPad, to 172. Or even like the
| | 01:18 | iPhone 4 has pixels per inch of 300.
| | 01:21 | So you can specify the resolution
for each individual image by using the
| | 01:27 | Object Export Options dialog box from
the Object menu. But otherwise if you
| | 01:31 | didn't set anything particular for an
image this is the default resolution
| | 01:35 | that it will be exported to.
| | 01:36 | If something is under 150 PPI
it's not going to upsample it.
| | 01:41 | So don't worry if you have 72
PPI images. They'll stay 72.
| | 01:45 | By default Image Size is fixed,
meaning it's going to be the same size
| | 01:48 | regardless of how large or how small
the reader device or the Window is for
| | 01:54 | the EPUB reader software.
| | 01:55 | The other option is to
change it to Relative to Page.
| | 01:58 | So the Fixed was how it
always was in previous versions.
| | 02:02 | Now we have the option to
change it to Relative to Page.
| | 02:05 | This was something that we had to do
manually in the CSS before, but now we
| | 02:09 | can have InDesign automatically do this
for us. And that means that as the page
| | 02:13 | size is reduced or enlarged, the image
changes its scale in relation to the size of that.
| | 02:21 | So it's kind of neat.
| | 02:21 | The best way to see how this is going
to work with your book is to try both
| | 02:25 | options, and decide which
one is the best way to go.
| | 02:28 | Under Image Alignment and Spacing --
this saves a ton of work in tweaking the
| | 02:33 | EPUB after the fact.
| | 02:34 | Like, for example, if you want all your
images to be centered you can do so here
| | 02:37 | instead of having to go into the CSS,
and adding that rule, and applying that
| | 02:42 | class to all your images.
| | 02:44 | You can also add space above and
below every image, and you can choose the
| | 02:48 | measuring system. Here Ems, just like
when we had in General, that's probably
| | 02:52 | the best way to go.
| | 02:53 | That's a dynamic measurement.
| | 02:55 | The default Type Size is 1 Em, in case
you're trying to figure out how much is an Em.
| | 02:58 | Say that default Type Size is 16
points, and you want 16 points above the
| | 03:03 | picture, then you would say 1
Em. Or you can choose pixels:
| | 03:06 | that's a hard measure.
| | 03:07 | Ems is usually the way to go.
| | 03:09 | You can also choose to
Insert a Page Break automatically.
| | 03:12 | This will actually chunk up your
documents; split it into separate stand-alone
| | 03:17 | HTML files, which is very interesting.
| | 03:19 | Now I can't imagine, though, when you'd
always want to have a page break before
| | 03:24 | every single image. Unless that's
how you planned it from the get-go.
| | 03:27 | Say, for example, that you have
an image that starts every chapter.
| | 03:31 | That would be really nice for you to be
able to use the image itself as the page
| | 03:35 | break trigger, rather than having to try
and figure out how you are going to do it
| | 03:38 | with paragraph styles and tables of contents.
| | 03:40 | You can also have it Insert the Page
Break after the image, or both Before
| | 03:45 | and After the Image.
| | 03:47 | It's kind of interesting.
| | 03:48 | So you can have pages with stand-alone images.
| | 03:50 | And if you have anchored objects, if
you've anchored images to the text flow by
| | 03:55 | dragging that cool little blue square
on top of the image frame or copying
| | 04:00 | and pasting into the text flow itself,
you could have these settings applied to
| | 04:04 | anchored objects as well.
| | 04:05 | Now in my experiments it's
still a little bit buggy.
| | 04:08 | Like, I've found that though the
resolution gets applied to the anchored images,
| | 04:13 | sometimes the image alignment
and the spacing doesn't work.
| | 04:17 | With a regular floating
image it works perfectly fine.
| | 04:19 | You say right, all of the images appear right.
| | 04:22 | But with an anchored objects sometimes
only the custom anchored objects, and not
| | 04:27 | the regular inline objects, work.
| | 04:29 | So I think this might be
something that they're still working on.
| | 04:31 | It's the first iteration of the feature.
| | 04:33 | So give them a break.
| | 04:35 | So just be careful: if you turn this on
you should definitely check your EPUB
| | 04:39 | to see how it worked.
| | 04:40 | Image Conversion -- this is how InDesign
will automatically convert your TIFFs,
| | 04:45 | and your PhotoShop files, and your AI
files, and your placed PDFs --what is it
| | 04:48 | going to convert to?
| | 04:50 | Automatic means, as I mentioned before, JPEG.
| | 04:53 | Everything gets converted to JPEG.
| | 04:54 | If you state PNG, then this is a
lossless file format, which means that it's not
| | 05:00 | going to compress the images, which
could make your EPUBs kind of large.
| | 05:04 | So be careful about choosing PNG.
| | 05:06 | PNG also allows for transparency.
| | 05:09 | So if you would like to test the
bleeding edge of a EPUB creation, maybe people
| | 05:15 | are going to be reading the EPUB and
changing the background color, then you can
| | 05:18 | have something that looks like an
Illustrator graphic, or transparent GIF. But
| | 05:23 | most people just leave it Automatic.
| | 05:25 | Now if you had chosen GIF, I can't
imagine I would ever choose that, and
| | 05:28 | you want all your images converted
to GIF, because it's a very limited
| | 05:31 | palette of only 256 colors.
| | 05:33 | Well, I guess it makes the images really small.
| | 05:35 | Then you can choose which palate it should use.
| | 05:37 | Under JPEG Options, this is probably the
thing you are going to be using much more often,
| | 05:41 | the default Image Quality is High, which
is a very good compromise between file
| | 05:47 | size and image quality.
| | 05:49 | If file size is not really that much of
a worry for you, then why not change it
| | 05:53 | to Maximum so you get the
best looking images as possible.
| | 05:56 | If you are doing an EPUB with a lot of
images and you trying to save space, or
| | 06:01 | you're trying to sell to clients who
don't have a lot of bandwidth and they
| | 06:05 | can't take a long time in downloading your
EPUBs, then you might want to change it to
| | 06:08 | Low or Medium. And of course you
would proof all this in the final EPUB.
| | 06:11 | I will leave that as High.
| | 06:13 | And The Format Method just
comes right from the HTML world.
| | 06:16 | If JPEG is Progressive, that means it
will start appearing line by line until the
| | 06:21 | whole thing is drawn.
| | 06:22 | If you say Baseline then it'll wait
until the entire thing is loaded, and then
| | 06:26 | you'll see the JPEG.
| | 06:27 | In my experience, I have never
seen any difference between the two.
| | 06:30 | So you can just leave it at the default.
| | 06:32 | If you have selected certain images in
your EPUB, and you have customized the
| | 06:36 | Object Export settings from that
dialog box under the Object menu, you can
| | 06:41 | choose to ignore all that stuff.
| | 06:43 | So if you're playing around with them,
and you're thinking -- instead of trying to
| | 06:46 | remember, which ones did I apply those
Object Export settings to? Because there
| | 06:50 | is no feedback looking at the image.
| | 06:52 | You actually have to select every
single image, and check the dialog box. Then
| | 06:55 | you might want to just turn this on:
Ignore Object Export Settings, so that all
| | 06:59 | of your images use these settings.
| | 07:01 | That was the ton of options. But they
are lot of fun to play with, and they
| | 07:05 | give us much more control over the
quality of our images in the EPUBs than in
| | 07:09 | any other previous version of InDesign.
| | 07:11 | I love it!
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| Choosing EPUB export options for content| 00:00 | The third panel of EPUB
Export Options is Contents.
| | 00:05 | What should I do with the
actual contents of the book.
| | 00:07 | The first choice that you need to
make is the format for the EPUB content
| | 00:11 | because there is actually at least two
main kinds of EPUB, the one that we've
| | 00:15 | been talking about called XHTML, it
actually creates XML files or DTBook, and
| | 00:21 | DTBook is a different kind of EPUB.
| | 00:23 | It's mainly meant for people who are
vision-impaired and we're not really going
| | 00:26 | to be talking about that
kind of EPUB in this title.
| | 00:30 | The kinds that you see for sale in
all the EPUB resellers and so on are
| | 00:34 | the XHTML-based EPUBs.
| | 00:36 | Then in the Contents section we have
four choices to make, by default none
| | 00:40 | of them are enabled.
| | 00:41 | The first one is, do you want to use a
table of contents style that you have
| | 00:46 | created, or maybe even the
default one if you edited that one,
| | 00:49 | to create the navigational table of
contents in the EPUB. I talked about that
| | 00:54 | in a few videos; that is the table of
contents that will appear based on a menu,
| | 00:58 | or a button, or a panel in the
EPUB reader. If you specify a TOC style, it will
| | 01:04 | include the paragraphs that would be included in
that TOC in the navigational table of contents.
| | 01:09 | If you don't turn this on, all you get
is the name of the InDesign file in that
| | 01:13 | navigational table of contents.
| | 01:15 | So I can't imagine when you
would never, not want to use this.
| | 01:18 | The InDesign document is exported as
one long HTML file, even if you are
| | 01:24 | exporting a book if you go to a Book
panel and choose Export to EPUB, you are
| | 01:28 | going to get the same options.
| | 01:29 | But usually you want to break up the
document at least according to chapters,
| | 01:34 | because really that's one of the
easiest ways to insert to chapter breaks, for
| | 01:38 | example, and also many EPUB resellers
have size limits for your entire EPUB and
| | 01:44 | each individual HTML file
that goes along with it.
| | 01:47 | So if you want to break the document
up into multiple HTML files then you can
| | 01:53 | choose to do so and you have
one paragraph style to choose.
| | 01:57 | Now I really wish that they would
like to choose more than one, but
| | 02:00 | unfortunately they don't.
| | 02:01 | So if your document needs to be
broken up in more places than one paragraph
| | 02:07 | style, then you going to have to do
that manually or with various tips and
| | 02:10 | tricks that people will be passing around.
| | 02:12 | Footnotes are usually placed
at the end of the HTML document.
| | 02:16 | So if it's one long document then they
will be placed at the very end, if you
| | 02:20 | break it up into individual HTML
documents like say, for example, Chapters, then
| | 02:25 | the footnotes will appear at the end
of each chapter document, but sometimes
| | 02:28 | even that is difficult.
| | 02:30 | What would be kind of cool to be able
to see the footnote at the end of the
| | 02:32 | paragraph, like right where the
footnote reference is, and if you want to CS55
| | 02:36 | will do that for you.
| | 02:39 | Even if it appears there or at the
end of the document or the end of the
| | 02:42 | chapter, when you go to the footnote you
can click the number of the footnote to
| | 02:47 | jump back to the source.
| | 02:48 | So it doesn't mean like people be
getting lost if it's not right there.
| | 02:51 | A nice little option they decided to
add here to the Content section is the
| | 02:55 | option to Remove Forced Line Breaks,
also known as Shift Returns or Soft
| | 03:01 | Returns, because you may have put
them in your InDesign document to force
| | 03:06 | certain spacing or words to break in a
certain position, but that doesn't make
| | 03:10 | any sense once they're exported to a
reflowable format, and since the line
| | 03:14 | breaks are honored in the HTML file
then you might find some very short lines.
| | 03:18 | And also I think some of eReaders
have a problem with that Line Break mark.
| | 03:22 | So if you didn't remove them all with
a fine change operation like we talked
| | 03:26 | about in the previous video, you can have
InDesign remove them automatically for you.
| | 03:31 | Now again, all these are turned off by
default and this is probably one of the
| | 03:34 | most important sections to pay attention to.
| | 03:36 | So make sure that you check this
every time that you export to EPUB.
| | 03:40 | And then finally we have CSS Options.
| | 03:42 | Now CSS is the way that EPUBs are formatted.
| | 03:46 | You have the content in the HTML files
but there is an extra CSS file that says
| | 03:51 | if something is a paragraph it should
look at this size, with this kind of
| | 03:56 | first-line indent, with this amount
of space above and below, and so on.
| | 03:59 | Now I've talked many times that in
InDesign when Export to EPUB, it converts
| | 04:04 | your paragraph and character
styles to CSS styles as much as it can.
| | 04:08 | So this is where you have a lot of
control over how the formatting is done.
| | 04:14 | First of all, you don't have
to have a Generate the CSS.
| | 04:16 | You can say, you know what, just create
a document that has a Style Names Only
| | 04:22 | and that you are going to
then enter the rules for the CSS.
| | 04:25 | If you do want to Generate the CSS, and
this is normally the option you choose
| | 04:29 | all the time, you almost always want
to turn on Include Style Definitions,
| | 04:33 | because that's really the meat of the CSS file.
| | 04:35 | It's all the attributes of every
paragraph and character style, otherwise it
| | 04:38 | wouldn't do you much good,
so keep that to one turned on.
| | 04:41 | Now this one is turned on by default, but I
don't like it, so I will always turn it off.
| | 04:45 | It's Preserve Local Overrides, I have
talked about that in a number of videos
| | 04:49 | and that means that if you have selected
some text and made it larger or smaller
| | 04:53 | or made it red, or bold, or whatever
instead of using a paragraph or character
| | 04:57 | style, you do it manually, then
in the CSS file you'll see like a
| | 05:02 | machine-generated CSS entry and
coding in the HTML files called like
| | 05:07 | automatically generated style number 1,
automatically generated style number 2,
| | 05:11 | that is maintaining the formatting so it
looks good but it is a devil to fix and
| | 05:17 | to tweak inside the file.
| | 05:18 | So far better to ignore the local
overrides and instead you should be taking
| | 05:22 | care of that by always using character
and paragraph styles in the document.
| | 05:25 | Include Embeddable Font is turned
on by default, similar to how you can
| | 05:29 | embed fonts in a PDF.
| | 05:31 | Some fonts do not allow embedding, so
that's why it's called Embeddable Font.
| | 05:35 | And it doesn't include the entire font,
it just encrypts the font so that if you
| | 05:39 | ever find an eReader that will support
that then you would see your document
| | 05:44 | appear in the fonts that you wanted to.
| | 05:46 | Right now, we are still sort of
like in the baby step era of can people
| | 05:49 | include Embeddable Fonts, and even
then the way the Adobe encrypts the file
| | 05:53 | sometimes won't validate.
| | 05:55 | So there is a number of problems
involved with this, it is turned on by default
| | 05:59 | and I will almost always turn it off,
and only for a few special projects might
| | 06:03 | I experiment with, including Embeddable Fonts.
| | 06:06 | If you have really got HTML and CSS
under control then you probably have a very
| | 06:12 | clean CSS file that you would prefer
to use rather than the way that InDesign
| | 06:16 | creates CSS files that are just full
of every single attribute ever known to
| | 06:20 | man and it's a lot easier to use a
cleaner CSS file, by all means do that, turn
| | 06:25 | on Use Existing CSS File and then click
Choose and navigate to where that CSS file is used.
| | 06:31 | In that way when you export files
from InDesign to EPUB, if something is
| | 06:35 | tagged with a block quote or unordered
list, it will use the settings in your
| | 06:39 | existing CSS file rather than the
settings that paragraph and character styles
| | 06:43 | here assuming that you've already tested
this and tweaked it so that they map correctly.
| | 06:47 | The default settings for CSS are these
three options and so my recommendation at
| | 06:52 | least with your first few EPUBs is to
keep Generate CSS turned on, but only
| | 06:56 | leave the first check box turned on
and turn off the other two, and that's it
| | 07:00 | for the Content panel of EPUB Export Options.
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|
|
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 at 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 coming
| | 00:21 | out on deck, but in preparation for the
title I asked a lot of people who are in
| | 00:26 | the business what they prefer to use to
preview the EPUBs that they're working
| | 00:30 | on 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.
And Calibre is an open source program
| | 00:44 | also available for Macintosh,
Windows, 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 your EPUBs,
not just on your computer, but also on
| | 00:58 | a lot of connected devices
like iPads, 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 converting to
| | 01:13 | Kindle, we will 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.
And if you double-click it, it opens
| | 01:31 | up into Calibre's e-book viewer, and
you can hide this other view behind it if
| | 01:36 | you'd like. But here you can just click
the right arrow and left arrow to move
| | 01:40 | from page to page. There are also
keyboard shortcuts for all these. And here are
| | 01:43 | the Contents, and the pages just appear.
So this is a really good way to check
| | 01:48 | to see what your EPUB looks like
outside of Adobe Digital Editions.
| | 01:53 | Then there are a couple that I
like to use that are available online.
| | 01:56 | For example, Ibis Reader is developed by
Threepress Consulting, the same company
| | 02:02 | who worked on creating the EPUB
Validation Checker, and they are very well-known
| | 02:06 | in the field as EPUB gurus.
| | 02:09 | They have their own online EPUB Library
where you can keep your books all in
| | 02:14 | one place, and they are stored in the
cloud, but you can also download the
| | 02:18 | books to your computer.
| | 02:19 | So it's not a completely
online way to manage your eBooks.
| | 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. And here
is our navigational table of contents on
| | 02:32 | the left. You can click No distractions,
and it hides a lot of the chrome from
| | 02:37 | around the browser for you.
Click NEXT and PREVIOUS to go from
| | 02:41 | page to page. Go back to the
site. And then also Firefox itself has a
| | 02:47 | plug-in that came out in late 2010
called EPUB Reader, and I've installed it in
| | 02:52 | Firefox. And what happens is that if
you click on a link to an EPUB in Firefox,
| | 02:56 | it automatically opens in Firefox. Or
if you want a preview what an EPUB looks
| | 03:02 | like that's on your computer in Firefox,
you just go to File, and then choose
| | 03:06 | Open File. And then navigate to where
your EPUB is, select it, and choose Open,
| | 03:12 | 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 is 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
| | 03:27 | same people who worked on Firefox.
| | 03:29 | So it's called EPUB Reader. It's a
free extension. And again here's the
| | 03:33 | navigational table of contents, and
you can save books to your desktop, and
| | 03:37 | move from page to page. It's got little tips
that pops up when you want it to; 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 Reader
| | 03:51 | that most people that I know use on
any kind of iPad, or iPhone, or Android
| | 03:55 | device, is called Stanza.
| | 03:57 | You may have heard of it. They have
been around for long time. And it's an
| | 04:00 | EPUB Reader, and also an EPUB library
organizer along the lines of Ibis Reader, and Calibre.
| | 04:07 | Unfortunately Stanza desktop has been
discontinued, so you can only really use
| | 04:11 | 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,
it has access to the Feedbooks library, and
| | 04:26 | some other libraries. So you can
actually download a lot of free EPUBs directly
| | 04:29 | into Stanza. Or if you have EPUBs on
your computer, like in this video where we
| | 04:34 | are talking about developing your own
EPUBs, and you want to see what it's going to
| | 04:37 | look like in Stanza, then you would add
it to Stanza by hooking up your device.
| | 04:41 | Right now I have my iPad hooked up, and
then you select the name of your device,
| | 04:45 | click Apps at the top, and when you
scroll down you'll have a list of apps that
| | 04:50 | let you share files.
| | 04:52 | So I've selected Stanza at the bottom,
and then you click Add, and then just add
| | 04:56 | your EPUB, which I have already done.
| | 04:59 | So once this has been added, when you
click Sync, then EPUB is added to 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 | Do 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
| | 05:20 | same EPUB that as seen in different
eReaders, so you have an idea of what
| | 05:24 | your readers are going to see. It's
kind of like testing a Web site on
| | 05:27 | 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. And Stanza, just like
| | 05:38 | other eReaders, has its own navigational
table of contents. So, if I just tap on
| | 05:42 | 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 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's 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;
| | 00:39 | well an iPad preferably, because it's larger.
| | 00:42 | So how do you get your EPUB onto an iPad so that
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'm going to quit out of Digital Editions.
| | 00:56 | And then you start up iTunes. 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,
and it'll automatically go into Books.
| | 01:32 | or you can just go to File, and choose Add to
Library, and navigate to where that file is.
| | 01:39 | There it is: SFHistory.epub,
and it'll go ahead and add it.
| | 01:43 | So there's 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'd see 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 to
| | 02:00 | 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, and you want to
| | 02:07 | sync the selected Books.
| | 02:09 | They're all selected, so I'll
click Sync. And it is copying;
| | 02:13 | I don't know if you saw that. It
appeared there 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, you can start up the
| | 02:23 | iBooks application;
| | 02:24 | you'll find it in your Library shelves
there, and you can tap it and open it and
| | 02:28 | see what it looks like.
| | 02:29 | So you just tap on the Brief History
of San Francisco, and it opens up to the
| | 02:35 | cover. And you can just page through
it a couple of times to the right and to
| | 02:38 | the left, and check out to see if the
contents is working, and did the subheads
| | 02:43 | come out the right color.
| | 02:44 | Now likely, you're going to find some
issues. Like I can see, for example,
| | 02:48 | there's 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 | Well, technically, what you're supposed
to do is go back to your Library, to the
| | 03:03 | Books section of your Library, right-
click and choose Delete, delete that book.
| | 03:08 | 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. You always have to sync
| | 03:16 | 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 to look exactly right on your
| | 03:41 | iPad is to bypass all that rigmarole.
| | 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
| | 03:53 | application called Phone Disk.
| | 03:55 | It's available for both Mac and Windows.
