IntroductionWelcome| 00:04 | Hi! I'm Anne-Marie Concepcion and this is
InDesign CS5 to EPUB, Kindle, and the iPad.
| | 00:11 | This course covers the complete
ebook workflow for getting your InDesign
| | 00:14 | contents into a number of
devices and EPUB reading software.
| | 00:19 | From determining which format you're
planning on using then setting up the
| | 00:23 | original InDesign file to make it EPUB
friendly, to tinkering with the final
| | 00:27 | EPUB in a variety of utilities like
Sigil and oXygen Author, to putting the
| | 00:33 | final file out there for publication
through Amazon's Kindle, Apple's iBookstore,
| | 00:39 | and plenty of third-party sites and options.
| | 00:42 | I'll show you some specifics like
setting up the images and other graphics for
| | 00:46 | best presentation in an EPUB, adding
and editing metadata to your files, and
| | 00:52 | even building custom TOCs and
covers for your final presentation.
| | 00:55 | ebook publishing is a great way to
get your work to your waiting audience.
| | 01:00 | So let's get started with
InDesign CS5 to EPUB, Kindle and iPad.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | If you are a premium member of the
lynda.com Online Training Library or if
| | 00:05 | you're watching this tutorial on a DVD
ROM, then you have access to the Exercise
| | 00:09 | Files used throughout this title.
| | 00:11 | So sometimes the exercise
files are just an InDesign file.
| | 00:15 | Just open that up in InDesign.
| | 00:16 | A lot of times the files that we are
using are EPUB files and they are opening
| | 00:21 | up in my default EPUB Reader, which
is Adobe Digital Editions, probably the
| | 00:25 | same thing for you.
| | 00:26 | During the title I'll be letting you
know where to download all these different
| | 00:29 | utilities that we will be using.
| | 00:30 | And when we actually get into editing
the contents of EPUB files, then you'll
| | 00:36 | see that we're dealing with a lot of
text files like XHTML files and XML files.
| | 00:42 | And you can use any kind text editor
that you'd like and I bounce around between
| | 00:47 | a few of my favorite ones.
| | 00:48 | If you don't have access to the
Exercise Files, you can follow along from
| | 00:52 | scratch or with your own assets.
| | 00:54 | Let's get started.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
1. Overview of ebooksWhat is an ebook?| 00:00 | What is an ebook exactly and is
an ebook the same thing as an EPUB?
| | 00:06 | I want to actually talk about the
different formats or meanings of the word
| | 00:10 | "ebook," so that we can narrow it down
a little bit, because I think a lot of
| | 00:14 | people are kind of unclear on the concept.
| | 00:16 | And in this video title it's
not about ebooks in general.
| | 00:20 | It's specifically about certain kinds of ebooks.
| | 00:24 | To me an ebook is the same
thing as, say, a digital book.
| | 00:27 | It is a book that is an electronic
file that can be attached to an email, for
| | 00:32 | example, and sent to somebody
or that can exist on a website.
| | 00:37 | A book can even be a website.
| | 00:38 | That would be an ebook as well.
| | 00:40 | But I think when people think about
ebooks, they are thinking of certain
| | 00:43 | formats and the three main
formats I have up here on the screen.
| | 00:48 | It's the same book, Alice's Adventures
in Wonderland, which is in the public
| | 00:52 | domain now, and it's actually existing
here on screen in three different ebook types:
| | 00:58 | as an EPUB, as a PDF and as a MOBI file.
| | 01:03 | And MOBI file might be more
familiar to you as a Kindle file.
| | 01:08 | This is the Kindle format.
| | 01:09 | PDF I am sure is very familiar to
you what a PDF is, and an EPUB might be
| | 01:14 | unfamiliar but it's actually the
main thrust of this video title.
| | 01:17 | An EPUB is an open source ebook format.
| | 01:21 | We are going to talk about all three right
now first, just so you can see the difference.
| | 01:25 | If I open up this PDF, it opens up in a
Reader on this computer, and the PDF is
| | 01:31 | a digital version of this book.
| | 01:34 | With a PDF if you resize the screen,
the type doesn't rewrap or anything like that.
| | 01:40 | You can get the type to be smaller.
| | 01:42 | If we come up here and press the big
old minus sign, the type can get smaller
| | 01:46 | and it can get larger, but basically
what's happening is the whole page is
| | 01:50 | getting small and getting large.
| | 01:52 | So it's kind of like the
layout is frozen into position.