It's not too expensive, and what it
| | 03:58 | does is it adds this little icon up
here in your title bar, or on the PC
| | 04:02 | down here in the bottom.
| | 04:03 | And when you connect an iPad, or an iPhone, or
an iPod Touch, it mounts it like a hard drive.
| | 04:10 | 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 | there is Books, and there are the
EPUBS that this iPad currently has.
| | 04:27 | They are a little obscured, okay,
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
| | 04:38 | obscured, all right.
| | 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
| | 04:53 | I just added, you can right-click on
the Books.plist, and just open that up in
| | 04:58 | anything that lets you take a peek
at it. And you can see that the title
| | 05:02 | appears at the top, and at the bottom is what it
appears inside your Finder or Explorer window.
| | 05:08 | So if I'm looking for A Brief History of
San Francisco, here it is at the bottom;
| | 05:11 | it's the IBFY one. 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
| | 05:20 | file, 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 onto 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 that 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, but I'm
really hoping that one day soon Apple is
| | 06:01 | going to come out with an iBooks
eReader that we can just install on our
| | 06:05 | computer, and proof our EPUBS that way.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Validating EPUB files| 00:01 | Simply creating an EPUB that
looks great and that reads well is
| | 00:05 | unfortunately not enough.
| | 00:06 | You have to go one more step, and that
is, you need to validate the EPUB file.
| | 00:10 | You need to make sure that it
adheres to the standards set forth by the
| | 00:14 | International Digital Publishing Forum.
| | 00:17 | This is a set of rules and regulations,
I guess you could say, for how EPUB
| | 00:23 | readers and EPUB devices should interpret
the code in the files contained inside an EPUB.
| | 00:29 | That way it makes a lot easier for us
to create an EPUB that can be released
| | 00:33 | among many devices and readers.
| | 00:36 | So if you click on EPUB, you'll see
that there's actually two standards right
| | 00:40 | now, as I record this.
| | 00:41 | EPUB 2 is what we need to check
against right now. That is the standard that,
| | 00:47 | for example, if you upload to iBooks,
or to Amazon, or to Barnes & Noble, they
| | 00:52 | want to make sure that your EPUB
adheres to the EPUB 2.0.1 standards.
| | 00:57 | They are currently working on the next
set of standards called EPUB 3 that adds
| | 01:01 | new features such as JavaScript, and
enhanced audio and video, and things like that.
| | 01:06 | But right now, we're concerned with EPUB 2.0.1.
| | 01:08 | Now if you go to the Details page for
EPUB 2.0.1, you'll see more information
| | 01:15 | than you can shake a stick at
regarding what are the regulations exactly.
| | 01:19 | If you're wondering, for example, what
kind of images are allowed in an EPUB,
| | 01:22 | you can come down here and check it out.
| | 01:25 | How you should encode your EPUBs, what
are the files that should be included;
| | 01:29 | it's all spelled out here
in the idpf.org Web site.
| | 01:33 | Now thank heavens, you
don't have to memorize this;
| | 01:36 | it's not going to be on the test.
| | 01:37 | It's actually been all compiled into a
single little program called EpubCheck,
| | 01:44 | which I have queued up over here.
| | 01:45 | It's an open source Google app that
you can download and install, but it runs
| | 01:50 | on the command line.
| | 01:51 | So if you are just doing a few EPUBs,
then you might want to instead use this
| | 01:57 | wonderful tool called the EPUB validator.
| | 02:01 | If you go to threepress.org/tools, or
just come to threepress.org and click on
| | 02:07 | tools link, you'll see that they have a
little program where you can upload your
| | 02:12 | EPUB as long as it's not too
large, and then you can validate it.
| | 02:16 | And it will tell you if it
passes those EPUB standards, or not.
| | 02:21 | I recommend that one of the first steps
that you do after you export your EPUB
| | 02:25 | from InDesign, and see that it's
basically looking okay, before you jump in to
| | 02:30 | editing the CSS or XHTML files,
that you run it through EPUB validator.
| | 02:35 | And that's because if you wait until
the very end, until the book is perfect,
| | 02:40 | and then you run it through validator,
you can't tell if it's something that
| | 02:42 | you messed up in InDesign, or if it's something
that you messed up in editing the actual EPUB.
| | 02:48 | So if you run it through EPUB
validator right after you get your EPUB, and it
| | 02:53 | passes, then as you start editing the
CSS and XHTML files, as I'll be talking
| | 02:58 | about in upcoming videos, if it doesn't
pass, then you missed a step during your
| | 03:03 | own hand-editing of the files.
| | 03:05 | It wasn't something that InDesign did.
| | 03:07 | So as we say in Chicago,
validate early and validate often.
| | 03:11 | Let's actually take a very simple
document and run this through the EPUB validator.
| | 03:17 | I have a document here called SFHistory-
simple and I'm just going to export this
| | 03:25 | to EPUB, right on to the Desktop.
| | 03:28 | We're going to leave everything as is; at
the current settings for Image, and General,
| | 03:33 | Contents. I do have a TOC Style
set up, and it's breaking on subheads.
| | 03:38 | I'm not going to include embeddable
fonts because this will almost always break
| | 03:42 | validation as it comes out of
InDesign. And then I'll say OK.
| | 03:47 | So that's what it looks like.
It's got a couple links. All right!
| | 03:49 | So now let's go ahead and
upload this to the EPUB validator.
| | 03:54 | I'm going to browse on my Desktop, there it is.
| | 03:59 | Open it, click Validate,
and that's how simple it is.
| | 04:02 | You just need to upload it, click
Validate, and you can go. Uh-oh!
| | 04:06 | No, no, no. I knew it.
| | 04:07 | I knew this is going to happen;
| | 04:08 | I set it up this way.
| | 04:10 | This is what you don't want to see.
| | 04:12 | What's nice is that they will give you a
clue about what caused the problem; why
| | 04:17 | it is not validating.
| | 04:18 | And there's actually two levels.
| | 04:20 | One is it isn't valid;
| | 04:22 | it won't validate. And the
other one is there are warnings.
| | 04:25 | So sometimes it'll pass but with warnings;
| | 04:27 | you usually don't have to
worry about that. It's this thing;
| | 04:30 | you want to see a happy face, not a big Red X.
| | 04:32 | So let's look here. It says the problem
is that this OEBPS/SFHistory blah, blah,
| | 04:39 | blah use of non-registered URL schema.
| | 04:41 | Clear as day, so that's a no-brainer.
| | 04:44 | What is it actually saying? Well,
remember that an EPUB is a collection of
| | 04:47 | files that are zipped.
| | 04:49 | So here in my Finder, like Stories_of_
California, if I unpack it, it's actually
| | 04:55 | a collection of files.
| | 04:56 | So EPUB validator is telling you the
path to the exact file with the problem,
| | 05:02 | and it's saying that the exact file
is in OEBPS/SFHistory-simple.html(12).
| | 05:11 | So actually it's this one, because it
doesn't have a hyphen, and a number, and
| | 05:15 | it's saying line 12.
| | 05:16 | So there's an issue here.
| | 05:18 | Now you don't have to unpack your EPUB.
| | 05:21 | If you have exported it directly from
InDesign, InDesign CS5.5 is perfectly
| | 05:26 | capable of exporting completely valid EPUBs.
| | 05:30 | So if there's an issue here, it has
something to do with the InDesign file.
| | 05:34 | And I can tell that there is something
in the book near the beginning that has
| | 05:38 | a problem with a URL.
| | 05:40 | And if we look here, it says href is http
:/note to self:look for url. All right!
| | 05:48 | That sounds like something I would write myself.
| | 05:51 | So let's check out that InDesign file.
| | 05:53 | I'm going to open up my HYPERLINKS panel.
| | 05:56 | I has two hyperlinks;
| | 05:58 | this one, San Francisco http; that's fine.
| | 06:02 | This one, also San Francisco; uh-oh!
| | 06:05 | There it is. There is the problem.
| | 06:08 | I'm going to actually correct it here.
I'll call this sanfrancisco.com as well,
| | 06:16 | and save it, and then I'll re-export it
| | 06:17 | back out to EPUB. I'll replace the
existing one on my Desktop; leave
| | 06:21 | everything else the same.
| | 06:25 | There's my document. It looks fine.
Now let's re-upload it to the EPUB
| | 06:31 | validator. Same one;
| | 06:34 | I guess I'm going to have to do that
again, but let's validate. Finger crossed!
| | 06:36 | Oh, there it is! Passed!
| | 06:39 | Love that!
| | 06:40 | So now that means if you want to
continue editing it for its format, or for the
| | 06:45 | CSS, or things like that, go ahead and do it.
| | 06:47 | But every once in a while, come back
here and upload your current version to
| | 06:51 | make sure that you haven't done
anything bad that will cause it to invalidate.
| | 06:55 | Because it's a lot easier to track down if you
remember what you just changed to the document.
| | 07:00 | And of course, you'll need to upload
it to EPUB validator, or run it through
| | 07:04 | epubcheck, one final time to make
sure that it passes, right before you
| | 07:08 | distribute it to your customers,
or upload it to an EPUB reseller.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. Editing EPUB Files for FunctionalityGetting inside an EPUB file| 00:00 | Getting a valid EPUB out of InDesign is
only the starting point, I'm sorry to
| | 00:05 | say. Because fundamentally, an EPUB is a
web site. It's a miniature Web site all
| | 00:12 | wrapped up in a zipped compressed file.
And we all know how wonderful InDesign
| | 00:17 | is at exporting to Web sites, right?
| | 00:20 | In other words, it gives it an old
college try, and it has come a long way in
| | 00:25 | recent years, but I can guarantee you
that 99% of the time you are going to have
| | 00:29 | to actually edit the EPUB file itself
to do things that InDesign just can't do.
| | 00:34 | So the question is, how do you do that?
| | 00:36 | How do you edit an EPUB file?
| | 00:38 | Well, if you are on a PC, it's a
lot easier than if you are on a Mac;
| | 00:41 | let me put it that way.
| | 00:42 | So let me talk about if you are on a
PC. All you need to do is change the
| | 00:47 | extension of the EPUB file to .zip.
And in fact, I have heard from some friends of
| | 00:52 | mine, I haven't actually seen it
in the wild, that there are many ZIP
| | 00:56 | extractors that can unzip an EPUB file.
Which is perfectly fine; you don't even
| | 00:59 | have to change the extension.
| | 01:01 | But if you don't happen to have one
of those cool utilities, you can just
| | 01:04 | change it to ZIP, and then you would
use your PCs normal utility to extract all
| | 01:09 | the internal files to another folder.
Then you would get that folder, it
| | 01:14 | would look like this --
| | 01:15 | I am going to keep that as EPUB
for now -- but that would be extracted to
| | 01:18 | a folder like this,
| | 01:19 | with all of the internal files inside
here. And we are going to go through
| | 01:23 | what all these files mean in another
video in this chapter, but these are all
| | 01:27 | the component files of the EPUB. Then
you would edit them in whichever editor
| | 01:31 | you would like, and I will be talking
about different editors you can choose as well.
| | 01:34 | And then when you're done you would
rezip it, and then change the .zip back to
| | 01:39 | .epub, and it works great.
| | 01:41 | Life is just not so easy for us on the
Macintosh. And that's because when you
| | 01:46 | unzip or zip a file, the Mac always adds
invisible data that will make that EPUB
| | 01:51 | invalid, and just not work.
| | 01:54 | So instead we have to go
through other gyrations.
| | 01:58 | First, let me call your attention to a
couple of utilities that you might want
| | 02:01 | to use just to peek inside an EPUB.
| | 02:04 | If you don't really need to edit them,
you just want to see what's going on in
| | 02:07 | the internal files, you could use
something like, I have it over here, Springy.
| | 02:12 | Springy is a wonderful little utility.
| | 02:14 | There is another one called Better Zip,
and I am sure there are more, that will
| | 02:17 | let you just drag and drop an EPUB on
top of it. And look, we can see inside.
| | 02:23 | So we can even open these files here.
| | 02:25 | We can select them, right-click, and
you can extract. Extract them all. Or you
| | 02:31 | can even edit while it's
still part of this archive.
| | 02:35 | It's useful if you just
need to make minor edits.
| | 02:37 | If you're doing wholesale edits, like
you need to do a Find/Change on all the
| | 02:41 | HTML files because there's an
incorrect tag, or you spelled somebody's name wrong,
| | 02:46 | or something like that;
| | 02:47 | you can't do it with a utility like this.
| | 02:49 | The other thing you have to watch out
for is, you have to go to Preferences of
| | 02:53 | these kinds of utilities, and make sure
that it's not going to add that horrible
| | 02:58 | Macintosh information when you close
the file, when you are done working on it,
| | 03:02 | because sometimes they do.
| | 03:04 | So in Springy, you'll find that in the
Archiving tab of Preferences, way here at
| | 03:10 | the bottom, it's actually turned on
by default, I remembered to turn it off.
| | 03:13 | So Preserve Macintosh contents. It
actually should also say Preserve or
| | 03:18 | Create Macintosh contents.
| | 03:21 | Those are those things like .dsstore
that you might see if have ever unzip a Mac
| | 03:24 | file, or look at a Mac folder on a PC,
that's what we are talking about. And that
| | 03:28 | will just completely
invalidate an EPUB, so you can't do that.
| | 03:32 | Another utility that you'll see me
using quite often in this title does the same
| | 03:36 | kind of thing as Springy,
and that's TextWrangler.
| | 03:39 | You can drag and drop an EPUB onto
TextWrangler; it won't work if you go to
| | 03:43 | File>Open. And I will be talking more
about TextWrangler when I talk about good
| | 03:47 | editors, but it also let's you
view the contents of an EPUB file.
| | 03:53 | When you select a file,
you can see what's inside.
| | 03:55 | Notice that you can't change it though.
| | 03:59 | But if you really want to do a lot of
work to this EPUB, you are going to have
| | 04:02 | to actually completely extract it,
just as though you were doing it on a PC.
| | 04:07 | And on a Macintosh, most people who
do this for a living use a Terminal
| | 04:12 | Command. And Terminal is the command-
line interface utility that comes in a
| | 04:16 | Macintosh that let's you enter UNIX
commands. And there are many Web sites and
| | 04:22 | books about EPUB that tell you how to
use the Terminal Command to unzip and
| | 04:25 | re-archive EPUB files.
| | 04:26 | I am not a fan of Terminal.
| | 04:29 | I'm not morally opposed to it, but I
like it easy, and I found a very easy
| | 04:34 | solution in the form of these two Apple scripts.
| | 04:37 | EPUB UnZip 1.0 and EPUB Zip 1.0.3.
| | 04:42 | These are Apple scripts only, of course,
because you don't need them on a PC.
| | 04:46 | And all you do is you drag the EPUB -- I
am going to move this out of the way,
| | 04:49 | because it's going to actually, let me
rename this guy to old. There you go.
| | 04:55 | So you take an EPUB, and you just drag
and drop it right on top of the script. So
| | 04:59 | unzip means extract, right?
| | 05:00 | So I am going to unzip it, and there it
went ahead and unzipped. It's right here.
| | 05:05 | Let's actually, let's get these out of the way.
| | 05:09 | Okay, so now they are on the Desktop.
| | 05:12 | When you're done editing your EPUB file,
now we can go ahead and edit away with
| | 05:16 | whatever program you want, then you
just drag and drop it back on to EPUB ZIP,
| | 05:25 | and it makes your EPUB file.
| | 05:28 | Double-click it; it opens perfectly fine
in Adobe Digital Editions. There you go.
| | 05:34 | So these scripts are in your exercise
folder, or you can download them yourself
| | 05:38 | from the mobilereads.com forum.
| | 05:40 | It's a wonderful resource for people
who are working with EPUBS, and I will talk
| | 05:44 | a lot more about that, and show you the
URL in the final video in this title.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Identifying parts of an EPUB file| 00:00 | When you create an EPUB file, and then
you expand it, or extract its contents,
| | 00:06 | you're going to find a folder that's
full of all sorts of fun stuff: HTML files,
| | 00:11 | and images, and XML files.
| | 00:14 | It contains all of the formatting
instructions, all of the content, all the
| | 00:17 | images, and metadata that's required
by any EPUB reader or software to read
| | 00:24 | the EPUB successfully.
| | 00:26 | Now some of these files you will never
need to touch, and others you'll become
| | 00:29 | quite familiar with.
| | 00:31 | You may think, oh no, this is way too geeky.
| | 00:33 | You know Indesign, you know how
to export to EPUB, the end.
| | 00:37 | You're, like, eager to jump forward to
how do you sell on the iBookstore and
| | 00:41 | make a million dollars.
| | 00:42 | But take it from me, even if you
can export perfectly valid EPUBs from
| | 00:47 | Indesign, you will always need to
come in here for one reason or another.
| | 00:51 | Because first of all, sometimes it
won't validate, and the validation checker
| | 00:56 | will always tell you, oh, the problem
is in this weirdo file, and it's always
| | 01:01 | referring to one of these files.
| | 01:03 | Second of all, once you start
hanging out with other EPUB geeks,
| | 01:07 | when you hang out in the forums, or
Twitter, or wherever where people are talking
| | 01:11 | about EPUB creation, they're going to be
talking about these files with abandon.
| | 01:16 | So if you want to keep up with
the conversation, you might as well
| | 01:18 | become familiar with them.
| | 01:20 | Let's go through this step-
by-step. It's not so bad.
| | 01:23 | I'm going to use oXygen
Author to open up this EPUB.
| | 01:29 | I'll open up the document right here.
| | 01:32 | So inside the EPUB, there are two main
folders, and then there is this one XML file
| | 01:39 | called mimetype. And all it
is, is this plain text right here.
| | 01:44 | You never really need to edit this at all,
| | 01:46 | so you can ignore it.
| | 01:47 | The one thing I want to say about the
mimetype file is that part of the EPUB
| | 01:51 | specifications say that when you
compress a collection of files and folders, and
| | 01:57 | zip them and make them into an EPUB,
that this one file cannot be compressed. And
| | 02:02 | apparently that's why we need to use
terminal on the Macintosh. And that's
| | 02:06 | something that can cause problems
if the mimetype is ever compressed.
| | 02:09 | So just be careful with that file.
| | 02:12 | I am going to close it up.
| | 02:14 | Inside the META-INF folder, this is also
another folder that you'll seldom need
| | 02:20 | to worry about or look inside,
| | 02:22 | it normally contains
just one file: container.xml.
| | 02:27 | I just double-clicked it
so we can see the contents.
| | 02:29 | It's an XML file, and it's saying the
root file of this EPUB is inside this
| | 02:34 | folder, OEBPS/content.opf, which
we are going to look at in a bit.
| | 02:39 | And that is a very important file. and
the META-INF has the file that says
| | 02:45 | where important file is.
| | 02:48 | So no need to edit that, and don't ever edit it.
| | 02:51 | You'll have another file inside META-
INF if when you export to EPUB from
| | 02:56 | Indesign you turn on to embed the fonts.
And you'll see a little encryption file here.
| | 03:03 | The encryption file has code in it
that you can edit as well if you want to
| | 03:06 | look at it, but it's the encryption
file that will often stop the EPUB
| | 03:10 | validation in its tracks.
| | 03:12 | So if you run an EPUB through validation
and it says there is a problem with the
| | 03:16 | encryption file, that's
the problem, right there.
| | 03:19 | Now this folder you're
going to be going into a lot.
| | 03:22 | We call it the books folder for short,
but the OEBPS folder is the Open E-book
| | 03:27 | something or something.
| | 03:29 | When you open it up, you will see this
is where the meat of the entire EPUB is.
| | 03:33 | All the HTML files that you see
here are actually the text contents.
| | 03:37 | So if I double-click one, this was the first
page of our EPUB, which was our internal TOC.
| | 03:45 | If I double-click this one, here
is the first chapter of the document
| | 03:50 | surrounded by all of its tags.
| | 03:53 | These are HTML files as exported
by Indesign CS5.5. Earlier versions
| | 03:59 | exported XHMTL files.
| | 04:01 | I've downloaded EPUBs
Gutenberg.org and opened them up.
| | 04:05 | Those are XML files.
| | 04:07 | So with the EPUB 2.0 specification all
those file types are perfectly legit.
| | 04:12 | I don't know what's going to happen
with the EPUB 3, but just for now, just
| | 04:16 | FYI, if you are ever looking at other EPUBs
don't worry about it if the extensions
| | 04:20 | are slightly different.
| | 04:21 | They do all need to say at the
top that they're XHTML files.
| | 04:25 | That's the important part; that
they're doc type XHTML files.
| | 04:29 | When Indesign exports to EPUB, it neatly
puts all of the images into an images folder.
| | 04:35 | That's not really required, but it's nice.
| | 04:38 | It keeps things easy, so you could
select these images, and open them up in
| | 04:41 | Photoshop or something like that.
| | 04:44 | And then down here, we are looking
at this in alphabetical order,
| | 04:47 | we have a file called template.css.
| | 04:50 | This is a highly important file.
| | 04:52 | It is the Cascading Style Sheet: the
document that defines how text looks, how
| | 04:58 | images are aligned, and so on. And this is
something I'll be talking about quite a
| | 05:02 | bit later on in this title.
| | 05:04 | But again, this is something that
Indesign creates when you export to EPUB, or
| | 05:09 | you could build this on your own if you'd like.
| | 05:10 | Then there are two XML files.
| | 05:13 | One is called content.opf,
one is called toc.ncx.
| | 05:17 | Let's look at toc.ncx first.
| | 05:21 | This is the navigational table of contents.
| | 05:24 | When you open up an EPUB in an eReader
there is usually a menu, or a button, or
| | 05:28 | something you can press to look at the TOC.
| | 05:31 | So it's something that actually lives
outside of the content files, but it is
| | 05:36 | something that Indesign generates. And
basically it's just, it will say, like, the
| | 05:41 | Arrival of Europeans in early
settlement, and you click it, and it opens up this
| | 05:45 | file and brings you that TOC marker.
| | 05:47 | So the toc.ncx, its reason for being is only
to create the navigational table of contents.
| | 05:54 | They're an essential part of every
EPUB, and I'll cover that in another video.
| | 05:58 | Do you remember that root file,
that container.xml pointed to?
| | 06:04 | That was content.opf inside the OEBPS folder.
| | 06:09 | Content.opf is kind of like
the brains of the entire EPUB.
| | 06:14 | So you need to be careful when you're
editing this. And the content.opf has
| | 06:20 | three important sections, and one
optional section, that the EPUB validation
| | 06:26 | checker will look for.
| | 06:28 | The first main section that you'll find is metadata.
| | 06:31 | So any metadata that is attached to
this EPUB is listed here. And certain bits
| | 06:37 | of metadata are required in order to pass
validation, including the publication date.
| | 06:44 | Indesign will add that
automatically for you behind the scenes.
| | 06:47 | It's the same date as when you exported the
EPUB, and you can come in here and edit it.
| | 06:53 | The second section is called the manifest.
| | 06:56 | Like a manifest, when you're shipping
merchandise, it's a list of everything that
| | 07:00 | this EPUB file contains.
| | 07:01 | When you run it through the validation
checker, it's like a little guy with a
| | 07:05 | clipboard who says, there is an HTML
file called SFHistory; check. SFHistory-1;
| | 07:10 | check. There is template.css file;
| | 07:12 | check. There is this image.png; check.
| | 07:14 | Now if it finds other things in the EPUB
file that's not listed in the manifest,
| | 07:19 | then you don't pass validation.
| | 07:21 | Or if it finds things in the
manifest that don't exist in EPUB because
| | 07:26 | you accidentally deleted an image, for example,
that will also cause it to fail validation.
| | 07:31 | So the manifest is very important.
| | 07:33 | The third required section of content.
opf is the spine. And the spine is what
| | 07:40 | tells an eReader when the person who's
reading EPUB presses the Right Arrow, or
| | 07:45 | swipes right to the left to go to the
next page or go backwards, what document
| | 07:49 | should appear there.
| | 07:51 | When you're reading an EPUB
you're not aware that you're looking at
| | 07:53 | multiple HTML files, right?
| | 07:55 | It looks like one long book. And the
spine section is what tells the eReader
| | 08:00 | software or eReader device which
document to bring into view when somebody is
| | 08:04 | navigating around the EPUB.
| | 08:06 | There is a fourth optional section that
would go into content.opf, that I have a
| | 08:12 | video at the end of this chapter that's
specifically about that, called the Guide
| | 08:16 | Section. And the Guide Section
would come right after the spine.
| | 08:19 | It's required by some eReader devices.
| | 08:22 | It's a way for you to say where the
title page is, where the index is, and
| | 08:26 | things like that, though it is
not required to pass validation.
| | 08:31 | So that's the end of the content.opf
file, which is the only other file that we
| | 08:36 | have left to talk about in the OEBPS folder.
| | 08:39 | In other words, we are done talking
about all of the contents in an EPUB file.
| | 08:42 | I know it's a bit technical for many
users, especially if you're a designer. But
| | 08:47 | understanding what exactly constitutes
an EPUB is essential for you to be able
| | 08:52 | to create EPUBs that
validate, and that look good.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Choosing an EPUB editor| 00:01 | What is the best program to use
for editing the EPUB file itself?
| | 00:05 | Well, there is no clear winner yet, and
I think there's a huge opportunity for a
| | 00:10 | developer to come along with
something that EPUB producers need.
| | 00:13 | But I'd like to run through some of the
top contenders, and what people are using
| | 00:18 | today on both Mac and PC
platforms to edit EPUBS.
| | 00:23 | Because I am running on a Mac, let me
talk about PC first, and then the other
| | 00:27 | programs. Most of them are bi-platform.
| | 00:29 | You want to find a good text editor,
because remember after you open an EPUB
| | 00:34 | what you're going to actually be editing
are actual text files, right? The HTML or the CSS files.
| | 00:40 | These are plain old text files.
| | 00:42 | So you want to find an editor that can
let you do search and replaces; that can
| | 00:47 | color code some of the tags, so that
it's easy to distinguish what's actual live
| | 00:51 | text, and what's actually tags. And it
can do Grep Find/Changes, which I will
| | 00:56 | show you in a bit, but that
means pattern based Find/Changes.
| | 00:59 | That's the kind of text editor you want.
| | 01:02 | On a PC, what I've heard is that one of the
best contenders is a program called Notepad++.
| | 01:09 | It's an Open Source free program for
Windows only that qualifies on every one of
| | 01:14 | those points that I just brought
up. It's supposed to be excellent!
| | 01:17 | And I've actually used it a bunch
times on Windows, and it is great.
| | 01:21 | The closest equivalent, in my mind,
on a Macintosh would be TextWrangler.
| | 01:26 | Let me actually open up
one of these in TextWrangler.
| | 01:31 | TextWrangler is the free baby brother
of a commercial program for the Mac user
| | 01:36 | called BBEdit, and it is
distributed by Bare Bones Software.
| | 01:41 | I love TextWrangler, because not only is
it free, but it's very powerful. And it
| | 01:45 | has those features that I was talking about.
| | 01:47 | You see all of the tags are color coded,
all of the live text here is black, and
| | 01:52 | of course you can change the
colors for all this in Preferences.
| | 01:56 | I've set it to automatically wrap by
default so that we don't have text running
| | 02:00 | off the end of the window.
| | 02:01 | If you open up multiple files, they will
appear here in this little side car on
| | 02:05 | the right, so you can
quickly click back and forth.
| | 02:07 | So you can Shift+Click a whole bunch
of files in the Finder, and it will open
| | 02:11 | them all up at once.
| | 02:13 | Under Search, not only can you Find in
the Active file right here, and it's pretty
| | 02:18 | powerful with a lot of features,
but you can also do Multi-File Search.
| | 02:22 | So if you had selected a whole bunch
of files, you can go ahead and open them
| | 02:26 | all up, or you can even search in a
particular folder on your hard drive.
| | 02:29 | So you don't even have to open them up
first to do a Search and Replace, which
| | 02:32 | can be very helpful if you need to
do a whole scale Find/Change to the
| | 02:38 | contents of an EPUB.
| | 02:39 | A cool feature about TextWrangler is
that it can open up in the actual archive.
| | 02:44 | So now we are running just in
TextWrangler, and I'm going to open the EPUB
| | 02:49 | itself on my desktop. Isn't that cool?
| | 02:53 | So we can actually peek inside here,
and we can investigate the contents.
| | 02:57 | Now you can't change anything.
| | 02:59 | The only way you can change something
is if you actually extract the files
| | 03:02 | from the EPUB first.
| | 03:03 | But it is a cool feature of
TextWrangler that you can use it to look inside
| | 03:08 | different files in your EPUB
without having to extract it.
| | 03:12 | Now a program that does that, and let's you edit
it while it's still archived, is oXygen Author.
| | 03:18 | Let me zip over to oXygen Author.
| | 03:22 | oXygen Author is one of the family of
oXygen programs that you can purchase
| | 03:28 | from the developer.
| | 03:29 | It's a little on the pricey side, but
it is so worth it if you're doing a lot
| | 03:34 | of EPUB work. Because not only will it
let you open up the EPUB itself, called
| | 03:38 | an Archive Browser, without having to explode the
EPUB first, but you can open up multiple files.
| | 03:45 | I am just double-clicking here, and
what's happening is that oXygen Author is
| | 03:49 | unzipping them in the background, and
then opening them. And then we have the
| | 03:53 | same kind of color coding
happening to the text editor.
| | 03:55 | We can do a whole bunch of files. And if
we go to the Find command, you can see
| | 04:02 | that you can Find/Replace in multiple
files even while they're still archived,
| | 04:06 | which is a new feature they just
recently added to oXygen Author.
| | 04:10 | And they have an EPUB
validation checker built right in.
| | 04:15 | So if there is any issues with this -- I
just went ahead and clicked it, and you see
| | 04:19 | down here; Validation Successful.
| | 04:21 | But if there are any problems here you
get a little pop-up window, and it would
| | 04:24 | tell you which file, which line, and
you can double-click, and it will jump you
| | 04:28 | right to that file to fix. Very cool!
| | 04:30 | Now you probably already have a very
good HTML and CSS editor installed on your
| | 04:36 | computer, if you have the Creative
Suite, and I'm talking about Dreamweaver.
| | 04:40 | Dreamweaver is perfectly great for
editing the contents of many of these files,
| | 04:44 | because it can edit, open and edit
XML files, HTML files, and CSS files.
| | 04:49 | So let's go ahead and open.
| | 04:51 | Let me go to Desktop, and here
is the file that I exploded.
| | 04:55 | Now unfortunately it can't open an archive.
| | 04:59 | So you do have to extract
all of the EPUB files first.
| | 05:02 | But we can always hope for CS6.
| | 05:07 | One of the beautiful things about
Dreamweaver, besides perhaps that's already
| | 05:10 | sitting there on your computer, is that
you have the code view with all the color
| | 05:14 | codes; you have the split view, so you
can see any change that you make here. It
| | 05:22 | gets updated over here on the right as
soon as you click it. And you can also
| | 05:25 | preview in any browser.
| | 05:28 | So if you choose Preview in Safari.app --
we will go ahead and save those changes.
| | 05:34 | Previewing in Safari is as close as
you can get to previewing for the iPad.
| | 05:39 | As I mentioned before, unfortunately
Apple has not released a desktop previewer
| | 05:44 | for iBooks, but iBooks and Safari use the
same internal rendering engine called Webkit.
| | 05:51 | So it's not 100% exactly the same in
both programs, but if you are looking to
| | 05:57 | see if something is wrapping
correctly, or the drop cap is working, or the
| | 06:01 | alignment is working, Safari is going
to be the closest you can get to actually
| | 06:05 | copying it over to the iPad, and
opening it up in iBooks, and looking there.
| | 06:10 | I want to mention two other frequently
mentioned free or shareware utilities.
| | 06:15 | One of them is Calibre,
and the other one is Sigil.
| | 06:17 | So I have Calibre running here, and
Calibre also allows you to open up EPUBS and
| | 06:22 | read them on screen.
| | 06:23 | It's more of an EPUB library.
| | 06:27 | If you have a bunch of EPUBS on your
computer, Calibre will track which ones you
| | 06:31 | have, and show you their
covers, and lets you read them.
| | 06:33 | So it comes with a little quick start guide.
| | 06:37 | And if you double-click on any one of
these EPUBS it will open up in a nice
| | 06:40 | little reader utility that you can use
to page through your EPUBS, or you can
| | 06:46 | just scroll through it.
| | 06:47 | Calibre is also frequently used to
convert files, like it can convert from EPUB
| | 06:52 | to MOBI, and MOBI is the
file format used by Amazon.
| | 06:57 | However, in my experience, and
this is only anecdotally,
| | 07:01 | sometimes the Calibre conversion
doesn't play nice with the validation
| | 07:05 | engines, or with the requirements by
the EPUB resellers. And it's more for
| | 07:10 | your own personal library.
| | 07:12 | If you have something on an EPUB and
you want to get it onto your Kindle, for
| | 07:15 | example, then you could do it through Calibre.
| | 07:19 | I have the same kind of cautions about Sigil.
| | 07:21 | okay, I've jumped over to Sigil.
| | 07:25 | Now Sigil is very cool in that, like
oXygen Author, it will let you open up EPUBs
| | 07:31 | without extracting them first,
and it will let you edit them.
| | 07:35 | So I can go to File>Open, navigate
to my desktop, and select that EPUB.
| | 07:41 | One of the problems with Sigil is that,
it might be hard for you to tell at this
| | 07:45 | point, but Sigil moves files around
without you being able to give it permission.
| | 07:51 | It created a folder called Text, and put
all of our text files in there. And then
| | 07:55 | it created another folder called Styles,
and put that in there. Whereas that is
| | 07:59 | not how InDesign exports EPUB files.
| | 08:03 | InDesign does have an Images folder,
but everything else is just floating
| | 08:06 | inside the OEBPS folder.
| | 08:08 | And also you can that see we are missing
views of a couple of other files here.
| | 08:12 | Now the developer of Sigil says it's
for your own good, because after he puts
| | 08:17 | them into these kind of folders, then he
is able to make sure that all the links
| | 08:22 | are working right with whatever
kind of work you can do in here.
| | 08:24 | And it is very cool, because I can just
double-click this one HTML file, and like
| | 08:28 | Dreamweaver up here
| | 08:29 | we have a Book View, Split View, and Code View.
| | 08:32 | So here's Code View.
| | 08:34 | It just looks like any other text
editor. And then there is Split View.
| | 08:38 | In addition, there are EPUB
specific features in Sigil, such as Metadata
| | 08:43 | Editor, and a TOC Editor.
| | 08:46 | You can also right-click on, say, an
image, and say Add Semantics>Cover Image, and
| | 08:52 | then suddenly this image becomes the
new cover image. And in the background,
| | 08:56 | Sigil adds the correct links to all of
the component files of the EPUB, so that
| | 09:01 | eReaders and eReader devices know that
| | 09:03 | that's the cover image.
| | 09:05 | So it does some really cool stuff.
The one issue, as I said, is that it moves
| | 09:08 | files around. And I would prefer that it
didn't, or that it gave me the choice. And
| | 09:13 | second the developer was hired by Google,
and he has already put out the word as
| | 09:17 | I'm speaking that he will
be leaving this project.
| | 09:21 | It's an Open Source project, and he's
asking other developers to take over.
| | 09:24 | So the future of Sigil is a little iffy.
| | 09:27 | He does have a Beta available that you
can download from the Sigil site, but
| | 09:33 | here under Applications I
have both versions installed.
| | 09:38 | So I named one version 3, and version 4 for Beta.
| | 09:42 | So version 4 is the Beta one.
| | 09:44 | If I double-click it;
| | 09:46 | let's close the other one, and we'll go
ahead and open up that same EPUB here.
| | 09:54 | You can see it's a little different in
that he does still move files around, but
| | 09:59 | he does allow you to get to some of the
other component files that Sigil 3 was
| | 10:03 | missing. And if you say, oh, I want to
edit the navigational table of contents
| | 10:08 | document, you double-click, and it'll say,
it's for experts only. Are you sure?
| | 10:12 | So it is more powerful than version 3, but
again, the developer is leaving the project.
| | 10:18 | So in the meantime, you know, what I'm doing is I'm
mainly using oXygen Author or TextWrangler.
| | 10:25 | So you'll see me bouncing between
those two programs in most of the remaining
| | 10:29 | videos in this title.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Modifying the navigation TOC| 00:00 | The navigational table of contents,
or nav TOC, is that part of an EPUB
| | 00:06 | reader or EPUB device that shows you the
table of contents that can be shown and hidden.
| | 00:12 | In other words, it's not
part of the actual EPUB;
| | 00:15 | it's something that
appears to be separate from it.
| | 00:17 | So I could choose Hide
Navigation Pane, and still see this.
| | 00:21 | I talked about the difference between
the navigational TOC and an internal TOC
| | 00:25 | in other video. But often you want to be able
to edit what the navigational TOC is showing.
| | 00:32 | This is actually generated
automatically when you export the document to EPUB,
| | 00:36 | and in this case the user had
set up a book file in InDesign.
| | 00:42 | And each individual
InDesign document was called, you know,
| | 00:45 | 01_early_history was the name of the first one,
02_sanfran_pen was the name of the second doc.
| | 00:51 | When they exported to EPUB, they
apparently didn't use a custom TOC style, which
| | 00:56 | is a way to get InDesign to put
custom text over here on the left.
| | 01:00 | But even if you do, even if you do go to
the trouble of creating a custom TOC
| | 01:04 | style, so that this might say Early
History, it will pick up this text.
| | 01:08 |
Maybe you want to edit it so it says
Really Early History. It doesn't have to
| | 01:13 | exactly match what it says in the EPUB.
| | 01:15 | So there are ways that you can edit
what's here, but you do have to do it
| | 01:19 | internally inside the EPUB.
| | 01:22 | So here is the EPUB that we
were just looking at in the finder.
| | 01:25 | Now if you expand it, like on the Mac
if you drop it onto one of those EPUB
| | 01:30 | expander scripts that I showed you, or
you're on a PC, and you could change the
| | 01:34 | extension to .zip, and you extract it
that way, you're going to end up with a
| | 01:37 | folder with the same name as the EPUB.
| | 01:41 | And inside this folder, the one that
you're looking for is inside the OEBPS
| | 01:45 | folder, remember that's the "book
folder" and it's the file called toc.ncx.
| | 01:52 | I am going to actually use Author,
oXygen Author, so that I don't need to expand
| | 01:58 | my EPUB, and I'll show you how you can do that.
| | 02:00 | ,
I'll jump over to Author, and I'm going
to open up the EPUB. And you don't choose
| | 02:06 | File>Open, which would make sense,
in Author to open up an EPUB.
| | 02:10 | You use File>Open for an actual file.
But when something is zipped, what's
| | 02:13 | called an archive, then you use the
Open command in the Archive Browser.
| | 02:18 | Now this panel doesn't appear by default.
| | 02:21 | So if you've downloaded the 30 day
trial for oXygen Author, or you purchased it,
| | 02:25 | and you want to see this, just go to
the Window menu, go to Show View, and
| | 02:31 | choose Archive Browser. And then this
will lock itself to the upper left-hand
| | 02:35 | corner of your window that you see here.
| | 02:37 | So it's this button that
you choose to open up an EPUB.
| | 02:39 | I click that, and I'll choose Open Archive.
| | 02:43 | So I'll go to my Desktop where I
have saved the EPUB file, and click Open.
| | 02:50 | Now I can see the contents of the
EPUB file without having to extract it
| | 02:53 | first. And if you remember toc.ncx is
inside the OEBPS folder. See, it just, like,
| | 02:59 | rolls off the tongue.
| | 03:01 | And we want to find toc.ncx. We'll
double-click it, oXygen expands it, and will
| | 03:07 | show it to us in this window.
| | 03:10 | In the toc.ncx file, you'll find every
entry in the navigational TOC between
| | 03:17 | the two navMap tags.
| | 03:19 | So here is one, navMap, and the
other one is at the bottom, close navMap.
| | 03:26 | Every individual entry in
the nav TOC has two main parts.
| | 03:31 | First of all, there is a navLabel,
like here is 01_early_history, and second,
| | 03:36 | where does that point to?
| | 03:38 | So, early history points
to 01_early_history.html.
| | 03:42 | So when the user clicks here, this is the
page that automatically opens in the eReader.
| | 03:46 | So if I want to change 01_early_history
to just Early History, I could do that
| | 03:53 | right here. Early History.
| | 03:57 | You don't want to change where it
points to, because then you're going to break
| | 04:00 | the link, and it won't validate.
| | 04:01 | So even if you already had custom
entries here, you can see how easy it would be
| | 04:06 | to go ahead and change these.
| | 04:07 | I'll do one more, we'll change
that to San Francisco Peninsula.
| | 04:16 | I'm going to go ahead and close this
and save my changes. And a cool little
| | 04:22 | feature; it will backup these files.
| | 04:24 | I'll go ahead and have it do a Single
file backup. And then to close the archive
| | 04:29 | you click this little guy right here.
| | 04:30 | You don't actually choose Close.
So we're going to close the archive.
| | 04:35 | And now let's find that. Here is the
backup. There it is on the Desktop, I'll
| | 04:40 | double-click it, and there you go.
Early History, San Francisco Peninsula.
| | 04:44 | So as you can see it's very simple to
edit the navigational TOC, you just have
| | 04:49 | to know where to look: good old toc.ncx file.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding and editing metadata| 00:01 | Getting the metadata right in your EPUB
is critical to its success once you are
| | 00:05 | distributing it, because people can't walk
into a bookstore and look at the pretty covers.
| | 00:11 | Online they are typing in search terms.
Whether they're looking in the iBookstore,
| | 00:15 | or they're looking them in the Nook
Store, or anywhere were eBooks are gathered.
| | 00:20 | They are typing in search terms, and
the search terms are going to look at the
| | 00:24 | metadata that you add to your file.
| | 00:26 | Now when you upload your EPUB file to Amazon, or to
the Nook bookstore, or to iBookstore, they
| | 00:33 | will often ask you for metadata that
they'll include in their own database.
| | 00:37 | But you too can include metadata
yourself. And I showed you how in an earlier
| | 00:42 | video, just want to briefly refresh
your memory, that in InDesign, if you go to
| | 00:46 | the File menu and choose File Info,
you can insert all kinds of metadata.
| | 00:52 | This will travel along with the file.
| | 00:54 | So I've already inserted a bunch of
stuff. And then when you export to EPUB,
| | 00:58 | there is more of metadata that you can add
right at the very top of the General section.
| | 01:06 | So you want to make sure you turn on
Include Document Metadata, you can add your
| | 01:10 | Publisher Entry, and a Unique Identifier.
| | 01:13 | There's only two pieces of metadata
that are required for an EPUB to pass
| | 01:19 | validation, and that is a unique
identifier, which is usually your ISBN number,
| | 01:24 | and the publication date.
| | 01:27 | Now if you leave the Unique Identifier
empty, InDesign will automatically create
| | 01:31 | a Unique Identifier for you, and
put it in the Metadata section.
| | 01:34 | It will also automatically add a
publication date, which is the date that you
| | 01:39 | exported this to EPUB.
| | 01:40 | We are hoping in upcoming versions
InDesign that they will add a field for
| | 01:45 | publication date, but in the
meantime, it's added behind the scenes.
| | 01:49 | Now if you want to look at the metadata
of an EPUB file, and edit it, and perhaps
| | 01:53 | you want to edit fields that InDesign
doesn't let you edit, or maybe you don't
| | 01:57 | have the original InDesign file, let
me show you how you can get to that.
| | 02:00 | I am going to cancel out of here, because I
have already exported to EPUB here in the finder.
| | 02:06 | So this is the SFHistory-
simple.epub that I exported.
| | 02:10 | I could open this in oXygen
Author, or any number of other programs;
| | 02:14 | the thing is that the metadata is
included not in any of the HTML files, but in
| | 02:18 | an extra XML-based file within the EPUB.
| | 02:22 | Right now, I don't really
need to change anything.
| | 02:24 | So I just need a way to look at
the content without extracting it.
| | 02:28 | I could use oXygen Author, or I could
use TextWrangler, or if I was in a PC, I
| | 02:33 | could use Notepad++.
| | 02:35 | One thing about TextWrangler though,
that I want to show you, is that if I just
| | 02:39 | bring this over to TextWrangler so
it opens up, and I twirl open the OEBPS
| | 02:44 | folder, which is where our
file is located, you won't see it.
| | 02:48 | The file is called contents.opf, and
TextWrangler does not show that file, nor
| | 02:54 | does it show the toc.ncx file.
| | 02:56 | I am not quite sure why. But we
can skin that cat another way.
| | 03:01 | I'm going to drag and drop the EPUB on
to Springy, which is that cool program I
| | 03:06 | mentioned earlier that lets you look
at the contents of an archive. And then
| | 03:10 | here we can see all those files.
| | 03:12 | And then I'm going to open up the
content.opf file in TextWrangler.
| | 03:18 | So this file is where the metadata is
stored, and then I don't need to extract it;
| | 03:24 | I am just going to edit.
| | 03:26 | You'll see the metadata at the very
top of the content.opf file. And I did go
| | 03:30 | over what is inside the content of that
OPF file in another video if you are
| | 03:34 | curious what else is in this file.
But at the very top, in between the two
| | 03:38 | metadata tags, you'll see
who created the metadata,
| | 03:42 | the generator was Adobe
InDesign, and whole bunch of entries.
| | 03:46 | So, for example, it says as dc:title,
A Brief History of San Francisco, and
| | 03:50 | then it closes that tag;
| | 03:52 | dc:creator, dc:subject, and so on.
Here is the date that it was exported.
| | 03:57 | This is what InDesign added automatically.