| | 01:56 | The layout looks beautiful.
| | 01:57 | It's got great looking titles and
great looking images and wraps some things
| | 02:01 | like that, but essentially,
a PDF is like a frozen page.
| | 02:04 | Now, let's come back
here and talk about an EPUB.
| | 02:08 | An EPUB I happen to have
open in Barnes & Noble ereader.
| | 02:14 | So if you have like say a Nook, this
might be how Alice in Wonderland would look.
| | 02:19 | Now an EPUB is a re-flowable format.
| | 02:22 | If I make the screen smaller or larger,
look at the line endings. They are changing.
| | 02:28 | The type isn't changing.
| | 02:29 | The size of the type isn't changing,
but the line endings are changing.
| | 02:33 | What that means is that an EPUB is a
format that can be reflowed depending on
| | 02:39 | the size of the screen of the
device in which it's being read and it's
| | 02:42 | critically important.
| | 02:43 | If you try to read that big old
PDF on a little iPhone, it might be
| | 02:48 | impossible, because the type to be too
small to read, or you would constantly
| | 02:51 | be scrolling from line to line.
| | 02:54 | I can have this ebook open on an iPhone.
| | 02:56 | We are going to have it
open on a Kindle previewer.
| | 02:59 | This is a Kindle for iPhone Previewer,
so this happens to be the MOBI file,
| | 03:03 | because it's the Kindle format, and if I go
from page to page, you can see that this
| | 03:08 | is what the ebook would look like on an iPhone.
| | 03:12 | So, it has reflowed. Tthe line endings
are much shorter but you can read it.
| | 03:15 | You can read it very easily.
| | 03:17 | You can still change the
size of the type if you want.
| | 03:20 | You can make it larger or smaller, but
the fact it is a MOBI format, which is
| | 03:26 | very similar to the EPUB format,
means that it's re-flowable.
| | 03:29 | Those are the kind of ebooks we're
going to be talking about in this title.
| | 03:33 | Is how to make this re-flowable format.
| | 03:35 | It is the wave of the future.
| | 03:37 | Now, don't get me wrong.
| | 03:38 | I love PDFs and I would love for a way
for us to be able to get this kind of
| | 03:43 | reflowable text out of
a PDF and still look good.
| | 03:47 | Unfortunately, we're not there yet.
| | 03:49 | So it seems at this point PDFs will be
for one type of digital ebook but the
| | 03:53 | vast majority of actual books that are
being sold like on the Apple iBookstore
| | 03:58 | and on the Kindle are going
to be this re-flowable format.
| | 04:02 | Here I have Kindle reader for the
Macintosh, and here I can make it as large or
| | 04:09 | small as I want and you can see how it reflows.
| | 04:11 | So I don't know how often people will
be reading an EPUB on their computer,
| | 04:16 | but you can. Which brings me to something
else that people ask me about all the time.
| | 04:21 | All right so that's what a digital book
is and that's what an EPUB or Kindle is,
| | 04:25 | that it's reflowable book,
but where do you read them?
| | 04:28 | You can read EPUBs and Kindle
books in lots of different places.
| | 04:32 | You can read them and dedicated devices,
like a Kindle or like a Nook or a Sony
| | 04:36 | Reader or an Apple iPad. You can read them on
the computer as well and you can mix and match.
| | 04:42 | If you're on the computer especially,
if you have the Creative Suite installed,
| | 04:46 | you're probably going to be looking
at EPUBs in Adobe Digital Editions.
| | 04:50 | This is the free utility, kind of like
Adobe Reader is for PDFs, Adobe Digital
| | 04:56 | Editions, or ADE, is for EPUB files,
and we will be using Adobe Digital
| | 05:01 | Editions a lot during this title as a
quick proofer for the EPUBs that we are
| | 05:05 | exporting out of InDesign.
| | 05:08 | Digital Editions can open EPUB
files and it can open PDF files.
| | 05:12 | We will mainly be working with EPUB files.
| | 05:15 | Now, if you want to read EPUBs on
some sort of external device, you could
| | 05:20 | download some software. Like for
example, Stanza is a very well-known EPUB
| | 05:24 | reader for lots of different
devices that you can download and install.
| | 05:27 | It doesn't run on the desktop. Or if
you have an Android phone, you could
| | 05:32 | download this ereader, which is very
popular. So you just install this software
| | 05:36 | and then you can open up any kind of EPUB.
| | 05:38 | You can even read an EPUB in your browser.