Here is my unique identifier that I added.
| | 04:02 | Apparently, I could have entered
source, relation, and coverage in InDesign;
| | 04:07 | it's just putting it there for our
sake so we could actually enter in source,
| | 04:11 | and enter in relation.
| | 04:12 | But if you are wondering, first of all,
what does that mean? What's the source,
| | 04:16 | and relation, and coverage?
| | 04:17 | Second of all, why is it called dc?
| | 04:20 | What does dc have to do with anything?
| | 04:22 | Actually, dc stands for Dublin Core;
the Dublin Core Metadata element.
| | 04:28 | Dublin Core is kind of like the
EPUB standard created by the IDPF.org.
| | 04:34 | The EPUB standard relies
on the Dublin Core metadata.
| | 04:37 | So what is the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative?
| | 04:41 | It is just a way to standardize
on metadata for all sorts of books.
| | 04:45 | If you scroll down on this page -- and
you don't have to, I mean, this is just a little
| | 04:50 | bit of extra information that you only
get from a lynda.com video -- you can see
| | 04:54 | that, for example, the DC Label:
| | 04:56 | Contributor, this is what it means by that.
| | 04:59 | Here are some examples of that.
| | 05:00 | If you're wondering what Source is,
| | 05:02 | we can just scroll down here, and it says
the label of Source, it's a reference to a
| | 05:06 | resource from which the
present resource is derived.
| | 05:09 | So now that we're back here, we can go
ahead and edit, now that we know all about DC.
| | 05:15 | These were actually keywords that we added.
| | 05:17 | So if we want to add more keywords, we
could select this whole thing, copy it,
| | 05:21 | click in front of here, paste, and don't
worry about the indentations, and we'll say also
| | 05:29 | it should be all about Dublin.
| | 05:32 | So when you're done editing the
metadata, or checking it out, or correcting it,
| | 05:36 | just close the content.opf file, and
save your changes, and you are done.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating guide sections for iBooks| 00:01 | So InDesign can create valid EPUB
files, EPUB files that will pass basic
| | 00:06 | validation, but you will quickly
encounter additional rules from people like
| | 00:11 | Apple and Amazon as far as what an
EPUB should require for their purposes.
| | 00:17 | They assume that it's valid, first
of all, but they also want additional
| | 00:21 | information. And one thing that both
Apple and Amazon require is at least one
| | 00:26 | entry in a Guide section.
| | 00:28 | A Guide section is an additional,
optional section to the content.opf file. And
| | 00:35 | you will need to enter that manually.
| | 00:37 | InDesign cannot do that for you.
| | 00:38 | So I am going to show you how to do it;
| | 00:40 | it's not that bad at all.
| | 00:41 | So here we have SFHistory, an
EPUB that we've been using a lot in this
| | 00:45 | course, and I've cracked it open
already; I have unzipped it to this folder.
| | 00:50 | And inside the OEBPS folder, there is
a file called content.opf, which I've
| | 00:56 | talked about a number of times in this chapter,
but let's check it out. We have
| | 00:59 | it open already, actually, in TextWrangler.
| | 01:03 | Content.opf. And the content.
opf contains all the metadata.
| | 01:08 | It has the manifest, which is a list of
all linked files and assets in this EPUB.
| | 01:15 | It has a spine, which is the linear
reading order. When somebody says next page,
| | 01:20 | or it clicks the right arrow,
| | 01:21 | this is what's going to come up next.
| | 01:23 | And the guide section would appear
right after the spine section, before the
| | 01:28 | end of this package.
| | 01:29 | The guide section looks something like this.
| | 01:31 | I already have it queued up in my
clipboard, so I am just going to paste it in.
| | 01:36 | It's just more links.
| | 01:38 | We are going to come back to this in a
minute, but I want to go over what the
| | 01:42 | guide section needs to include.
| | 01:45 | It is a section of the content.opf file
that identifies semantic elements. That
| | 01:51 | means things like the cover, the
copyright page, the index, the preface, the
| | 01:58 | epilogue, things like that.
| | 01:59 | The elements of a book, and the text as well.
| | 02:02 | They don't need to know every single
chapter, but where does the text start;
| | 02:06 | what is the very first file that has chapter 1.
| | 02:09 | And this is because, beyond the
navigational table of contents,
| | 02:14 | the iBookstore, when you read it on the
iPad or the iPhone, and the Kindle, also
| | 02:18 | have menus that say jump me to the index,
jump me to the beginning, show me the
| | 02:23 | title page, and so on.
| | 02:24 | So that's why they want these
sections listed in the guide section.
| | 02:29 | The tags that you should use for the
guide, you can't just see here's the
| | 02:32 | copyright page or here's our list of
illustrations, you need to pull them from
| | 02:36 | a list of standard guide tags. And
it's really long URL that I have shortened
| | 02:41 | and saved for you here; j.mp/guide-tags.
| | 02:42 | I have already gone there in my browser.
| | 02:50 | It's a section of the idpf.org Web site,
I guess the older Web site, this is
| | 02:55 | actually the link that Apple and
Amazon Kindle will send you to, to see what
| | 03:00 | the guide is all about, how to properly
write it out, and what are the elements
| | 03:06 | that you can include.
| | 03:07 | So you can say cover, title page,
and it tells you what should be here.
| | 03:10 | Now on the Kindle, the only guide
element that they require is the TOC.
| | 03:17 | They need the guide element saying
where the TOC is. And this is a link to the
| | 03:20 | internal table of contents, which is a
requirement for all Kindle books, and I'll be
| | 03:25 | talking about that in a later chapter.
| | 03:28 | They will also support only a couple
other guide elements, and they ask you
| | 03:31 | in their guidelines not to include
every single element because they will
| | 03:35 | be grayed out in the Kindle menu, and
Kindle users will be disappointed and confused.
| | 03:41 | Whereas Apple goes the other way;
| | 03:42 | they want you to include every possible
element in the book. All these, if you
| | 03:47 | like, if it contains it.
| | 03:49 | Obviously, if you don't have a
dedication, don't include the dedication.
| | 03:52 | Okay, so you want to add a guide
element if you are thinking about uploading
| | 03:57 | your EPUB to the Apple iBookstore, and
it wants all the book elements listed. And
| | 04:03 | for the Amazon, just the TOC guide element.
| | 04:06 | So let's just add a couple of these things.
| | 04:08 | I've just added the beginning guide
tag, and then the structure of how the tag
| | 04:13 | should be written, the cover, and then this
would point to the HTML file that is the cover.
| | 04:17 | Now you can't make up new HTML files.
| | 04:20 | All the HTML links that you list here have
to have already been listed in the manifest.
| | 04:26 | That's this section up here.
| | 04:27 | So you can't just say, oh, I am
going to another little epilogue, because
| | 04:31 | then that's going to ruin the whole thing.
| | 04:32 | At that point you should actually
just create a new EPUB so that the HTML
| | 04:37 | pointing to the epilogue is
already included in the EPUB.
| | 04:40 | Here is the title page, so it's
reference type title page, and then you can add
| | 04:46 | a little explanatory content for yourself.
| | 04:49 | This is what the Kindle requires: type,
toc; title, Table Of Contents, pointing to
| | 04:54 | the table of contents.
| | 04:55 | Notice I have two of the same URLs
for both of these different elements.
| | 04:59 | That's perfectly fine.
| | 05:01 | You might have two different elements on
the same page, or in the same HTML file,
| | 05:05 | but you cannot repeat the type.
| | 05:07 | So you can only have one unique type.
| | 05:10 | Let's add one more for text.
| | 05:11 | So I am just going to Copy and Paste this.
| | 05:15 | The text is the very first
chapter where the main body of content is.
| | 05:20 | It's okay if it's indented like that.
| | 05:22 | We are going to say type, Text. Text, and we'll
point it at, let's say that the second
| | 05:33 | HTML file is actually the first
chapter of the main body of text.
| | 05:37 | That's about it. And then you close
it with final guide and that's it.
| | 05:42 | That is how you create the optional
guide element if you are preparing an EPUB
| | 05:47 | for the Apple iBookstore, or the Kindle,
and possibly other resellers as well.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
8. Editing EPUB Files for FormattingCleaning up the HTML files| 00:00 | We're looking at an EPUB open in Adobe
Digital Editions called SFHistory.epub.
| | 00:06 | And it's not a very complicated file.
It's just mostly text, a few images,
| | 00:10 | some links, and so on.
| | 00:12 | Now let's say that we need to come in
here and do some things to the content; to
| | 00:16 | make some changes to the actual HTML files.
| | 00:19 | I'm going to zip back over to the Finder.
| | 00:24 | This is the EPUB that we were just looking at;
| | 00:25 | this is the InDesign file
from which I made the EPUB.
| | 00:28 | Now to edit the content of the EPUB
depends on the kind of editor that you have.
| | 00:33 | If you have an editor that lets you
edit the contents of an EPUB without
| | 00:36 | extracting the files first, like
oXygen Author or Sigil, then you can just go
| | 00:41 | ahead and open up this EPUB in that program.
| | 00:43 | Otherwise, you're going to have to unzip
it, like on the PC. Or run it through one
| | 00:47 | of those cool unzip AppleScripts that
I mentioned earlier, on a Macintosh, and
| | 00:51 | extract the EPUB into a folder
containing the contents of the actual EPUB file.
| | 00:56 | And I went through what all these
files mean in a previous video.
| | 01:00 | Inside the OEBPS folder is all of the
content for the EPUB itself, which from
| | 01:06 | InDesign CS5.5 is a series of HTML files.
| | 01:09 | So we want to open up these
HTML files in our text editor.
| | 01:13 | Now a lot of the work that you're going
to be initially doing with your content
| | 01:17 | files are changes that have to be
made to every one of them, like if you're
| | 01:20 | trying to get rid of a certain
tag in every one of the files.
| | 01:24 | So you want to use a text editor
that can do a batch Find/Change.
| | 01:28 | And the one that I'm going to use right
now is called TextWrangler. So I'm going
| | 01:31 | to start up TextWrangler, and then go
to File>Open, and Shift+Click all these
| | 01:37 | files, and open them up.
| | 01:40 | So right now we're looking at one file;
| | 01:42 | we're looking at SFHistory.html.
| | 01:44 | That's the one that's selected over here.
| | 01:46 | And at the top is a bunch of very
important gobbledygook that we don't really
| | 01:49 | need to worry about, except to note
that first of all it's encoded UTF-8, which
| | 01:54 | is the default for the EPUB standard.
| | 01:57 | If you ever get any encoding errors
kicked back to you from when it gets
| | 02:01 | validated, it's probably because it doesn't
have encoding="UTF-8", or UTF-16 will also work.
| | 02:07 | This is normally something that you
don't have to set; that whatever program
| | 02:10 | you're using create an EPUB, it'll
automatically encode the files in this way for you.
| | 02:14 | The second line declares that this is
actually an XHTML document, and it says
| | 02:18 | where it's pulling the rules from, from w3.org.
| | 02:22 | What's important for us is the link to
the template.css file that was part of
| | 02:28 | the EPUB, if you remember, when we expanded it;
| | 02:30 | it's inside the OEBPS folder.
| | 02:32 | It contains all the formatting instructions
for every HTML file that has a link to it.
| | 02:37 | We'll be talking about the
CSS file in the next video.
| | 02:40 | Then the head section ends, and
then the body section starts.
| | 02:44 | So everything in between the
opening body and the closing body is what
| | 02:49 | appears in the eReader;
| | 02:51 | this is the actual content.
| | 02:52 | So you can see that every paragraph is
marked off with a p tag for paragraph,
| | 02:57 | and InDesign converted the name of
the paragraph style to a class that was
| | 03:02 | applied to the entire paragraph.
| | 03:04 | All of these paragraphs are inside
this div, which is short for division.
| | 03:08 | And the div is the name of the Object
Style that formats the textframe, which is
| | 03:14 | by default Basic-Text-Frame.
| | 03:15 | But I'll be showing how you can use
divs in later videos to do things like
| | 03:19 | pull quotes, and things.
| | 03:21 | Each story's div is enclosed in a parent div
that is actually the name for this HTML file.
| | 03:27 | Most of the time you are mainly
concerned with going into the actual content and
| | 03:32 | fixing typos, or fixing links, or
changing the names of styles, and so on.
| | 03:37 | Now if you are familiar with HTML and
CSS, or you have a department, or at least
| | 03:43 | one brainiac working for you that
knows all about HTML and CSS, they might
| | 03:47 | blanch. Because the way that InDesign
creates the HTML code is it ensures that
| | 03:52 | the styles come through in the EPUB
reader, but it adds a whole lot of overhead
| | 03:56 | that's normally not necessary.
| | 03:58 | For now we're just going to leave these
things alone, but let me tell you about
| | 04:01 | a couple changes that you can make
that will at least clean up some of the
| | 04:04 | croft that InDesign adds.
| | 04:06 | For example, you can see this xml:lang="
en-US" that it adds here, and it adds it
| | 04:13 | in many other places.
| | 04:15 | For some reason, it
needs to specify the language --
| | 04:17 | this is English, US.
| | 04:19 | If you were writing this in Great Britain,
it would say en-GB, for English, Great
| | 04:24 | Britain -- to a number of tags in the HTML file.
| | 04:27 | You can see it up here
as well in the main div id.
| | 04:30 | So let's get rid of that.
| | 04:32 | And this is going to appear, you'll see
if you double-click any of these, you'll
| | 04:35 | see this in many of the HTML files.
| | 04:38 | Now as I said, this is kind of
superfluous code that InDesign adds. It's not
| | 04:42 | going to harm anything. It's not a
requirement for you to remove this, but I
| | 04:46 | think it's a good easy lesson in getting
accustomed to doing a batch Find/Change
| | 04:50 | with the contents of your EPUB files.
| | 04:52 | What you want to look for in your program
is a way to change all of these opened files.
| | 04:58 | And in TextWrangler we come
up here to the Search menu.
| | 05:00 | There is Find, which will only do a
Find/Change in the current file, and then
| | 05:04 | there is Multi-File Search. All right!
| | 05:06 | So now we're going to enter what
it is that we want to search for;
| | 05:10 | we want to search for xml:lang="en-US".
| | 05:13 | So what I'm doing is I'm copying from here.
| | 05:21 | If I would've thought ahead, I
would've copied and pasted it right in here
,
| | 05:25 | because it's important to get it
exactly right, as anybody who has ever
| | 05:27 | used Find/Change knows.
| | 05:29 | Now what I could do is say that I want
to replace with nothing, and then search
| | 05:32 | just one file, and then do that over
and over again for all these files.
| | 05:36 | And then repeat the whole thing for
finding every instance of en-GB, which you
| | 05:41 | can also see in other places
in this file. But why do that?
| | 05:44 | Unless you work by the hour,
there's no reason to do that.
| | 05:47 | Instead, you can combine these two
searches by using Grep. And this is why I
| | 05:50 | said earlier it's important to find
a text editor that lets you do grep
| | 05:54 | searches, often called Regex, Regular
Expression searches, because that lets you
| | 05:58 | really turbo-charge your Find/Changing.
| | 06:01 | TextWrangler does let you do that. You
just have to turn on Grep here, so it
| | 06:04 | knows to search for patterns.
| | 06:06 | And there is a real easy one to use
to find two or more things at once;
| | 06:11 | just surround the first element in parenthesis.
| | 06:14 | And these parenthesis are only turning red,
because it's a little clue that I'm in Grep.
| | 06:18 | If I turn off Grep, then they turn
black, so it would actually look for
| | 06:21 | parenthesis x. But by
surrounding them with parenthesis, I'm telling
| | 06:25 | TextWrangler to search for this
thing inside the parenthesis.
| | 06:29 | And then the or command is a simple
pipe, which is the Vertical Bar above
| | 06:33 | the Backslash, Shift+\.
| | 06:36 | And then we want to search for the
same pattern, just copy it this time, and
| | 06:42 | paste on my keyboard, except that we want GB.
| | 06:46 | One last thing is that, notice down
here under xml:lang that there is
| | 06:50 | actually a space here that we don't need.
| | 06:52 | So I'm going to actually add this
space right in front of each of these.
| | 06:58 | When TextWrangler finds either one of
these, I want it to replace with nothing, so
| | 07:01 | that'll essentially just clear this out
and close up the tag, which is perfect.
| | 07:05 | And where do I want it to search?
| | 07:07 | I want it to search in all
of my Open Text Documents.
| | 07:09 | So I'll just turn that check box on,
and I'll double-check down here.
| | 07:13 | It should match this list at the right.
| | 07:15 | There's an untitled text file, a
default untitled document open when I first
| | 07:19 | started this, so I don't need to
search there; I'll turn it off.
| | 07:22 | And then we'll click
Replace All, because we're brave.
| | 07:26 | TextWrangler gives you a choice, and
most programs will, do you want me to save
| | 07:29 | the changes as I make them,
| | 07:30 | or should I just leave these open?
| | 07:31 | I'll leave them open, and show me the
results, and then please proceed. There we go!
| | 07:36 | So it found a whole bunch of changes. Yeah!
| | 07:40 | So we did that set.
| | 07:42 | These have all been made to the file;
| | 07:44 | as you can see, it was closed up.
| | 07:46 | They just haven't saved the changes.
| | 07:48 | So while we're here we can go ahead
and do more Find/Changes if we wanted to.
| | 07:52 | In fact, I do want to show you an HTML
wide change that you really do want to
| | 07:57 | make to every one of your EPUBS if
you're exporting them from InDesign CS5.5.1.
| | 08:03 | In other words, it'll say
InDesign 7.5.1 in the About InDesign box.
| | 08:09 | Maybe by the time you see this, we'll
be up to .2, and they'll have fixed this
| | 08:13 | issue. But it's a known issue with all
versions of InDesign CS5 for the first
| | 08:19 | release, and the first patch.
| | 08:21 | And the issue is this:
| | 08:22 | Up here at the very top in the DOCTYPE
declaration, there is an additional space
| | 08:27 | that should not be here.
| | 08:28 | This space was not here in
EPUBS created by CS4 and CS5.
| | 08:32 | These will still validate;
| | 08:34 | the problem that users have
encountered is that sometimes it confuses the
| | 08:38 | eReader, and the eReader doesn't know
how to parse certain characters, like
| | 08:43 | discretionary hyphens or special glyphs.
And it will throw an error, or put a
| | 08:47 | question mark there instead. And astute
users have traced the problem to
| | 08:51 | this one crazy space.
| | 08:52 | If you delete the space, then
suddenly the problem goes away.
| | 08:56 | So Adobe has acknowledged that it's an
issue, and they say that it's going to be
| | 08:58 | fixed in the upcoming patch.
| | 09:00 | I don't know when that's going to happen, but
that's an interesting one that we can easily fix.
| | 09:04 | In fact, let me take the opportunity
to show you how to do this in oXygen.
| | 09:08 | oXygen Author will let you do Find/
Changes without extracting the files first,
| | 09:13 | which I don't think there's any other
program that'll let you do that; not even Sigil.
| | 09:16 | So I'm going to close out of here.
| | 09:18 | I'm not going to save any changes. And I'm
going to open up SFHistory.epub on Author.
| | 09:23 | I'm going to oXygen Author. And I like
to show things in TextWrangler, because
| | 09:28 | that's a free program, and Author
costs a couple hundred dollars, unless you
| | 09:32 | have an academic discount.
| | 09:34 | So it's only really for professional EPUB
producers who are doing this all the time.
| | 09:38 | But it is worth the investment if
you do more than a few EPUBS a year.
| | 09:41 | So in Author, remember, you
go to the Archive Browser.
| | 09:44 | If you don't have the Archive Browser
showing, go to Window>Show View, and
| | 09:48 | choose Archive Browser.
| | 09:49 | And you open up an EPUB from the Archive
Browser, not from here. Click this guy,
| | 09:57 | Open Archive; now we're in the right folder.
| | 10:00 | Now I'm going to just take a peek at
one of these, because I want to show you
| | 10:03 | what it is that we wanted to find and change.
| | 10:06 | Right here, what we want to do
is get rid of the space after 1.1.
| | 10:11 | So I'm going to actually just select
all this, and copy to the clipboard, and
| | 10:17 | then we'll close it.
| | 10:18 | And then under Find, choose Find/
Replace in Files, and you can see I've already
| | 10:24 | been practicing with this.
| | 10:25 | I pasted in Text to find, replaced with the
same exact thing, except I closed up the space.
| | 10:31 | oXygen will offer to create a
backup file in case things go blooey.
| | 10:35 | And then under Scope, what should it do
this Find/Changing, because we're doing
| | 10:38 | Find/Replace in files;
| | 10:40 | this is the multiple Find/Replace.
| | 10:42 | We want it to do the Opened archive;
| | 10:43 | it's called an archive here.
| | 10:44 | We'll just say Replace All. Yes, I'm sure.
| | 10:49 | Nine replacements; let's
check it out. There you go!
| | 10:54 | All closed up.
| | 10:55 | That's a really fast fix to run through an EPUB.
| | 10:57 | You don't even have to
expand it first to do that.
| | 11:00 | You're going to encounter many times
when you need to actually get into the
| | 11:03 | XHTML files, either to fix a
miscellaneous typo without having to re-export the
| | 11:08 | whole thing from InDesign, or to do
these kind of batch Find/Changes to fix
| | 11:12 | issues having to do with the coding.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Editing the CSS file| 00:00 | When you're formatting text in your
InDesign document, you normally are applying
| | 00:05 | paragraph styles and character styles to text.
| | 00:08 | These styles are carried forward when
you export the file to EPUB, and that is
| | 00:14 | what governs the style of the EPUB itself.
| | 00:16 | Here I have exported this file to this
EPUB, and you can see that we have the
| | 00:24 | same subhead, and same drop cap, and
hyperlink style, and so on for a lot of the text.
| | 00:30 | It doesn't match exactly.
| | 00:32 | For example, we don't have the exact
same line spacing that we have here. But it
| | 00:36 | comes very close, and that's a good thing.
| | 00:38 | I've already extracted the files of
this EPUB to this folder, and let's take a
| | 00:43 | look at the actual file itself.
| | 00:45 | So it's this file here called template.css,
which stands for cascading style sheet.
| | 00:52 | And I think I will go ahead and open
it along with one of the HTML files, the
| | 00:56 | very first one. Actually the very
first one would be this one.
| | 01:01 | Let's open these both up
in TextWrangler. All right!
| | 01:03 | So here is the template.css.
| | 01:07 | It's a plain text file, and it may look
quite confusing if you're not familiar
| | 01:12 | with CSS at all, but actually it's
pretty understandable. And as long as you
| | 01:16 | understand how paragraph and character
styles work, well, then you are 80% of
| | 01:20 | the way there, actually.
| | 01:21 | Let's start at the very top, and let
me go through some of these entries, and
| | 01:25 | tell you what kind of edits you might
want to make or what they mean, and what kind
| | 01:28 | of impact they will have. And then
later on in this video I am going to show
| | 01:32 | you some really cool applications of
cascading style sheets to different EPUBS
| | 01:36 | and show you how you can experiment with
applying those kind of style sheets to your own EPUBS.
| | 01:42 | At the very top we have this @ page
command, which adds 0.5em margin all the way
| | 01:49 | around the body of text.
| | 01:51 | Now this is coming from the
InDesign EPUB Export Options dialog box.
| | 01:57 | In the General panel, what I discussed
in Chapter 5, is that you can opt to have
| | 02:02 | InDesign automatically add 0.5em of
space around the page in order to back it
| | 02:07 | off from other elements in the EPUB reader.
| | 02:10 | A lot of the eReader devices ignore this.
| | 02:13 | For people who didn't know, or didn't
want to edit the CSS, and still needed to
| | 02:17 | have that page margin, the InDesign
feature goes ahead and adds it for them.
| | 02:21 | Then following that we have entries for
everything having to do with the table;
| | 02:25 | table body, table head, table footer.
| | 02:28 | And then following that we have a bunch
of entries in a string having to do with
| | 02:32 | tables, like TDs: table data;
| | 02:34 | that's for a cell. And all that it's
saying is that if you have applied some
| | 02:38 | kind of formatting to any of these,
then all the other elements will inherit
| | 02:43 | that same formatting. Because normally
table entries don't inherit, and you have
| | 02:47 | to set them over and over
again for each individual entry.
| | 02:50 | Also by default, InDesign will always
add these two commands: leftFloat, and
| | 02:54 | rightFloat. And they're
actually used for text wrapping.
| | 02:57 | So if you have an object with text
that wraps around the right, then InDesign
| | 03:02 | will apply the leftFloat class to it,
so that it floats on the left, and the
| | 03:07 | text wraps on the right, and
vice versa for the next one.
| | 03:11 | So these four entries here will
appear in every single CSS file you create,
| | 03:15 | whether or not you use them. Even if
you just created a document that had the
| | 03:18 | word "hello", and you export it, you
would see these with the CSS file.
| | 03:22 | Following that are any actual
paragraph styles and character styles, or
| | 03:26 | overridden styles, that were in your document.
| | 03:29 | So, for example, we had a
hyperlink style in the InDesign file.
| | 03:34 | This word right here had the
hyperlink character style, and if we edit that
| | 03:39 | style, you can see all it did was it
changed the color to a Pantone color.
| | 03:44 | Now there is no such thing as Pantone
in EPUBS, so what InDesign did when it
| | 03:50 | converted this to CSS was it
just converted it to the Hex Color.
| | 03:55 | A Hex color is a special kind of code
for describing colors for Web sites and
| | 03:59 | for EPUBS ,and it's essentially just a
series of six letters and numbers preceded
| | 04:04 | by this hash symbol.
| | 04:05 | I will be talking about that in another
video later on in this title, but there
| | 04:09 | are many places on the Web where you
can enter a color, and then get the Hex
| | 04:12 | value that you can put in here.
| | 04:14 | So I thought that was pretty slick.
| | 04:15 | What I really like is that it's not
adding a whole lot of other definitions to
| | 04:20 | this character style.
| | 04:21 | The character style just changed the
color, so this just adds a color spec.
| | 04:24 | Now you can see how this is applied if you
look inside of a document; one of the HTML files.
| | 04:30 | So let's switch over here, and here
in the body of the text is the actual
| | 04:34 | hyperlink text, and you can see that
it added the class hyperlink to San
| | 04:38 | Francisco, so that means that
it's actually turning it red.
| | 04:41 | Now if we look at this in the EPUB
reader, there is the red hyperlink, but the EPUB
| | 04:47 | reader sometimes also adds
its own information as well.
| | 04:50 | Like here it's adding an underscore.
| | 04:53 | Now if you are familiar with CSS you
might think, oh you know, I could just add
| | 04:56 | an attribute to the CSS file that says
text decoration: none, for any link, which
| | 05:03 | is true, but many readers will ignore it
any way. I mean like some readers don't
| | 05:07 | even use an underscore, they just
color the text differently, or they put a
| | 05:10 | highlighting behind it.
| | 05:11 | So it's something that
you need to experiment with.
| | 05:13 | The span character style override 1;
| | 05:16 | this is actually a little bug that I
think is in InDesign, and this is being
| | 05:20 | applied to the drop cap,
right here, the drop cap.
| | 05:25 | Normally an override means that you
manually formatted something, but this is
| | 05:28 | not manually formatted.
| | 05:30 | This is actually coming from the drop
cap style, and it's part of the nested
| | 05:34 | style for this paragraph.
| | 05:36 | Even if you selected the L, and hard
applied drop cap on top of that, InDesign
| | 05:43 | still creates this span
character style override.
| | 05:46 | You can see it here, surrounding the letter L.
| | 05:48 | I don't know why it does that, and it
might be something they will fix in a
| | 05:51 | later patch, or a next version, but that's
an excellent example of when you might
| | 05:56 | want to edit the CSS
yourself, and the HTML files.
| | 06:00 | To clean up some of the mistaken
notions that InDesign when it converts your
| | 06:05 | styles to CSS styles.
| | 06:07 | Especially if you are doing a series of
books using the same set of styles, then
| | 06:12 | you can make one really nice and
clean, and then reuse that CSS file for all
| | 06:17 | the other books so that you don't have
to reinvent the wheel every time. And I
| | 06:20 | will show you how to do
that in a couple of minutes.
| | 06:22 | Let's continue on our little trip.
| | 06:24 | So here is the paragraph
style called body-first.
| | 06:30 | Click here, PARAGRAPH STYLES>body-
first. And in body-first there is no indent,
| | 06:38 | there is a drop cap, there is space
before, and I think it's about -- well, of
| | 06:43 | course we have all these other
settings for font, and so on.
| | 06:47 | Let's jump back to CSS.
| | 06:51 | The addition of the word serif here
just means that if the person doesn't have
| | 06:54 | Chaparral Pro, then you would like the
eReader to show this content with a serif
| | 06:59 | font, whatever they have installed.
| | 07:01 | We have a lot of entries here that
really aren't necessary for the paragraph
| | 07:05 | style such as font-weight: normal, font
-style: normal, because that's usually
| | 07:09 | assumed. And what InDesign does is it
goes a little bit overboard in specifying
| | 07:15 | all the attributes of the styles,
which makes it difficult for the savvy CSS
| | 07:20 | designer to employ the cascading nature of CSS.
| | 07:25 | For example, if you understand the
concept of character styles; that when you
| | 07:28 | create a character style, like, let's
look at hyperlink, you only specify one
| | 07:33 | attribute that needs to
be different from the base.
| | 07:36 | So for hyperlink, we don't care what
the font face is, or the size. We just
| | 07:41 | care about the color.
| | 07:44 | So this style called hyperlink is very
flexible and can be applied throughout
| | 07:48 | the document, regardless of the size, or
font face, or anything like that. It'll
| | 07:52 | always just go ahead and
change the color of the type.
| | 07:55 | It makes it very flexible.
| | 07:57 | But if you had actually specified an
attribute for each one of those settings,
| | 08:01 | then it would be very difficult, and
you have to have multiple character styles
| | 08:04 | for drop cap large, drop cap body copy,
drop cap caption, drop cap title, and so on.
| | 08:10 | Unfortunately that's how InDesign
writes all of its attributes for all of
| | 08:13 | its paragraph styles.
| | 08:14 | If this is a one-off job you can leave
them as is, but if you're going to be
| | 08:18 | reusing the CSS file, or you need
to do some wholesale changes to the
| | 08:23 | formatting throughout this EPUB, then you
might as well take a few moments and clean this up.
| | 08:27 | For example, text-decoration should
always be none, so you don't need that; you
| | 08:31 | can just delete that.
| | 08:32 | It's specifying the color as black,
that is the default, and so that doesn't
| | 08:37 | need to be entered either.
| | 08:40 | The font-size is perfectly fine,
specified as 1em not really necessary, but it's
| | 08:45 | okay to leave it as is.
| | 08:46 | I brought up the concept of the em
unit in an earlier video so that you
| | 08:50 | understand what an em is.
| | 08:53 | An em is the size of the default typeface.
| | 08:55 | So like on an Apple iPad, in iBooks;
the default type size is approximately 16
| | 09:00 | pixels, which is about a 12-point type size.
| | 09:03 | So what we are saying here is we want
the size of the body-first paragraph style
| | 09:09 | to be your default font size.
| | 09:11 | If you wanted it slightly larger than
what the default font size was for that
| | 09:15 | reader, then you'd say 2em or 1.5em, and so on.
| | 09:20 | That's how you modify these.
| | 09:21 | You can sort of see it happening in
other places here where the measures
| | 09:25 | are fractions of an em.
| | 09:26 | I will change this back to 1em.
| | 09:29 | Then this setting, margin, is saying
that for the paragraph body-first there
| | 09:34 | should be 14 pixels above it, and then 0
to the right, 0 beneath, and 0 to the left.
| | 09:41 | So whenever you see four measures in a
row, think of it as the hands of a clock.
| | 09:46 | Okay, so the first measure is
always Noon, the next one is 3 o'clock, 6
| | 09:51 | o'clock, 9 o'clock.
| | 09:52 | So you can immediately tell this is
14 points above, but nowhere else.
| | 09:56 | So now that you understand a little
bit about what the template.css file
| | 10:00 | does, let me inspire you.
| | 10:02 | If you go to epubzengarden.com, you'll
see a public experiment that lets you
| | 10:11 | view the same content; the only thing
different is different CSS files being
| | 10:15 | applied to the content.
| | 10:17 | So up here under Change the style,
you could change it to say Contact.
| | 10:22 | Give it a second, and you'll
see different things appear.
| | 10:25 | So, for example, if you want to see
what the section opener looks like, or a
| | 10:31 | chapter looks like, and then you switch
to another CSS file, you will see what
| | 10:37 | the same chapter looks like
with a different CSS file.
| | 10:41 | You can learn more about it if you
click the About button. But if you wanted to
| | 10:44 | see what is happening in this
actual CSS file, it's pretty easy.
| | 10:48 | Go to the View menu in whatever browser
you are using, and look for View Source
| | 10:53 | or Page Source, and then
click the link to the CSS style.
| | 10:58 | Now this one happens to be very well commented;
everything with the slash, and the asterisk explains --
| | 11:04 | the author here is explaining
what these things are used for.
| | 11:07 | So you can see content,
the line-height is 1.4em.
| | 11:10 | And like down here, H1, He is saying H1
is only used for the book title, and
| | 11:17 | that the font-size is 3.5em, and then
he is helpfully giving you the math: 16
| | 11:22 | pixels times 3.5, is 56 pixels. That's
the size he is after for the H1, for headlines.
| | 11:29 | If you want to try and use this
yourself you just Select All, Copy, and then
| | 11:33 | Paste it into a text
editor, like say TextWrangler.
| | 11:36 | I am going to create a New document,
and I will Paste it in, and Save this.
| | 11:41 | I will Save it on my Desktop
as, we'll call this anne.css.
| | 11:47 | Make sure that the Encoding is UTF-
8, and then just Save it. All right!
| | 11:51 | We will close that. To use
your own CSS file in an EPUB --
| | 11:58 | in InDesign, when you go to export the EPUB,
| | 12:00 | we'll go out to the
desktop, and you click Save.
| | 12:04 | Down here under Contents, instead of
having InDesign Generate the CSS, choose
| | 12:09 | Use Existing CSS File, and then you
find the CSS file that you want to use, and
| | 12:16 | click Open, and OK, and now
let's take a look at that.
| | 12:21 | On the desktop here is the new SFHistory.epub.
| | 12:26 | Let's open this right up in
TextWrangler and you can see, well, if you are
| | 12:30 | looking for anne.css, you are not
going to find it, because InDesign changes
| | 12:34 | the name back to template.css. But you can
see it's all now been included in your EPUB.
| | 12:39 | Now of course a lot of this is not going
to work because you might not be using
| | 12:42 | these classes or these styles, but you
can work back and forth, and I think you
| | 12:46 | can see how this can really
make your EPUBS look really great.
| | 12:50 | If you remember from a previous
video when I showed how you can map a
| | 12:53 | paragraph style to a tag; you could say,
whenever body-first is used I want
| | 12:57 | you to use whatever tag and class was
in that custom CSS file, so that you
| | 13:02 | export this and it comes up
perfectly designed, and you don't have to do
| | 13:06 | anything to the CSS file.
| | 13:07 | So now you have gone through CSS 101
through advanced, and let's take a look at
| | 13:12 | some specific things that you might
want to edit in the CSS and XHTML files to
| | 13:17 | make your EPUB the best it can be.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting spacing in the file| 00:00 | Now let's jump in and really start
messing around with the CSS file to get some
| | 00:04 | of the effects that we're after.
| | 00:06 | In this video, I want to talk about
setting spacing in between paragraphs, and
| | 00:09 | spacing for first line
indents, and those kind of things.
| | 00:13 | So I have already extracted all the
files from this EPUB, and in my OEBPS
| | 00:19 | folder I've opened up template.css,
and SFHistory-1 in TextWrangler behind
| | 00:26 | here. Because we're going to edit the CSS, and
preview what the file looks like in Safari.
| | 00:32 | So if I right-click on that first HTML
file and I choose Open With, I'm going to
| | 00:37 | open it up in Safari.
| | 00:39 | So here is what that file looks like right now.
| | 00:42 | Now why am I previewing in Safari?
| | 00:44 | Well, because TextWrangler can't
show us a live preview of the HTML file;
| | 00:49 | you have to jump to a browser.
| | 00:51 | And I'm jumping to Safari because
both Safari and Apple iBooks use the
| | 00:57 | same rendering engine.
| | 00:59 | So it's actually the closest you can
get on a Mac or PC to a preview of what
| | 01:04 | something will look like on the iPad
as an EPUB; to look at it in Safari.
| | 01:08 | And it's actually not going to
be this wide, so you might want to
| | 01:11 | actually reduce the size.
| | 01:12 | So right now this is what this EPUB
will look like, more or less, not 100%
| | 01:17 | but about 85% or 90%.
| | 01:19 | Now if you're using Dreamweaver,
then you can edit the HTML and CSS in
| | 01:24 | Dreamweaver, and then switch over to Design
view to see what it's going to look like.
| | 01:28 | However, I do not think that
Dreamweaver uses the WebKit rendering engine. I'm
| | 01:33 | not sure, so you might end up
previewing in Safari there as well.
| | 01:36 | But if you're not really trying to proof
this for an iPad specifically, then the
| | 01:42 | Dreamweaver preview is perfectly fine.
| | 01:44 | Both Sigil and oXygen Author will also
give you previews of the EPUB, and let you
| | 01:50 | edit the code and preview
the design in the same window.
| | 01:54 | But I'm kind of in a TextWrangler groove,
so that's what we're going to stay with.
| | 01:58 | All right!
| | 01:59 | So I'm looking at this file and the
first thing that hits me is the amount of
| | 02:03 | spacing in between these paragraphs.
| | 02:04 | I don't know why there
is that amount of spacing;
| | 02:07 | I didn't want it to be there. That's
not what my InDesign file looks like.
| | 02:10 | And I know at some point when I was
previewing this in Digital Editions, I
| | 02:14 | didn't have that amount of space.
| | 02:16 | So why would that happen?
| | 02:17 | Well, I could tell you why.
| | 02:18 | Let's take a look at my CSS file.
| | 02:21 | I was a little overvigilant in paring out
the unnecessary attributes for my CSS styles.
| | 02:27 | As I mentioned in an earlier video,
InDesign goes a little overboard in spec'ing
| | 02:31 | things, and I was getting rid of some
of the paragraph style attributes that I
| | 02:35 | didn't think were necessary.
| | 02:36 | But what controls the amount of
spacing in between paragraphs is margin.
| | 02:41 | So you see here under Subhead I
have a margin setting of 24 pixels;
| | 02:47 | that means above. So 24 px, 0, and then
3 pixels underneath, and 0 to the left.
| | 02:54 | So margin settings, if you see four of
them, they go around like the hands of a
| | 02:57 | clock is how I remember them.
| | 02:59 | The first measure is 12 o'clock;
straight up. Second measure is 3 o'clock, to the
| | 03:03 | right, so the amount of spacing
on the right side of the element.
| | 03:06 | The next one is 6 o'clock, so the
amount of spacing underneath or below, and
| | 03:11 | then 9 o'clock to the left.
| | 03:14 | That is how I know this is 24 above and
3 below, nothing to the left or right.
| | 03:17 | But I don't have any margin
settings for my other paragraph styles
| | 03:21 | because, other than inline-caption,
because I got rid of them; I didn't
| | 03:23 | think they were necessary.
| | 03:26 | Well, if you don't have a setting
of margin, then as you probably already
| | 03:31 | know, Web browsers will automatically
add what looks like an empty carriage
| | 03:35 | return in between paragraphs; this thing.
| | 03:38 | So if you really want these to be kiss
fit next to each other, you have to set a
| | 03:42 | margin below of 0 pixels.
| | 03:45 | So let's go ahead and do that.
| | 03:47 | All we need to do is, first of all,
figure out which paragraph styles that
| | 03:51 | should be applied to.
| | 03:52 | So I'm going to peek at SFHistory.
html to see, what are the styles?
| | 03:58 | So its body that I need to
edit, and body-no-indent.
| | 04:01 | Yeah, those are the major ones. So
let's come back here, find body, and hit
| | 04:09 | Return, type margin : 0px;
| | 04:11 | Now you are probably thinking why don't
you do 0 pixels, 0 pixels, 0 pixels, and
| | 04:21 | so on? Because with CSS, if you just
set up one measure, then it's assumed that
| | 04:26 | that's what all four measures should be.
| | 04:28 | The only time that you really need to
specify four different measures is when
| | 04:32 | one of them is different.
| | 04:33 | Always remember to end with a semicolon,
and let's do the same thing to body-no-indent.
| | 04:38 | Hit Return, you can just copy and
paste too; I guess you can do that, and
| | 04:45 | then save the changes.
| | 04:50 | Let's go back to Safari and refresh. Yeah!
| | 04:53 | We fixed it.
| | 04:55 | So remember, that CSS file affects
all of the HTML files in this EPUB.
| | 05:01 | So I really just need to preview one of
them as I'm editing the CSS knowing that
| | 05:05 | all the other ones will be
affected in the same way.
| | 05:07 | Now let's look at first line indents.
| | 05:11 | You can see in this file that the
body paragraphs have a small first line
| | 05:16 | indent, but the first
paragraph does not, and I'd like it to.
| | 05:19 | So I believe that that was body-first,
let me doublecheck in my HTML file.
| | 05:24 | No, it was body-no-indent.
| | 05:25 | A lot of browsers, like especially
Firefox, have add-ins where you could
| | 05:31 | actually see what is the CSS that is
affecting the different paragraphs that
| | 05:36 | you're looking at in a Web site or in
any HTML file. So that would be very
| | 05:40 | useful, but I don't have anything
| | 05:41 | like that installed on this computer,
so instead we have to keep checking what
| | 05:44 | are the codes in the actual HTML file.
| | 05:47 | So what I want to do is add a
first line indent to the style
| | 05:50 | called body-no-indent.
| | 05:51 | Stop it, don't yell at me.
| | 05:56 | Okay, body-no-indent. Now how do
you actually say first line indent?
| | 05:58 | It's called text-indent, so you
can see in the paragraph style body,
| | 06:02 | text-indent : 12 pixels.
| | 06:05 | You could also specify this
in ems if you wanted to.
| | 06:08 | Let's come up here.
| | 06:09 | In some cases it makes a difference what order
you add attributes in, but not for text-indent.
| | 06:13 | Oh, look, it's already there;
| | 06:15 | I didn't even realize.
| | 06:16 | text-indent was set at 0,
so let's change this to 12.
| | 06:20 | Let's go crazy, actually, and change them both to 24.
| | 06:24 | It's free, it's legal, 24. And save;
I'm pressing Command+S or Control+S; well
| | 06:30 | Command+S since
TextWrangler isn't available on the PC.
| | 06:33 | Go to Safari and refresh. Aaah!
| | 06:36 | There you go!
| | 06:36 | So to add spacing in between paragraphs,
you'd have to remember to set a margin
| | 06:44 | and to add first line indents. Remember
to set a text-indent in your CSS files.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating drop caps| 00:00 | We're looking at a preview of one of the
files in our SFHistory book that I have
| | 00:05 | opened up in Safari, and what we're
focusing on this video is the drop cap.
| | 00:10 | You know, this is how InDesign
exported the drop cap without any editing to
| | 00:15 | the CSS file at all.
| | 00:17 | It does a much better job than
it ever did in previous versions.
| | 00:20 | It's actually not
maintaining the number of lines;
| | 00:22 | let me put it the other way.
| | 00:23 | It's actually maintaining the
multiple of the default font size.
| | 00:28 | So if the user makes the default font
size smaller in their eReader, then this
| | 00:33 | will also be reduced in size.
| | 00:35 | It's also maintaining the float
property, which makes the text wrap to the right,
| | 00:40 | and some margin settings.
| | 00:42 | Let's take a look at exactly where
that is in our HTML and CSS file, and any
| | 00:47 | tweaks that you might want to do to it.
| | 00:49 | So I have both of these
files open in TextWrangler.
| | 00:53 | The drop cap is actually being styled
with this crazy name: span.char-style-,
| | 00:57 | character style, override-1. Such a pain.
| | 01:01 | As I mentioned in a previous video, I
believe it's a bug in CS5.5. Even if
| | 01:05 | you apply the style called drop cap
to the drop cap, because this is being
| | 01:10 | applied as part of a paragraph style, but
even if you go ahead and manually apply
| | 01:14 | the drop cap style, it does not come
through. And you could change this to
| | 01:19 | drop cap, you, know, if it bugs you. You then
have to remember to change it in every
| | 01:25 | HTML file where that style is used.
| | 01:28 | So you have to change this to drop
cap as well, and you could do that with
| | 01:32 | a batch Find/Change.
| | 01:33 | But as soon as you try another version,
like, let's say that you save this as a
| | 01:38 | CSS file that you're going to attach
to other EPUBS as you export them from
| | 01:43 | InDesign, it's just going to ignore
it, because for some reason it's not
| | 01:47 | capable of exporting span style called
drop cap, so you're still going to have
| | 01:50 | to do the Find/Change.
| | 01:51 | So let's just accept it and move on.
| | 01:55 | You can see that this class is
applied only to the letter L, and so then it
| | 02:00 | closes the tag for span class.
| | 02:03 | The paragraph itself is styled with
the paragraph class style "body-first".
| | 02:08 | So if you want to edit how your drop
caps look in the EPUB without having to do
| | 02:14 | that in InDesign and re-export, you
need to first figure out what is the style,
| | 02:18 | the class, that is affecting your drop caps.
| | 02:21 | And we know that it's character-style-
override-1, because you might have a bunch
| | 02:24 | of character style overrides in your CSS file.
| | 02:26 | So figure that out first.
| | 02:28 | Then in your CSS file, find that
matching style, and let's take a look at it.
| | 02:33 | The font size is a multiple of an em,
right here it's 4.846, to be exact, of an
| | 02:39 | em. And em is the default font size
for that eReader; 1em is the default font
| | 02:45 | size, which for most eReaders is 16 pixels.
| | 02:48 | So this is 4.8x16 pixels, so in
other words, it's a big letter. Float:
| | 02:53 | left is what causes the text to wrap
around the right edge of the letter,
| | 02:58 | otherwise it will just completely
overlap if this was not in here.
| | 03:01 | The line-height makes no sense really for
this style. The line-height is like leading.
| | 03:06 | So if you did a bunch of drop caps in a row,
they'd be separated by a line-height of 1.
| | 03:11 | This is more important: margin-top,
right, and bottom; is that it's adding some
| | 03:15 | spacing around that drop cap.
Let's jump back to Safari.
| | 03:20 | So it's adding, you know, this is margin-
right, margin-bottom, margin above.
| | 03:25 | Then font-weight; this one is bold.
And color; that's the color orange.
| | 03:29 | So of course, you can easily choose these.
| | 03:30 | If we wanted to make an Italic drop
cap, we ccould change this to Italic.
| | 03:34 | Most of the time when I am editing
drop caps, well, first of all I am doing
| | 03:38 | editing the drop caps far less
frequently with CS5.5, but I might just be
| | 03:43 | tweaking the margins.
| | 03:45 | So, for example, the margin right: if
I would like the text to be pushed a
| | 03:49 | little further away from the drop cap,
then I might change this to, let's say,
| | 03:54 | from .05 to .10, so I'll double the
amount. And to see that, you need to Save
| | 04:01 | your changes. And then get to Safari
again, if you're following my method of
| | 04:07 | previewing in Safari, and refresh. And
you see it just moved over a little bit.
| | 04:12 | Let's go back and Undo, I am just going
to press Command+Z or Control+Z. This time
| | 04:16 | let's change the font size.
| | 04:18 | So if I change the font size to, say, 3em,
maybe I think that's a little too big
| | 04:22 | for a drop cap. And Save; jump back to
Safari, refresh, that looks pretty good.
| | 04:29 | If you change the font size too
much, it will start to move up.
| | 04:32 | You can see there it's moving up a
little bit, and that's because of the negative
| | 04:36 | measure for margin top.
| | 04:39 | So you will need to start messing
around with these. And in truth, I would not
| | 04:43 | spend too much time editing a drop
cap here, other than the incidental
| | 04:47 | scooching things out, or changing the
font size, it's just faster to change the
| | 04:51 | drop cap settings in InDesign and export
since CS5.5 does such a great job of
| | 04:57 | exporting the specifications for drop
caps, other than the style name in the
| | 05:01 | resulting EPUB.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating sidebars and pull quotes| 00:00 | You can easily create pullquotes or
callout boxes, whatever you would like to
| | 00:04 | call them, in your EPUBs like this; a
little tinkering with the CSS file.
| | 00:10 | Now with the best of intentions I
started out in InDesign by actually creating
| | 00:15 | an anchored text frame.
| | 00:17 | So this text frame is pasted into,
or anchored within, the text flow of
| | 00:22 | this parent text frame.
| | 00:24 | And I've created
paragraph styles for the contents.
| | 00:27 | This one is called pullquote-body.
This one is called pullquote-head. And I
| | 00:32 | created an object style for the
frame itself that I call pullquote.
| | 00:37 | Then when I exported this to EPUB and
previewed, it as we are previewing the
| | 00:42 | individual HTML files here in Safari, this
is how it came out, right? No, unfortunately.
| | 00:48 | It would be great if it did; maybe next version.
| | 00:51 | Actually it comes out like this.
| | 00:54 | So a lot of what we saved was not retained.
| | 00:57 | I would love to see, in the next version
of the InDesign, of the ability to retain
| | 01:02 | the specifications from the object style:
| | 01:04 | the object style defined the
stroke and defined the fill.
| | 01:08 | Even that would be great but it did not.
| | 01:10 | But it's actually not that difficult to
do in the CSS file, and it helps if you
| | 01:15 | did start with the anchored
graphic and an object style.
| | 01:18 | Let me show you why.
| | 01:19 | We are going to jump over to
TextWrangler where I've opened up the template that
| | 01:24 | governs this CSS file and the HTML
file that contains the pullquote.
| | 01:29 | Let's look at that first actually.
| | 01:31 | So I select that, let's make
this bigger so we can see more.
| | 01:34 | Here is the first paragraph, second
paragraph, and now do you see this where it
| | 01:40 | says div class="pullquote".
| | 01:42 | So that was the name of the object style.
| | 01:44 | When you apply an object style to a
text frame, InDesign converts that to a div,
| | 01:50 | to a division, and it sets it off with a
div class opening tag and closing tag.
| | 01:57 | So it does help to assign object styles
to these things that you want to further
| | 02:01 | finesse in the EPUB and the CSS files.
| | 02:04 | Then we see the appropriate paragraph
style applied to the first paragraph and
| | 02:08 | to the body paragraph.
| | 02:09 | So what we need to do is tell the EPUB what
the pullquote at div class should look like.
| | 02:16 | So you do that in template.css.
| | 02:19 | Now the div classes will always be at the
bottom; I have already scrolled down there.
| | 02:23 | So you remember that the CSS files
always start out with the same elements that
| | 02:28 | InDesign adds to every CSS file, then
your paragraph and character styles, and at
| | 02:32 | the bottom any div styles.
| | 02:35 | So this is the div for the basic text
frame that always gets added, and here is
| | 02:39 | the div for the pullquote.
| | 02:41 | Both of these are just existing as
names only. There are no attributes.
| | 02:45 | So we need to add attributes to the div
pullquote, which I'm going to do right now.
| | 02:50 | Now you do not have to madly
scramble and scribble down everything that
| | 02:54 | I'm writing because I do have the
sample in the exercise folder that has
| | 02:58 | the finished CSS code.
| | 03:01 | It's called after, okay.
SFHistory-after. So you can find it there.
| | 03:05 | But let's just take this step by step.
| | 03:07 | First I am going to hit
Return, and a Tab to indent.
| | 03:10 | The first thing we are
going to do is add a border.
| | 03:13 | We want to add a border around our
pullquote, and you need to define at least a
| | 03:18 | border width, and a style, and
then I would like to color as well.
| | 03:21 | So we are going to say border-width is 1 pixel.
| | 03:27 | And you will always have to remember
to end up with the semicolon afterwards.
| | 03:31 | When you preview, you are not seeing
your CSS applied correctly, come back and I
| | 03:35 | bet that you forgot to enter the
semicolon, or you entered a colon instead or
| | 03:39 | something like that.
| | 03:40 | It happens to me all the time. Border-style;
| | 03:41 | now if you look in any CSS reference
book, or any of the CSS videos here on
| | 03:48 | lynda.com, they talk about all the
different styles that you have. There's dotted,
| | 03:52 | and all kinds of fun things.
| | 03:53 | I am just going to do
solid. And that's solid.
| | 03:56 | And a border-color; there's about 20
different colors that you can just add by
| | 04:02 | name rather than Hex code.
| | 04:04 | So I am just going to go ahead and say gray.
| | 04:06 | That's what we have so far.
| | 04:09 | Let's save this file, and
locate where this one is.
| | 04:14 | I want to make sure I don't get confused.
And then we are going to preview this in Safari.
| | 04:21 | So I will just drag and
drop it onto my Safari icon.
| | 04:23 | So here's what we have so far.
| | 04:26 | We have our border, and it's gray and it's solid.
| | 04:29 | We still need to add a few things.
| | 04:31 | So let's come back here to template
and we will add a margin area, because we
| | 04:38 | want to sort of scooch that in a bit.
| | 04:39 | So we will say margin;
| | 04:41 | I would like, let's say, 2ems above it, and then 3
to the right, 2 underneath, and 2 to the left.
| | 04:53 | Remember it's like the positions on
a clock: 12, 3, 6 and 9. And that with
| | 04:58 | a semicolon, Save it.
| | 05:01 | Go back to Safari. Refresh.
| | 05:04 | Getting better, right?
| | 05:07 | Now I'm seeing an issue in that
| | 05:09 | these things are butting up
against the line too much.
| | 05:11 | It's not butting up against the left
and the right, because that was part of the
| | 05:16 | paragraph style that got carried over to CSS.
| | 05:19 | If we look at the paragraph
style definition for like this body,
| | 05:24 | pullquote-body, you can see that it's
indented 1 pica on the left and the
| | 05:29 | right. And that got translated to a 12-
pixel margin up here in pullquote-body.
| | 05:36 | So we don't have to worry about that.
| | 05:37 | If the text was butting up left and
right we would have to add more attributes
| | 05:40 | to back it off a bit.
| | 05:41 | Let's add some padding. Let's say 0.5em.
| | 05:47 | Save that and see where we are. There see.
| | 05:50 | So it's the padding that
sort of gives it a little error.
| | 05:52 | And now we just need to add a background color.
| | 05:56 | And back here, background-color.
| | 06:02 | I could type in red or black or white
or any of the other regular names, but
| | 06:06 | let's do an actual Hex code.
| | 06:07 | You can go to any number of Web sites
and say Hex code color chart, and quickly
| | 06:12 | get that. But one of my favorite sneaky
ways is, because I usually have Photoshop
| | 06:16 | running in the background, I just
click on the Color Picker, and then start
| | 06:21 | moving around and finding a color that
I like. Because notice it's got a cool
| | 06:24 | little field down here where it
gives you the Hex code.
| | 06:28 | So let's do something: instead of blue,
| | 06:29 | let's make it, let's make it, yeah pink.
That's kind of cool. A dusty rose.
| | 06:35 | All right!
| | 06:35 | So I am going to select that
and Copy it to the Clipboard.
| | 06:39 | We will Paste it in with the hash tag first;
end it with the semicolon, don't forget.
| | 06:50 | Save. That's lovely!
| | 06:53 | So we have the original one behind it.
And now you can see what's really cool is
| | 07:00 | that it will resize as the window
resizes, because that's how the CSS is set up to
| | 07:06 | work, which means that this will work
in any number of eReader devices, and
| | 07:10 | pretty simple to do.
| | 07:11 | I really wish though that it would
retain a lot more of the object style from
| | 07:15 | InDesign so we don't actually have to
type this in ourselves, but at least now
| | 07:19 | you know how to do it.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting text wrap rules| 00:00 | What I'd like to see in my EPUB is this
kind of affect; a little pullquote, or a
| | 00:05 | sidebar if you will, on the left-hand
side, and the text wraps around to the right.
| | 00:12 | And the sidebar, of course, travels with
text flow, which is normal for an EPUB.
| | 00:20 | So what I have done in InDesign is, I
have created a text frame that I filled
| | 00:26 | with text and applied specific
paragraph styles to; pullquote-body,
| | 00:30 | pullquote-head. And then I anchored
that text frame in the text flow with a
| | 00:35 | custom anchor, and I applied
text wrap to the frame as well.
| | 00:39 | So it's pushing the text off to the
right. And then for good measure, I made it
| | 00:43 | into an object style called sidebar.
| | 00:46 | So if you watched the previous video
where I was demoing how to do a pullquote,
| | 00:50 | these are essentially the same steps
except for the part about creating a text wrap.
| | 00:55 | Then I export it to EPUB, and then I've
opened up, I have already expanded the
| | 01:00 | EPUB, and I have opened up one of those
HTML files, the one containing this frame,
| | 01:04 | in Safari to preview it.
| | 01:05 | And is this how it came out? No.
| | 01:08 | This is after my edits to the CSS file.
| | 01:11 | It came out looking like this.
| | 01:14 | So it's the same issue; that
unfortunately information from object styles does
| | 01:18 | not get converted into the
div styles that we need it to.
| | 01:22 | However, it's very simple to add on
your own, and if you watched the previous
| | 01:25 | video where I showed how to do a
pullquote, essentially it's the same thing
| | 01:29 | except that you just add a couple more
attributes to make it float to the left
| | 01:35 | and resize. You see how it's getting
wider and thinner in response to the window
| | 01:41 | area that you have for the EPUB.
| | 01:42 | Now this is something cool that
InDesign cannot do, that CSS can do.
| | 01:47 | So let's see how we create this.
| | 01:49 | I am going to close both of these and we
will jump over to the finder where I have
| | 01:55 | both before and after, both.
| | 01:56 | So before is what we are going to work on.
| | 01:59 | You don't have to write down everything
that I'm typing in because I have it for
| | 02:01 | you in the exercise files;
saved in the after files.
| | 02:05 | So you expand your EPUB, or if you
are doing it in an editor like say Sigil
| | 02:11 | or Oxygen Author, then you can edit the
CSS without expanding first. But I like
| | 02:17 | TextWrangler, and I have it running, so I
am going to open up both of these files:
| | 02:19 | the CSS and the HTML containing that sidebar.
| | 02:27 | Before we look at the CSS,
let's jump to the HTML file.
| | 02:33 | Down here, where you see div class="
sidebar leftFloat", this is what's setting
| | 02:39 | apart our sidebar. And you only see this
because you have applied an object style
| | 02:45 | to an anchored frame.
| | 02:46 | If you just anchor the frame, InDesign
will create a fake class for you, an
| | 02:52 | automatically generated one, and it will add
leftFloat because you had text wrap to the right.
| | 02:57 | Unfortunately the browsers are
ignoring this way that it's declaring the CSS.
| | 03:02 | So we have to fix that.
| | 03:03 | Now even if you didn't apply any object
style at all, you could always make any
| | 03:08 | paragraph into its own floating
pullquote or text wrap just by adding div class
| | 03:14 | before and after that section, one
paragraph or more paragraphs. And then you
| | 03:19 | just need to add that div class to the
CSS file, but because we already did, it's
| | 03:23 | already in the CSS file.
| | 03:24 | Anyway, what I want to do here is
we are going to get rid of leftFloat,
| | 03:27 | because we are just going to add the
float attribute to the sidebar CSS, and
| | 03:34 | why confuse the issue.
| | 03:36 | Okay, so have that cleaned up. Then we
go to the template.css, and remember that
| | 03:41 | InDesign adds all div CSS to
the bottom of the CSS file.
| | 03:46 | So there is basic text frame and then
there's our sidebar. That is the name
| | 03:50 | for the object style.
| | 03:51 | If you didn't do the object style you
would see an automatically generated
| | 03:53 | name for a div class.
| | 03:55 | So here's what we want to do.
| | 03:58 | We want to first of all
specify the width of this div.
| | 04:01 | We don't want it to take up 100% of the
width of the screen, right? We want text to be
| | 04:05 | able to wrap around it.
| | 04:07 | So in this instance, I'm going to set
a width, let me indent, set a width of
| | 04:12 | 30%. Then end it with a semicolon.
And then we want to make the text wrap
| | 04:19 | around to the left.
| | 04:20 | So the way that you do that with CSS is
you say that this item floats on the left.
| | 04:25 | So, float: left.
| | 04:28 | Then the rest of things that you enter
are the same as what we did for pullquotes.
| | 04:32 | So we are going to add a border-
color, because I like border colors.
| | 04:35 | We will do gray, and we will do a
normal solid as well. We could say dotted, or
| | 04:43 | striped, or something else.
| | 04:45 | We are going to give it a width,
because if you don't give it a width then it
| | 04:48 | gives it a really ugly,
thick border. So border-width:
| | 04:50 | 1px. And then a margin.
| | 04:56 | A margin is what pushes
the text away from the wrap.
| | 05:01 | So we don't need text pushed
away on top, so I will just say 0.
| | 05:04 | If you enter 0 you don't have to put in the
measuring units, so you don't have to add an em.
| | 05:08 | But I do want the text pushed off to
the right. And remember this goes top,
| | 05:11 | right, bottom, left. The four
measures: 12 o'clock, 3 o'clock, 6, and 9.
| | 05:17 | So 0, then to the right, we
want 0.75em; 3/4 of the size of
| | 05:23 | the typeface is pretty cool. And 0, and 0.
| | 05:28 | Let's give it a background-color.
| | 05:28 | Let's just say gray for now. We can
choose different later. And then some padding
| | 05:38 | to add some air between the text and the
border, and we will say 0.5em. All right!
| | 05:42 | So that was risky entering all the stuff
without checking with every single step,
| | 05:50 | but let's see what it looks like.
| | 05:51 | So there is our HTML file.
| | 05:57 | Make sure I get the right one, and then
preview this in Safari because it's the
| | 06:02 | closest thing you'll get to previewing in
iBooks. It uses the same rendering engine.
| | 06:07 | And you're like, hey, Where's your changes?
| | 06:09 | That's because you have to refresh.
| | 06:10 | If you're testing you have to refresh
the browser view. It's remembering the
| | 06:12 | last time we looked. There you go.
| | 06:16 | So that's kind of working.
| | 06:17 | I am not really a big fan of the gray
background color but we can fix that in a second.
| | 06:21 | You see how it resizes to 30% of
the window width. I like that.
| | 06:27 | Let's choose a different background
color using my favorite method of jumping
| | 06:31 | over to Photoshop, clicking the
Color Picker, because it has a little Hex
| | 06:34 | read-out, and we need a Hex number here.
| | 06:37 | We did pink before;
| | 06:39 | let's do an interesting
greenish kind of color. That's good!
| | 06:47 | Copy that, jump over to TextWrangler,
and we are going to enter instead of gray
| | 06:55 | we want this Hex color. There we go.
| | 06:57 | Oops, not for the border color.
| | 06:59 | Let me undo that; the background color.
| | 07:06 | So let's Save these
changes and preview in Safari.
| | 07:09 | There; kind of cool!
| | 07:11 | So to summarize, to make anything wrap
in your EPUB you have to take the content
| | 07:17 | that you want things to wrap around, and
surround it with div tags: div class,
| | 07:23 | equals, and then a closing div
afterwards. And then in the CSS you have to define
| | 07:30 | the attributes of that div class.
| | 07:31 | And the two most critical ones for
making things wrap are the width of the div;
| | 07:38 | can't be 100% otherwise how can things
wrap, it has to be less than that. And the
| | 07:42 | fact that it's floating: you
can say either left or right.
| | 07:45 | Maybe one day our text wraps in
InDesign will automatically convert to this, but
| | 07:49 | until then it's pretty simple to do on our own.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
9. Converting EPUB Files to Other eBook FormatsExploring the Kindle portal| 00:00 | All of your hard work in getting a
solid EPUB prepared is going to serve you
| | 00:04 | in good stead when you want to convert that
EPUB to the MOBI file required by Amazon Kindle.
| | 00:12 | Amazon still does not support the EPUB
on the Kindle Reader, but you can easily
| | 00:17 | convert an EPUB to MOBI file.
| | 00:19 | There's just a few gotchas that
we'll be talking about in this chapter.
| | 00:23 | Anytime anybody mentions that, hey,
they thought they heard a rumor that Amazon
| | 00:27 | was going to drop the MOBI format,
and was going to start accepting EPUBS,
| | 00:30 | everybody gets all excited. Because
that's what we all want; EPUB is a standard,
| | 00:34 | it's Open Source, but so far no luck.
| | 00:36 | The thing is, in the land of eBook sales
Amazon is still a 500-pound gorilla.
| | 00:41 | So it is important to be able to get
your EPUBS correctly converted to MOBI
| | 00:47 | files. Amazon is responsible for at
least 60-70% of all eBook sales, so it's a
| | 00:54 | big market out there.
| | 00:55 | Luckily, they take care of
the publishers very well.
| | 01:00 | If you just go to kdp.amazon.com
you'll be at Kindle Direct Publishing.
| | 01:06 | It's the portal for people who want to do
their own publishing on the Amazon Kindle.
| | 01:11 | You don't have to be a big publisher
and have a corporate enterprise account.
| | 01:15 | So, it's people like you and me, small
to medium sized publishers, individual
| | 01:19 | authors. Just come right to the site
and then sign in with your Amazon account,
| | 01:23 | or if you don't have one, create a new one.
| | 01:25 | You might want to create a
different one just for KDP.
| | 01:27 | Very easy to get started with;
| | 01:30 | you can read the Kindle
Publishing Guide, visit the forums.
| | 01:33 | Let's go ahead and click
on Kindle Publishing Guide.
| | 01:36 | Well, I already did, and it brings you to
this page; Welcome to Kindle Direct Publishing!
| | 01:40 | Lots of very easy to read and understand
links on the left. And also they have a
| | 01:45 | little link to a survey
here just for InDesign users.
| | 01:48 | Please take the survey,
| | 01:50 | because it asks all about should we
continue developing the InDesign plug-in?
| | 01:54 | They have a plug-in that will let you
export to the Kindle format directly from
| | 01:58 | InDesign. Unfortunately, as of
right now, it doesn't work with 5.5.
| | 02:03 | The latest version came out in March of
2011, just about two months before 5.5
| | 02:08 | was released, and if you watch my
videos on CS5 and CS4, I show how convenient
| | 02:15 | it is to use the Kindle plug-in
with InDesign for those versions.
| | 02:19 | Unfortunately we can't do it with 5.5.
| | 02:21 | So please, take the survey, and let
them know how important it is for them to
| | 02:25 | continue developing the
Kindle plug-in for InDesign.
| | 02:29 | So of course, you're going to be
exploring all this kind of information, and
| | 02:32 | they have an excellent PDF that you can
download with all sorts of publishing information.
| | 02:36 | I will be talking more about that in
the next video, but I want to point you to
| | 02:40 | the Community page, which
I've already queued up over here.
| | 02:43 | There is an excellent set of forums,
and one of them is for people who have
| | 02:47 | formatting questions.
| | 02:48 | So this is our little
community right here, Forum:
| | 02:51 | Formatting, with excellent
discussions with a lot of views.
| | 02:56 | Look at this one, Guidelines on
creating the cover, TOC has had 18,000 views for
| | 03:00 | that one topic alone,
which is pretty interesting.
| | 03:03 | But once you become a member of the
forum, you can go ahead and post your own
| | 03:06 | questions, and answer questions.
| | 03:08 | It's got a very robust search engine,
so this is probably stop number one in
| | 03:13 | making sure that your EPUBS look the
best once they're converted to MOBI.
| | 03:17 | The other thing that you need to
do while you're at the Kindle Direct
| | 03:19 | Publishing portal is find your way to
this page right here, and just about
| | 03:24 | every page has links to it.
| | 03:25 | This is like the mothership page. It has
downloads for all the software that you
| | 03:30 | will need to do the conversions.
| | 03:31 | The first thing you want to download
is KindleGen version 1.2; make sure and
| | 03:35 | turn on I agree to terms of use.
| | 03:38 | This is a program that actually runs
in the command line of Windows, Linux,
| | 03:43 | or Macintosh. And if you're familiar with
running Terminal on the Macintosh, no problem.
| | 03:48 | Even if you're not familiar with the
command line, you still need to download it.
| | 03:52 | It's required to do the kind of EPUB
to MOBI conversions on your platform.
| | 03:56 | Now, I am scrolling painfully past
the part about the InDesign plug-in .92
| | 04:01 | (Beta); this only works with
CS5. And I tried anyway with CS5.5.
| | 04:07 | After I'd followed all these
instructions, I copied and pasted the plug-in and
| | 04:11 | the scripts over to 5.5,
and it just refused to load.
| | 04:14 | Maybe by the time you see this, check back
here and see; if it's past .92, give it a shot.
| | 04:19 | But you definitely want to
download the Kindle Previewer 1.61.
| | 04:24 | This actually is a Previewer for MOBI
files that will let you see, without owning
| | 04:29 | a Kindle, what a MOBI file will look
like on the various sizes of the Kindle
| | 04:34 | devices: the small ones, the DX one.
| | 04:37 | But better than that is that it
runs KindleGen in the background.
| | 04:40 | If you try to open up an EPUB as
opposed to a MOBI, it will go ahead and start
| | 04:45 | running this fun little program in the
background, and KindleGen is what Amazon
| | 04:50 | themselves run. Because you can
actually upload an EPUB to Amazon, instead of a
| | 04:55 | MOBI, and they will do the
conversion on their end.
| | 04:58 | They give you a little preview windows so
you can see what it looks like. But I
| | 05:01 | strongly recommend that you convert it
yourself first on your own computer and
| | 05:05 | preview it in Kindle Previewer, and
ideally, on your own Kindle, so that you can
| | 05:10 | upload a solid, beautifully designed
Kindle version of your EPUB, rather than
| | 05:15 | letting their computer do it.
| | 05:17 | So if you're going to be publishing to
the Kindle format, you definitely want to
| | 05:21 | Bookmark Kindle Direct Publishing portal,
and download and install that software.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Preparing your EPUB file for Kindle conversion| 00:00 | When you go to the Kindle portal for
publishers, you can download a publishing
| | 00:05 | guide for Kindle that explains all the
parts of what a Kindle file needs to have,
| | 00:11 | and what it cannot have.
| | 00:12 | Unfortunately, I can't really go
through that here on screen, because you need
| | 00:15 | to register to see that, and we
don't usually show that kind of stuff. We
| | 00:19 | only show things that are publicly
accessible without having to register. But I was
| | 00:23 | able to read it, and I
summarized some of the high points for you.
| | 00:27 | So this is what you need to do with
your InDesign file, and then with the
| | 00:30 | EPUB that you export from there, to
make sure that you get a very good EPUB
| | 00:35 | to MOBI file conversion.
| | 00:37 | We will be doing the actual
conversion in the next video.
| | 00:40 | So first of all, Amazon requires that
all Kindle cover images be exactly 600px x 800px,
| | 00:44 | and that they have to be a JPEG.
| | 00:48 | Now like for iBooks, you can have all
sorts of different dimensions as long as
| | 00:52 | one dimension is at least 600 pixels.
| | 00:55 | But this is the exact format for Kindle.
| | 00:58 | So you might have to do two different covers.
| | 01:01 | The EPUB that will be converted to a
MOBI has to have a both kinds of tables of
| | 01:06 | contents that we've been talking about.
| | 01:08 | It has to have the
navigational table of contents;
| | 01:11 | that's the one you can open and close,
like in the left of Adobe Digital Editions.
| | 01:15 | The one that gets created
automatically from InDesign if you specify a custom
| | 01:20 | TOC, or if you export from a book, a
collection documents, and that you can edit
| | 01:26 | in the toc.ncx file. So
that's the Navigational TOC.
| | 01:30 | Then it also requires a content TOC: a
page toward the beginning of your EPUB
| | 01:37 | that is a linked table of contents, and
you have to be able to link to that page
| | 01:42 | that contains the TOCs.
| | 01:43 | It can't be buried in the middle of a long file.
| | 01:46 | It can't just be plain text, and it has
to be linked to the actual chapters,
| | 01:50 | which as you know InDesign can do,
as long as you just generate
| | 01:54 | the TOC and place it.
| | 01:56 | But another requirement
that I didn't put in here, is that it
| | 01:58 | can't have page numbers.
| | 02:00 | I already told you, you shouldn't
enter page numbers, because it doesn't make
| | 02:03 | any sense. But if it does have page
numbers, the conversion will fail, so make
| | 02:07 | sure there are no page numbers.
| | 02:09 | Do you remember when I talked about the
guide section that you need for iBooks,
| | 02:13 | and that you also need for Kindle, at
the bottom of the content.opf file?
| | 02:17 | I will show you that in a second.
| | 02:20 | But this is just a reminder that you
need to have at least these two things in
| | 02:24 | the Guide section for the Kindle file,
otherwise the conversion will fail.
| | 02:28 | You need to have a pointer showing
where the cover is, or if the cover is in
| | 02:32 | an HTML file with a JPEG inside there,
it has to have a link to that. And you
| | 02:37 | have to be able to link to
the actual TOC in the document.
| | 02:41 | Amazon also requires you to include
the publication title, and the creator or
| | 02:47 | the author, but the metadata tag is creator in
the metadata, which again is in the content.opf.
| | 02:53 | Now see, that's not a requirement to make a
valid EPUB, but for Kindle it is a requirement.
| | 02:58 | As far as formatting is concerned, all
paragraph tags will automatically get a
| | 03:03 | quarter inch first line indent.
| | 03:06 | All paragraphs are fully justified,
and if you want to give it a shot in
| | 03:11 | overriding that, you can use CSS to do so.
| | 03:14 | Joshua Tallent, who is probably one
of the nation's premier experts in
| | 03:18 | formatting for Kindle; he
has been doing it forever.
| | 03:21 | He says that the best way to
do this is to do inline CSS.
| | 03:24 | That means, in the HTML files
themselves, to add at the beginning of every
| | 03:29 | paragraph a bit of indent code, rather than
having them link to the external CSS file.
| | 03:34 | Another issue with CSS is that
Kindles don't support the float command; the
| | 03:39 | thing that let's you do the textwrap,
and also let's you do drop caps.
| | 03:43 | So if you do have that kind of code in
your EPUBS, and you probably do if you
| | 03:48 | use a drop cap, then you're going to get
funky formatting. That won't cause it to
| | 03:52 | fail conversion, but it will
look strange in the final MOBI file.
| | 03:57 | So you usually want to get rid
of that in the InDesign file.
| | 04:00 | One the other hand, any tags in the
CSS file that starts with that @ symbol,
| | 04:04 | those are not allowed, and that
will cause that conversion to fail.
| | 04:08 | So, for example, that new CS 5.5
feature of including the little @ tag to set
| | 04:13 | page margins; you want to make sure
that's turned off when you export to EPUB,
| | 04:17 | or you need to delete it
from the CSS file afterwards.
| | 04:21 | See, in general, Kindles support a
much smaller set of CSS tags and formatting
| | 04:26 | than Apple iBookstore, or the NOOK;
than the usual EPUB standard.
| | 04:30 | That's another reason why a lot of us are
hoping that Kindle moves to EPUB from MOBI.
| | 04:35 | Now let's see with an actual InDesign
document how we might get it ready for Kindle format.
| | 04:41 | I have our friend SFHistory open here in
InDesign 5.5. I think the best thing to
| | 04:46 | do if you're going to be publishing the
same book to both EPUB and to MOBI is
| | 04:51 | to create two versions of your InDesign file.
| | 04:54 | Because as I said, the EPUB format can
support much more formatting, much more
| | 04:59 | paragraph and character style
formatting, than the MOBI can. And for the MOBI
| | 05:04 | version of your file, you're going to
want to strip out some of that extra
| | 05:08 | formatting so that the end
result doesn't give you any surprises.
| | 05:13 | So we have here in InDesign file, and
if I select the first page, you'll see
| | 05:19 | that this has already been grouped,
and it's going to be turned into a cover.
| | 05:23 | Because when I export to EPUB -- let's
just call it SFHistory -- I can choose to
| | 05:30 | rasterize the first page, and InDesign will
automatically list this first page as the cover.
| | 05:37 | Alternatively, you could choose to use
an existing image file and then link to a
| | 05:43 | 600 x 800 pixel cover image elsewhere.
| | 05:46 | If you do that, get rid of this first
page. Your first page here, then, should be
| | 05:50 | the table of contents, because otherwise
you're going to have two covers showing up.
| | 05:54 | In fact, even if you do it this way,
you're going to have two covers showing up,
| | 05:58 | because the cover is part of the InDesign file.
| | 06:02 | Now when you are looking at it, say in
iBooks, sometimes that's what you want.
| | 06:05 | You want to be able to open up the book
and still see the cover on the left and
| | 06:09 | table of contents on the right.
| | 06:10 | It will look a little bit dumb in a
MOBI file, though, to have the cover repeated
| | 06:14 | after you start reading it, so that
might be an instance of when you want to
| | 06:18 | actually export this as a JPEG
and then delete the first page.
| | 06:22 | It won't harm it though, to keep it here,
so I am just going to leave it here for now.
| | 06:26 | You need a TOC that's linked, and I've
already placed this in here. You can
| | 06:30 | look at it in the story editor, and see
that this is actually linked table of contents.
| | 06:35 | Let me turn off dynamic spell check.
I don't want to turn that on.
| | 06:44 | Having images and captions and such is not a
problem, but remember floats are not supported.
| | 06:52 | So let me zoom in.
| | 06:53 | We are going to get strange
looking results if we keep this drop cap.
| | 06:57 | So I would go to the paragraph style and
Edit it so that it does not have a drop cap.
| | 07:04 | We want to set this to 0
for both Lines and Characters.
| | 07:10 | Links are okay to retain.
| | 07:13 | So go through your document and
look for any potential problem areas.
| | 07:16 | I am looking to see if there's any
other wraps. I thought I had another
| | 07:19 | wrapping image; yeah.
| | 07:20 | This one, because it doesn't support
floats, we don't know what's going to happen.
| | 07:25 | So I'm actually going to cut that out
and put it back in here, and then I will
| | 07:31 | just add it as an inline image.
| | 07:32 | I will hold down the Shift key and drag
that blue square, which brings it in here
| | 07:41 | as an inline image.
| | 07:42 | It's okay if it overlaps, because
it's not going overlap once we export it.
| | 07:47 | Everything else looks okay, so I am
going to do a Save As and call this
| | 07:52 | SFHistory-forKindle, so I don't get
confused later on. And then I will
| | 07:58 | export this to EPUB.
| | 08:00 | So I press Command+E or Control+E and we
are going to export it to the Desktop.
| | 08:07 | Now as soon as I get to this dialog box,
I remember that the Kindle requires two
| | 08:12 | bits of metadata: both the publisher and
the creator. And unfortunately, InDesign
| | 08:18 | doesn't give us a feel for the creator;
| | 08:20 | that is the author here.
| | 08:21 | So I am going to Cancel out of here,
and make a quick trip over to File Info,
| | 08:28 | and then enter it here.
| | 08:29 | It needs the Author, and the Document Title.
| | 08:31 | So I will call this History of San
Francisco by Anonymous. That's fine;
| | 08:40 | I can leave all this as is.
| | 08:42 | And now I will go ahead and export it to
EPUB again. Publisher Entry; Acme Books.
| | 08:50 | I will put in my ISBN. or just let
InDesign generate its own number here.
| | 08:56 | I will be talking about ISBN
numbers in a different video.
| | 09:02 | Unfortunately, there's no way to
turn off the Book Margin option.
| | 09:06 | So InDesign is always going to add to the
bottom of the CSS file a little @ CSS command.
| | 09:13 | And that we are going to have to remove
in the file before we do the conversion.
| | 09:18 | Under Image we can leave everything as
is. And just FYI, there is no need to
| | 09:23 | convert anything to grayscale when
you're going to create an EPUB that will be
| | 09:27 | converted for Kindle. Because remember
that the Kindle software that runs on
| | 09:31 | PCs and Macs, the Kindle Reader app
sees everything in color. And in fact, the
| | 09:36 | publishing guidelines for Kindle say,
keep your images in color, keep them
| | 09:39 | high-res, because they want those MOBI
files to be able to be read by future
| | 09:43 | devices, which hopefully will be
supporting color and higher-res in the coming years.
| | 09:48 | So don't dumb down your
images just for the Kindle.
| | 09:52 | Then in the Contents you definitely
want to use the custom TOC Style to make
| | 09:57 | your navigation table of contents, which
is another requirement, and I'll go ahead
| | 10:01 | and break up this document at that
Paragraph Style, and we are going to have it
| | 10:05 | Generate the CSS, and then click OK.
| | 10:14 | So here's our book, and it roughly
looks fine. We don't have the drop cap
| | 10:18 | anymore; that's okay.
| | 10:21 | We do have the linked table of
contents. And now let's open this up in an EPUB
| | 10:27 | editor, such as oXygen Author, or I
can just bring us over to Springy, that's
| | 10:34 | the little utility that let's you
get inside in EPUB without extracting
| | 10:38 | everything, and take a look at the CSS file.
| | 10:41 | I will Edit that with TextWrangler.
| | 10:47 | You want to remove the @page;
| | 10:49 | you want to remove that because
that will cause the conversion to fail.
| | 10:53 | It works perfectly fine for
other eReaders, but not for Kindle.
| | 10:57 | If you're not using it within the
document, this is just superfluous, but
| | 11:01 | because Kindle doesn't support the
float you might as well get rid of it.
| | 11:09 | That's good, and we can close that, and
Save it. And then Springy is saying, are
| | 11:16 | you sure you want to override the file?
| | 11:17 | Yes. And then in the content.opf file,
you want to add that guide section.
| | 11:26 | The guide section is at the very bottom.
You need to add it manually after the spine.
| | 11:31 | I have already done this to this
SFHistory.epub file, so let's open that in
| | 11:38 | Springy. And open up the content.opf
file in TextWrangler, and here is the guide
| | 11:49 | section at the bottom.
| | 11:51 | You need a reference to the cover, and
the cover, the name of the cover that
| | 11:56 | InDesign automatically generated
from that file, happened to be 464.png.
| | 12:01 | It would be nice in a future version
of InDesign for us to be able to specify
| | 12:04 | the name for the cover.
| | 12:06 | But I was able to discover that the
PNG was that one just by looking at the
| | 12:10 | contents of the file.
| | 12:11 | Remember, everything is listed in the
manifest, so as long as that PNG is listed
| | 12:16 | in the manifest, then we
are cool; and there it is.
| | 12:20 | Then the other entry that you need to
do for the guide is the link to the TOC
| | 12:26 | with type= "toc", title= "Table of
Contents". I talked about this when I talked
| | 12:29 | about adding the Guide Section, and then
with a link to it, and it's actually the
| | 12:33 | very first HTML file that
InDesign created is where the TOC is.
| | 12:38 | And that's it; now I think that we
have satisfied all the requirements of
| | 12:41 | converting an EPUB to a MOBI file, and
we will be doing that in the next video.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Converting with KindleGen and Kindle Previewer| 00:00 | Okay, so we have created a solid EPUB
that is specifically for Kindle, and just
| | 00:06 | to review, I want to quickly take a
peek at it. We'll use oXygen Author to open
| | 00:10 | up the archive, so we don't
need to actually extract it.
| | 00:16 | To make sure that in our CSS file
we've removed the @page code that InDesign
| | 00:22 | always adds, because Kindle doesn't allow that.
| | 00:26 | And then in the content.opf file, I
just want to check that we have added a
| | 00:31 | title and creator, which we did, in the
metadata. And then down here that we have
| | 00:36 | our guides listed, and that they end
correctly with a backslash. Excellent!
| | 00:42 | Now we can close this and close out of Author.
| | 00:46 | Now we need to convert this EPUB
file to a MOBI file. Now you can use
| | 00:51 | KindleGen, which is a command-line utility, or
the better way is to use Kindle Previewer app.
| | 00:57 | Kindle Previewer app will
convert the EPUB to a MOBI file.
| | 01:00 | So I'm going to go to Recent Items>
Kindle Previewer. And from the Kindle
| | 01:07 | Previewer app go to File and choose Open Book.
| | 01:10 | Now normally you're looking for MOBI
file, and that you're going to preview
| | 01:13 | here. But if you choose an EPUB, like
ours are on the Desktop, it will convert it.
| | 01:19 | And here is when we have a drum roll; yeah,
this is happy, except that there are warnings.
| | 01:25 | We can always take a look at those
warnings, and it's says that the Output File
| | 01:28 | has been generated here, which is right there.
| | 01:31 | If you click on the downward pointing
arrows, it will show you every step that
| | 01:35 | it went through as it was
running KindleGen to convert the file.
| | 01:39 | So it unpacked the EPUB file, and it
made sure that it was adding all of the
| | 01:43 | required metadata, and then it
went through all of our HTML files.
| | 01:48 | Apparently we had one bad hyperlink;
I'm not sure what that was about.
| | 01:52 | It built the table of
contents; it didn't find a page map.
| | 01:55 | I don't know if that makes any difference,
I've never encountered problem with that.
| | 01:59 | Then a whole bunch of scary MOBI
stuff, and then that's it. It's done.
| | 02:04 | It has some warnings,
| | 02:05 | so I would probably go back and check to
see what the bad link was, but the fact
| | 02:10 | that it went ahead and
converted it is always good news.
| | 02:13 | So once it does a successful conversion,
it will automatically open it. So we're
| | 02:17 | looking at History of San Francisco,
and if I click on this little icon, we'll
| | 02:21 | see the actual cover.
| | 02:23 | We happen to be looking at it in the
default Kindle Previewer, but you could
| | 02:27 | also look at it in any one of these
other Kindle Devices. And then use the Arrow
| | 02:33 | keys to move from page to page.
| | 02:35 | There is our linked table of contents.
| | 02:36 | There is the gold rush right there.
| | 02:39 | Say, for example, you want to see
Kindle for the iPhone, which I have, just
| | 02:44 | choose that and then the window resizes
itself, and suddenly you see things in color.
| | 02:48 | Because remember, the Kindle app that
runs on the iOS on the Mac and the PC
| | 02:53 | shows everything in color. So
definitely keep your EPUBS in color, even though
| | 02:57 | they're going to be converted to MOBI.
| | 02:58 | Now I would not stop here; in
addition to fixing a hyperlink, I would go
| | 03:03 | through page by page to make sure
that my formatting looks good. And then I
| | 03:06 | would also e-mail it to my Kindle, or
side load onto my Kindle, to make sure it
| | 03:11 | looks good there before uploading
it to the Amazon Bookstore for sale.
| | 03:15 | You can see that once you have a
healthy EPUB that has had the necessary
| | 03:19 | tweaks for the Kindle formatting
| | 03:22 | it's pretty simple to convert
that EPUB into a healthy MOBI file.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Converting for other resellers| 00:00 | Just like Amazon has its own set of
publishing guidelines for the Kindle, other
| | 00:05 | 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 in previous video, and it
| | 00:17 | 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 an
| | 00:27 | iTune's publisher, Apple publishes a
very voluminous 60 or 80 page PDF with
| | 00:33 | what's allowed and what's not
allowed inside the EPUB beyond validation.
| | 00:38 | For example, you have some ability to
include different font faces, you can
| | 00:42 | include some video and audio, and
they have special specifications for the
| | 00:46 | cover, that kind of thing.
| | 00:48 | Now unfortunately, you cannot see
those publishing guidelines until you
| | 00:52 | actually join the program. It is free
| | 00:54 | to join the program, and then you can
get them and work with them. But because
| | 00:58 | you have to join the program before you
can see them, I can't really show them
| | 01:00 | to you here on the screen.
| | 01:01 | We'll be talking a little bit more about
getting involved with the iBookstore as
| | 01:06 | your own publisher in the next chapter.
| | 01:08 | If you want to see publishing
guidelines for other eReaders or sellers like the
| | 01:13 | Sony Reader bookstore or the Kobo
bookstore, unfortunately, they really want to
| | 01:19 | work with large publishers only.
| | 01:21 | If you have say less than 25 titles,
then they want you to use an aggregator.
| | 01:26 | And those aggregators
very seldom take EPUB files.
| | 01:29 | The only other big major vendor
that is completely open to working with
| | 01:34 | individual publishers is Barnes &
Noble and the NOOK, which is a really cool
| | 01:39 | little eReader that comes in
many different sizes and form factors.
| | 01:43 | And there are just a few different
kinds of things that you might want to do to
| | 01:47 | your EPUB before you upload it
to the Barnes & Noble NOOK store.
| | 01:51 | First of all, of course, you should download
and install the NOOK reader for your platform.
| | 01:58 | So, for example, you can install it
on an iPad, you can install it on your
| | 02:02 | phone, I like this NOOK for
PC, and then Other Devices.
| | 02:07 | So Mac users, we are Other Devices.
| | 02:10 | If 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 Previewer;
| | 02:17 | you're not going to see what it would
look like exactly on a NOOK. It's just
| | 02:21 | more of a way to access the books that
you purchase from the Barnes & Noble NOOK
| | 02:26 | eBook store on these devices, because
most of the books they sell have DRM,
| | 02:32 | Digital Rights Management.
| | 02:33 | So you can't just send them
around willy-nilly and share them.
| | 02:36 | But it is important that if you want
to upload your EPUBS there, that you have
| | 02:40 | some method of seeing what it's going
to look like on a reader that at least
| | 02:44 | shares some of the same code
as the actually eReader device.
| | 02:47 | If you follow the links to
their PubIt! Bookstore; PubIt!
| | 02:51 | is their special program for smaller
publishers and authors to upload EPUBS.
| | 02:59 | And they're very open,
the Barnes & Noble people;
| | 03:02 | if you come down here, you don't even have to
register. You can learn more about the service.
| | 03:09 | Especially, check this
out: the Formatting Guide.
| | 03:13 | You could click on ePub Formatting
Guide, and download a very nice little PDF
| | 03:17 | that gives you some information about
if you want to format your EPUB for the
| | 03:21 | NOOK readers, here's what we suggest.
| | 03:23 | And basically if you have a valid
EPUB already, they're good to go;
| | 03:27 | they don't have any special
requirements for the cover.
| | 03:30 | But if you have a cover that's been
called out separately like we just did
| | 03:34 | for the Kindle, or like you might want to do
for the iBookstore, it'll be fine with them.
| | 03:39 | They do have a little bit of information,
| | 03:41 | though, that I thought was interesting.
Let me show you how we can edit an
| | 03:44 | existing EPUB to better work with the NOOK.
| | 03:48 | Apparently, the NOOK reader does not
add page margin by itself around the
| | 03:53 | edge of the screen.
| | 03:54 | So the type runs directly into the
edge of the metal surrounding the glass.
| | 03:59 | So they recommend in their publisher
guidelines that you add some page margin.
| | 04:03 | Now as you know, InDesign does that
automatically anyway, but we want to
| | 04:07 | tweak it a little bit.
| | 04:08 | I've opened up SFHistory.epub in
oXygen Author, and I'm going to open up
| | 04:14 | that template.css file.
| | 04:16 | And up here under page, first of all,
they recommend a different margin for the
| | 04:21 | bottom than for the three sides,
because at the bottom of the NOOK, there is a
| | 04:25 | little user interface.
| | 04:27 | They also recommend pixels
instead of ems, for whatever reason;
| | 04:31 | do what makes them happy.
| | 04:32 | So what we want to say is margin-top
should be 30 pixels, margin-left 30 pixels,
| | 04:45 | margin-right 30 pixels, and
margin-bottom just 20 pixels.
| | 04:57 | As you can see, oXygen Author is not
happy with margin-top, and that was because
| | 05:06 | I had a semicolon instead of a colon.
| | 05:08 | Now we're done. We can save
this, and close the archive.
| | 05:14 | So that's what you need to do, is any
big reseller that you're going to try and
| | 05:18 | distribute your EPUB to: go to their
Web site, nose around, and see if they
| | 05:22 | have publisher guidelines that give you
specific instructions for their device
| | 05:27 | and for their software.
| | 05:28 | Now Barnes & Noble does have an
application called NOOK; now that's the name of
| | 05:33 | their reader. That's what I've installed here,
And unfortunately though, it's not a way
| | 05:36 | to preview what the EPUB is going to
look like on a NOOK. They've improved it.
| | 05:40 | So now it's more like a better way to
read the books that you purchase from
| | 05:45 | the NOOK bookstore.
| | 05:46 | But you can go ahead and open up your
EPUBS to make sure that at least they're
| | 05:50 | readable by NOOK for Mac, or NOOK for Windows.
| | 05:55 | One of the easiest ways to do
that is just to drag and drop.
| | 05:57 | So I'm going to come over here and
drag and drop SFHistory.epub on to here,
| | 06:03 | and it adds the file. There it is!
| | 06:06 | And now it opens up and there's our lovely EPUB.
| | 06:10 | But the best thing to do is actually to
get a NOOK and then to sideload it on
| | 06:13 | there so you can see what
it's going to look like.
| | 06:15 | Yay! It's reading our table of contents, and so on.
| | 06:18 | So we've got the iPad, we've got the
Kindle, and we've got the NOOK. And you
| | 06:23 | need to do the same thing for any other
kind of major eReader that you're going
| | 06:26 | to be distributing your EPUBS onto, just
to give them that extra bit of tweaking
| | 06:31 | to make them look their best on that device.
| | 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 a 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 have, 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.
| | 00:39 | But I know that there are a number
of people watching this title who are
| | 00:43 | independent authors or small publishers
who maybe have never actually published
| | 00:47 | a book on their own before, and it is
important that you purchase your own ISBN,
| | 00:53 | and assign them to your eBooks.
| | 00:55 | Even if it doesn't have a print
edition you need one for your eBook. Even if
| | 00:59 | you're just going to be
publishing it as a PDF. There is this whole
| | 01:02 | 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,
| | 01:16 | this is where you purchase an ISBN
from,. And this is actually a very good
| | 01:20 | site, it's got some really good guidelines
over here on the right that you can download.
| | 01:24 | And then to actually get the ISBN you
go over here and choose Buy an ISBN.
| | 01:28 | If you just buy one at a time,
it's not cheap. Especially if you're
| | 01:32 | going to be selling your eBook for
something like 2.99, or even 9.99, you need to
| | 01:37 | sell quite a bit to get this.
| | 01:39 | I would recommend that you buy at least
a block of 10 if you can possibly afford
| | 01:43 | it, because then they go way down in
price. And if you create one for the Kindle, and
| | 01:47 | one for an EPUB, and one for PDF,
that's three different ISBNs right there.
| | 01:52 | So you're 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'll be
| | 02:00 | talking about in this chapter that requires
you have your own ISBN is the Apple iBookstore.
| | 02:06 | And even then, only if you decide to
publish directly through them as an iTunes
| | 02:11 | Connect publisher. You can also get
books into the iBookstore by working with an
| | 02:15 | aggregator which will be
talking about in this chapter as well.
| | 02:19 | But if you publish your books, say, through
an Amazon Kindle bookstore it's optional.
| | 02:24 | They can assign their own ISBN number.
Same thing with the Barnes & Noble
| | 02:27 | Nook; it's optional.
| | 02:29 | They can assign their own ISBN number.
| | 02:31 | Even if you decide to publish your
eBook with the iBookstore using an
| | 02:36 | aggregator, a lot of the aggregators, those
third-party companies include the cost
| | 02:40 | of 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 copyright.
Even if somebody assigns their own ISBN
| | 02:50 | number to your book, you still own the
copyright to the book, or however you're
| | 02:53 | working out 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 that you
purchase your ISBN numbers from.
| | 03:11 | So you just choose a
country from this dropdown list.
| | 03:15 | Let's say I'm from Belgium, and I speak
French, then it shows me where I should
| | 03:20 | go, and the e-mail address, and the Web site.
| | 03:23 | Ah, well, I understand that
perfectly. But that's what you do
| | 03:28 | is you go to the different individual countries.
| | 03:30 | While I was nosing around this
International ISBN Web site, I came upon this
| | 03:35 | wonderful FAQ about Guidelines for
the assignment of ISBNs to e-books.
| | 03:40 | This is really good reading.
| | 03:41 | For example, it's saying that if you
publish an e-book that has DRM, Digital
| | 03:46 | Rights Management, and then the exact same e-
book, and exact same format that doesn't
| | 03:50 | have DRM, you need to have
two different ISBN numbers;
| | 03:54 | one for each one. Because an ISBN
conveys not just the exact edition, and
| | 04:00 | publisher, and title of a 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: Guidelines for
the assignment of ISBNs to e-books.
| | 04:18 | So I'm hoping the ISBNs are not so
much of a mystery anymore, and I think you
| | 04:22 | should go get yourself one,
or a dozen, or a few dozen.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Getting your ebook into the Kindle Store, iBookstore, or NOOK Store| 00:00 | The three major eBook resellers that
currently welcome independent authors and
| | 00:06 | small to midsized publishers to work
directly with them are the Amazon Kindle
| | 00:10 | Store, the Apple iBookstore,
and the Barnes & Noble Nook Store.
| | 00:16 | Now there are other eBook resellers
of note like the Sony Reader store,
| | 00:21 | which is very large, the Kobo book store.
But they are more geared to working
| | 00:26 | with larger established publishers
who already have hardcovers 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 Web site looking for guidelines,
| | 00:40 | they have a page up that tells
you which aggregators to work with.
| | 00:44 | They want you to be managed by a third-party;
| | 00:46 | they don't want to deal with you
directly. And I'll be talking about working
| | 00:49 | with an aggregator later on in this chapter.
| | 00:51 | But let's take a look at what's
required out of becoming a direct reseller for
| | 00:56 | each one of these vendors.
| | 00:59 | For example, for the Amazon Kindle
Store, you just need to go to this URL,
| | 01:03 | kdp.amazon.com, and it's
very simple to get started with.
| | 01:09 | You just sign in with your Amazon
account if you have one already, and if you
| | 01:12 | don't, you can set one up on the fly.
| | 01:15 | And then once you get in, then you are
able to just upload your books through a
| | 01:19 | very friendly portal.
| | 01:21 | Now we're 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 and 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
let's say that you live outside of the
| | 01:45 | US, you can still sell your books
through the Kindle Book Store, but you are
| | 01:49 | going to need something called an
Individual Taxpayer Identification Number. And
| | 01:54 | this is something that most of the
other resellers will also require, and it's
| | 01:57 | actually very simple to get.
| | 01:59 | They have instructions, but I just
wanted to kind of show you; I jumped over
| | 02:02 | here really quickly.
| | 02:03 | If you go to the IRS.gov and just look
for Form, W-7 that is the form that you
| | 02:09 | fill out. It's actually pretty simple;
I actually downloaded it here.
| | 02:13 | Kind of like the US W-9 form.
| | 02:16 | And what they're going to do is they're
just going to give you a nine-digit code
| | 02:19 | that you can then enter during your
applications for the Kindle Book Store, or
| | 02:24 | the Apple iTunes iBookstore. And all
they really want to know is where do you
| | 02:28 | live, why do you need this,
and are you 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
| | 02:38 | who've filled this out, because at
first it was very offputting, and they
| | 02:41 | said it's actually not that big of a
deal, and they were able to get their ITIN
| | 02:44 | 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 forum;
| | 02:58 | it's actually pretty robust.
| | 02:59 | When you do have your EPUB ready,
they'll take it in either EPUB, or MOBI format,
| | 03:05 | or actually just about any other kind of format;
| | 03:07 | HTML, DOC. But of course, what's great
is that they'll take your EPUB format.
| | 03:11 | They are going to ask for some
metadata like the title, the description; you
| | 03:16 | have up to 4000 characters to enter description;
| | 03:19 | the author, the
contributors, when it was published.
| | 03:22 | An ISBN is optional;
| | 03:24 | if you don't have an ISBN
they'll assign one for you to use,
| | 03:27 | just for the Kindle edition. And they
want to know if it's public domain or if
| | 03:31 | you have publication rights.
| | 03:33 | It's just, like, a little check box. So
you can actually put together something
| | 03:36 | that's public domain on the Kindle Book Store.
| | 03:39 | Then the royalty rates are pretty well known;
| | 03:41 | it's 70% to you as the
publisher, and they keep 30%.
| | 03:45 | They actually do charge a little bit
for downloads, so that if you have a huge
| | 03:50 | book, it might be a few cents,
that's going to be deducted.
| | 03:54 | And, by the way, that 70% split, 70/30,
is only for eBooks 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 is detailed in the terms
and conditions in the pricing guidelines.
| | 04:12 | I am 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.
| | 04:23 | They need your tax ID;
| | 04:24 | they're going to pay you the royalties,
by the way, by an electronic funds
| | 04:27 | transfer, or by check.
| | 04:30 | So this is actually important because
I've talked with some other publishers who
| | 04:32 | they really prefer working with Kindle
because they are the only ones who don't
| | 04:36 | require a US bank account.
| | 04:38 | They'll be happy to send you a check.
| | 04:39 | Of course, they say in fine print it
will cost $8 per check. And then if you want
| | 04:43 | to read the publishing guidelines PDF,
I have seen it linked to publicly.
| | 04:47 | So here is the URL, if you want to
grab it, and it's just basically like how
| | 04:51 | to set up your EPUB, or your HTML
files, in order to make the best looking
| | 04:55 | 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?
| | 05:10 | And there's a link directly to the application.
| | 05:12 | The application is done completely online;
| | 05:14 | it's not onerous at all, 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'll see a
list of Apple approved aggregators.
| | 05:38 | These are third-party companies who
have been approved by Apple to take your
| | 05:42 | EPUBs, and then get them unto the
iBookstore. And you can click through to here.
| | 05:46 | We are going to talk about
aggregators in more detail later.
| | 05:49 | But let's say that you
actually do want to apply.
| | 05:52 | So you click that Apply button.
| | 05:54 | You're brought here to this page where it
says, what kind of thing do you want to
| | 05:57 | sell? And you choose Books, and click
Continue. And then it tells you the
| | 06:04 | technical requirements.
| | 06:05 | And this, I know, is surprising to a
lot of people, but technically, you have to
| | 06:09 | have a Macintosh to publish on the iBookstore.
| | 06:12 | Because in order to upload your EPUBs,
and fill in all the metadata, it's an
| | 06:17 | Apple Macintosh application.
| | 06:18 | It's not something that you do online,
which is how the Kindle handles it, and how
| | 06:22 | Barnes & Noble, and a lot of
the aggregators handle it.
| | 06:25 | It's an actual stand-alone
application that requires an Intel Mac; an operating
| | 06:28 | system 10.5 or later. And I've
talked with some publishers who are
| | 06:33 | completely PC-based and they are like,
we have to buy a Macintosh just to
| | 06:36 | 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;
| | 06:47 | they will accept no other format,
and it has to pass EPUB check;
| | 06:51 | this is the EPUB 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 log in, and access
what's called the iTunes Connect portal.
| | 07:09 | It has links to reports, and you can
download iBookstore EPUB templates, it has
| | 07:13 | a publisher user guide PDF with sample EPUBs.
| | 07:17 | It has lots of interesting EPUB and CSS
coding information to, like, include fixed
| | 07:23 | layouts in your EPUBs for the iBook
application -- that was just announced this
| | 07:26 | past week -- and multimedia;
| | 07:29 | you can 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 unfortunately I
| | 07:41 | can't share any of these URLs
with you because they're all private.
| | 07:44 | But they do have a similar, very generous
kind of revenue sharing model as the Kindle.
| | 07:50 | If 70% royalties for books. There is no
70% just in this one range, and then less
| | 07:56 | in other ranges. It's just like how
it is, if you are selling apps for the
| | 08:00 | iPhone or something. Its 70% period.
| | 08:03 | You can even set a price of zero if you
want people to be able to download a free
| | 08:07 | EPUB that you publish.
| | 08:09 | The royalties that they pay out to you
are paid by electronic fund transfer only.
| | 08:13 | So it is required that
you have a US bank account.
| | 08:16 | Again, so if you are an international publisher
then you might want to just use an aggregator.
| | 08:21 | The other big reseller is the Barnes &
Noble Nook Store, and it's really friendly
| | 08:27 | and accommodating for
independent authors and publishers.
| | 08:30 | They, of course, have other programs
for the big publishers. But for the vast
| | 08:34 | number of people who are getting all
into digital publishing of their own books,
| | 08:38 | or they are small publishers who are
converting their books to EPUB, this is a
| | 08:43 | very nice little portal called PubIt!.
| | 08:46 | All you need to do is log in down here
to create an account, and you have to have
| | 08:51 | a Barnes & Noble accounts.
| | 08:52 | Again, it's just like an Amazon
account, if you don't have one, you can
| | 08:55 | create one on the fly.
| | 08:56 | And the only thing different about
applying for the Barnes & Noble reseller
| | 08:59 | account is that they want
your credit card number.
| | 09:02 | 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 --
| | 09:10 | it's like a combination of the
iTunes and the Amazon requirements in
| | 09:14 | that an ISBN is optional;
| | 09:17 | you don't have to purchase an
ISBN, they can assign one for you.
| | 09:19 | 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. This is where you go to apply.
| | 09:33 | You can only upload an EPUB format,
again. And they have very nice guidelines for
| | 09:37 | how to prep the EPUB for them, which
I talked about in a previous video.
| | 09:42 | And then their royalty break down;
you get 65% royalties for books that are
| | 09:46 | priced from 2.99 to 9.99, and
otherwise it's 35% for things that are more
| | 09:51 | expensive or 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 you're 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 | what are known as aggregators.
| | 00:15 | And aggregators are, just like the name
implies, they aggregate all of the mom
| | 00:21 | and pop sort of publishers, and they
systemize them, and manage them as a
| | 00:26 | service to the large resellers.
| | 00:30 | And they take a little cut, 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 that aren't really
| | 00:40 | into this. And they make it very easy
for the large publishers, because the
| | 00:46 | large publishers can rely on them for sending
in quality product, and taking care of things.
| | 00:50 | Doing all the tech support; that
kind of stuff. So it's an option.
| | 00:53 | In fact, an Apple's Web site if you
apply for an iTunes account and they reject
| | 00:59 | you, they will send you to this URL. Or
even during the application process they
| | 01:03 | are like, you know you might want
to consider just using an aggregator.
| | 01:07 | So this list here is what they will
point you to, and it shows the different
| | 01:11 | services that they are approved
aggregators for the iBookstore supply.
| | 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 a whole
bunch of other names on here, and they are
| | 01:35 | gone, and it is a mystery in the
industry as to why. Like, for example, one of
| | 01:41 | the biggest ones there was Lulu books,
and there is still a way to use Lulu to
| | 01:45 | get your books on the iPad. I'm
going to show you that in a minute.
| | 01:48 | So you're not really limited to only these
Apple-approved aggregators as far as I know.
| | 01:53 | And unfortunately, they are not that
friendly to independent publishers who want
| | 01:58 | 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;
they have been around for a while.
| | 02:07 | You come to this beautiful Web page,
How to Publish Ebooks in the Apple iPad
| | 02:13 | iBookstore, and if you scroll down,
you'll find this sentence over here that
| | 02:18 | stopped me in my tracks:
| | 02:20 | "Your book must be uploaded to
Smashwords as a Microsoft Word .doc file.
| | 02:24 | No, you cannot upload a PDF or
EPUB or MOBI as your source file."
| | 02:29 | What they do is they gave you this
fantastic Microsoft Word template, and as
| | 02:34 | long as you only apply the styles in
the template, and use the fonts, and all the
| | 02:39 | other instructions, then they take
that Microsoft Word file, and they run it
| | 02:44 | through the meatgrinder.
| | 02:46 | So that is one of the aggregators which,
is really not what we are interested in.
| | 02:51 | If you go to one of the older
aggregators, which as far as I know
| | 02:54 | they're still working, like lulu.com;
they're very well known for doing
| | 02:58 | print on demand books.
| | 03:00 | So you could send them a PDF, or even
a Microsoft Word document, and choose
| | 03:03 | different designs for the cover, and
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.
| | 03:14 | 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
| | 03:20 | can be a big help in getting
your books into the iBookstore.
| | 03:23 | So this is what they offer:
| | 03:24 | they include an ISBN, you
don't have get an ISBN number.
| | 03:27 | They do sales reporting, they do the
document conversion to EPUB if you want,
| | 03:32 | though they will accept an EPUB.
| | 03:34 | But down here you will find out that
as a publisher; if you have your own ISBN,
| | 03:38 | you want a little bit more control; you
have to have at least 25 titles good to
| | 03:41 | go. Otherwise you got to come
over here and use For Authors.
| | 03:44 | But whether you are a author or
publisher, the cost is the same.
| | 03:49 | Lulu.com takes 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, and
stuff with the iBookstore with Apple.
| | 04:04 | Then your account is with Lulu.com.
| | 04:07 | And you find out how much money
the royalties were coming in from the
| | 04:10 | iBookstore, Lulu.com takes 20%
automatically, and then sends you a check or does
| | 04:15 | 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 of that.
| | 04:24 | So it's actually a pretty cool company.
| | 04:26 | I just want to point out that there are
many Ebook aggregators, and I think it's
| | 04:30 | worth it to investigate this for
little while, and check out what they offer.
| | 04:35 | Like this company BiblioCore, these
people are so nice. They are right upfront.
| | 04:40 | I like the plain English language on
their Web page about how does it work;
| | 04:44 | how much is it cost.
| | 04:46 | If you want to send them an eBook to
get on the iBookstore, I'd have to be EPUB,
| | 04:50 | have no unmanifested files, and that
means -- I am sure you all know what the
| | 04:54 | manifest is, it's part of the content.opf
page, it lists all files that are
| | 05:00 | in the EPUB. So you don't want to
have any extra images, for example, that
| | 05:03 | aren't listed in the manifest.
| | 05:06 | It has to have an ISBN number and it has to
be valid; it has to pass EPUB check, and so on.
| | 05:11 | Now with these people, they don't
charge a cut of the profits.
| | 05:14 | What they do is they charge so
much per year, and then less than that
| | 05:17 | for successive years.
| | 05:19 | Unfortunately, they don't say on
their Web site they are not upfront with
| | 05:22 | exactly how much they charge. They
want you to submit an application.
| | 05:27 | But I did talk with them and it's pretty decent.
| | 05:31 | One that's similar to them is called
BookBaby, and these people do say exactly
| | 05:34 | how 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
| | 05:43 | them then it's, like, $19 a year, or $9
a year. You can find out more here.
| | 05:48 | But what I like is that you can
upload an EPUB, but they will also make it
| | 05:52 | available for the Kindle, and the Nook,
and the Sony Reader, so they're an
| | 05:56 | aggregator for the Sony Reader bookstore.
And they have a very nice ePublishing
| | 06:00 | Guide that you might to
download and learn some things from.
| | 06:03 | So if you're considering going with an
aggregator I think it's worth your time
| | 06:06 | to investigate at least two
or three of these companies.
| | 06:09 | You want to make sure that they can
take your EPUB file, and that they have a
| | 06:13 | good track record of being honest
and upfront with all the authors and
| | 06:17 | publishers that they work with, that
they are responsive to your inquiries, and
| | 06:21 | that they've been around for a while.
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| Selling from your own web site or ecommerce site| 00:00 | There's 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 could always sell it on your own Web site.
| | 00:13 | So create your EPUBS, and write up some
instructions for people about how to
| | 00:18 | read the EPUB, point them to some eReaders,
or to Ibis reader or something like that.
| | 00:24 | 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 the screen.
| | 00:32 | eSellerate is a Web site 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, and then you just link to
| | 00:51 | the eSellerate site and create your own store.
| | 00:54 | I will show you couple of examples in a bit.
| | 00:56 | A competitor of 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
| | 01:15 | so that when people purchase it they can
download it from that site, that's what
| | 01:18 | you are looking for.
| | 01:20 | I did a search on Kagi and I found
here is an example of somebody who's
| | 01:23 | selling EPUBS using the Kagi store.
Systems let you modify what the store
| | 01:30 | looks like quite a bit, and really
customize it, or you can even integrate it
| | 01:33 | into your own Web site if you'd like, rather
than sending somebody to an outside service.
| | 01:38 | Here's another publisher that's using
eSellerate: Take Control. And here's their
| | 01:42 | 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 book
| | 01:55 | page, and we have lots of great
information. And if we want to buy this, you
| | 01:59 | click Buy Ebook, and it brings you to
the eSellerate store page, where the
| | 02:05 | purchaser can enter in their name
and their credit card number, and then
| | 02:08 | download the Ebook.
| | 02:10 | In fact, on the blog that I co-host,
indesignsecrets.com, we have a store here
| | 02:15 | where we are reselling PDF Ebooks in
Our eSellerate Store. So if you want to
| | 02:19 | purchase this book, then you just find
the link to purchase it, and it brings
| | 02:26 | you right to our eSellerate store with the
full description, and buttons to buy it, and so on.
| | 02:30 | So once you have your EPUB ready, you
are not beholden to these resellers. You
| | 02:35 | 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
| | 02:41 | with, 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| 00:01 | Well, thank you so much
for sticking through this.
| | 00:04 | 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.
| | 00:13 | And I'm sure that, you know, a few
months from now, there's going to be all
| | 00:16 | sorts of new things that we can do
with CSS, and EPUBs, and new tags that they
| | 00:20 | support, and ways to sell these.
| | 00:22 | So let me tell you about some more
resources that will help you keep up to
| | 00:27 | date with this field.
| | 00:28 | So there is a good one called Creating
a CSS Style Guide, Hands-On Training.
| | 00:33 | And while you're working with
Dreamweaver in the course, what you learn will
| | 00:36 | apply to any kind of CSS that you
are doing, not just Dreamweaver CSS.
| | 00:40 | There is another course here
called CSS Crash Course by SitePoint.
| | 00:45 | And although it's a little old, I think
it looks like a very accessible course
| | 00:49 | for people who are not familiar with CSS at all.
| | 00:52 | How to format text, what is a selector,
what's inheritance; all that stuff, and
| | 00:57 | it applies to EPUBs.
| | 00:58 | Another course on lynda.com is from my
friend Jim Maivald, who does this great
| | 01:03 | video title on Publishing Workflows with XML.
| | 01:06 | And XML is very closely
associated with the EPUB format.
| | 01:10 | All those files were XML files, and then
of course, we are dealing with HTML files.
| | 01:15 | So if you want to go a little bit
further in setting up some sort of automated
| | 01:19 | production that would result in EPUB,
you would definitely want to start
| | 01:23 | learning about XML and inDesign right here.
| | 01:27 | Outside of lynda.com, here are some
other places where you can keep up to date in this
| | 01:31 | quickly changing field of ours.
| | 01:33 | One of my favorite ones is on twitter.com.
| | 01:36 | Now even if you don't Tweet, even if
you don't have an account, you can go to
| | 01:41 | search.twitter.com, and do a search
for this hash tag: eproduction, eprdctn.
| | 01:46 | The hash tag stands for eproduction,
and it's what everybody is tweeting about
| | 01:53 | when their tweet has to do with posting
links having to do with creating EPUBs,
| | 01:58 | they ask questions about Kindle books,
and all sorts of stuff from the very
| | 02:02 | geekiest, to simply just selling
or working for a publishing company.
| | 02:07 | You'll find that there is a lot of
information about metadata, a lot of talk
| | 02:11 | about ISBN numbers, and resellers.
It's a wonderful place to get more
| | 02:15 | information and to ask questions.
| | 02:18 | And an online resource that I've
mentioned a few times during the course of this
| | 02:22 | title is mobileread.com.
| | 02:25 | I've talked about their
forums, and also their Wiki.
| | 02:28 | Their wiki, if you remember, was the
place where it listed every single eReader
| | 02:31 | device, and the pixels, and the resolution.
| | 02:34 | It's a volunteer organization that
people just post all the information they
| | 02:38 | can, and also the forums
themselves are fantastic places.
| | 02:42 | Whether you're simply a consumer of
EPUBs, or you're an author, or especially
| | 02:46 | though, if you keep going down here, if
you want to learn about eBook software.
| | 02:50 | So, for example, Calibre, which is a
fantastic program for converting from one
| | 02:54 | format to another, and that's also an eBook
library manager; they do all of
| | 02:59 | their tech support here.
| | 03:00 | And so does Sigil, which
I've mentioned a few times.
| | 03:03 | EPUBReader is a Firefox add-on that I demoed.
| | 03:07 | And then there's this whole section
called E-Book Formats, with all these
| | 03:10 | different formats that we've been
talking about, and a place to ask your
| | 03:14 | questions with other colleagues who are
dealing with the exact same issues as you are.
| | 03:18 | And they may have already
figured out how to solve those problems.
| | 03:22 | This is a fantastic resource, and I hope
to see you there. That's mobileread.com.
| | 03:28 | Now I know that I have
mentioned a number of times this company
| | 03:30 | Threepress Consulting.
| | 03:32 | They are the people who have their Web
site where you can upload your eBook for
| | 03:36 | EPUB validation, and they also came up
with the Ibis Reader; they developed it,
| | 03:40 | the online eBook reader.
| | 03:42 | They have a great blog, and
Liza Daly, is one of the owners of
| | 03:46 | Threepress Consulting.
| | 03:47 | She's a luminary in the field, and
this is the blog that I check daily.
| | 03:52 | I want to see daily, what Daly is writing about.
| | 03:54 | Okay, I crack myself up.
| | 03:57 | Another blog that I always check
is this one: PIGS, GOURDS AND WIKIS.
| | 04:01 | Don't ask me why Liz
called it that, but there it is.
| | 04:05 | Liz Castro, wrote a book called EPUB,
Straight to the Point, which is all about
| | 04:10 | how to create EPUBs from
Adobe inDesign and Microsoft Word.
| | 04:13 | She's a coder, through and through.
| | 04:16 | You know, she is well known for writing
the HTML, XHTML, and CSS Visual QuickStart
| | 04:21 | Guides, for Peachpit Press.
| | 04:23 | She's got a really great blog where,
when she discovers something new, she will
| | 04:27 | write about it with really good captions,
and sample files that you can download.
| | 04:31 | Liz is a huge help and a huge
asset to our industry; that's her blog,
| | 04:35 | pigsgourdsandwikis.com.
| | 04:37 | Finally, don't forget to keep up
with me on inDesignSecrets.com.
| | 04:42 | Where I try to write posts having to
do with EPUB, and everything else having
| | 04:45 | to do with InDesign.
| | 04:47 | If you come to indesignsecrets.com, and
you go to Blog Posts, you'll see that we
| | 04:51 | have a section just for EPUBs,
so check that out as well.
| | 04:54 | So thanks again everybody, and
I hope to see you again soon.
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