| | 05:41 | So anywhere that you have a browser
on your computer or on an iPad or an
| | 05:45 | Android, you can go to ibisreader.com and
you can actually open an EPUB directly in here.
| | 05:50 | You can even organize your
library of EPUBs this way.
| | 05:54 | If you go to Amazon.com, now Amazon.com
uses a different format for re-flowable
| | 06:00 | ebooks called the MOBI format.
| | 06:02 | So we are going to be talking about the
EPUB format and the MOBI format in this title.
| | 06:07 | If you want to purchase an ebook from
the Amazon Kindle store, it's going to be
| | 06:11 | downloaded in MOBI format.
| | 06:12 | So how do you read that?
| | 06:13 | Well, Adobe Digital Editions can't open
that, neither can Stanza, but luckily Amazon
| | 06:19 | has created all sorts of
free Kindle reading apps.
| | 06:22 | So if you go to Amazon.com and in the
Kindle file menu, you choose Free Kindle
| | 06:26 | Reading Apps, you'll see that you don't
even need a Kindle to read the digital
| | 06:30 | books that you purchase on Amazon.com.
| | 06:32 | You can install the Kindle Reader app
on your iPhone, on your PC, your Mac,
| | 06:37 | Blackberry and so on.
| | 06:38 | Another easy way to access
EPUBs are directly in your browser.
| | 06:43 | Firefox has a plug-in that lets you
open up the EPUBs directly in the browser.
| | 06:47 | And so you can see it's still reflowable,
I can resize the window and the text
| | 06:51 | reflows, but I can still access the
chapters and so on, just as though I were
| | 06:57 | reading it on an external device.
| | 06:59 | So hope you have a better
idea of what an EPUB is.
| | 07:01 | We are not going to be
talking about PDFs, so you go away.
| | 07:05 | We are going to be mainly talking
about EPUBs, which is the default almost I
| | 07:10 | guess you could say generic open
source format for re-flowable ebooks, and the
| | 07:17 | MOBI format is very closely related to that.
| | 07:20 | We are going to be talking about the
MOBI or the Kindle format in its own
| | 07:23 | chapter later on, but as you learn,
once you create a really good EPUB, then it's
| | 07:27 | not that difficult to convert it
to the Kindle or the MOBI format.
| | 07:31 | So we are going to be really
concentrating on working with EPUBs out of InDesign.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Where do I find and sell ebooks?| 00:00 | The entire ebook marketplaces
like a bizarre from the olden days.
| | 00:04 | There are all sorts of places.
| | 00:06 | There are huge established entities
where you can peruse and download and
| | 00:10 | purchase ebooks, and then there are
young upstarts and everything in between.
| | 00:15 | So let's talk about where you find ebooks and
how you can sell your ebooks. Just an overview.
| | 00:21 | Of course, we're going to be devoting
a lot more time later on this video to
| | 00:24 | exactly how do you get
your ebooks up here for sale.
| | 00:27 | First of all, if you just want to start
downloading some EPUBs, here is a really
| | 00:31 | good place to try is epubbooks.com.
| | 00:34 | You can see, they have a tone of free
books that you can download and there
| | 00:37 | is also places where you, as an author, can
search for ebooks and you can buy ebooks as well.
| | 00:42 | Another big one is feedbooks.
| | 00:44 | A lot of EPUB readers that you can
download like Stanza, they have a
| | 00:49 | links directly to feedbooks, so
that you can go ahead and search for
| | 00:53 | EPUBs and download them.
| | 00:55 | A lot of free ones and a lot of ones for sale.
| | 00:58 | And Project Gutenberg is probably the
most famous source for locating free books
| | 01:03 | that are in the public domain, and
most of the books on Project Gutenberg are
| | 01:07 | being converted to the EPUB format.
| | 01:09 | A lot of them already available as HTML,
but slowly but surely they're becoming
| | 01:13 | EPUBs, so you can download them to
Adobe Digital Editions or Stanza or any of
| | 01:18 | the other ereaders that can read an EPUB.
| | 01:20 | Of course, one of the big kahunas in
the marketplace is Amazon.com and this
| | 01:25 | where people download a ton of ebooks.
| | 01:28 | But anything you download from
Amazon.com, remember, cannot be opened in any
| | 01:33 | device that doesn't read MOBI files or in
any software that doesn't read MOBI files.
| | 01:38 | So you can't get any book from the
Kindle store and open it up say in Adobe
| | 01:42 | Digital Editions or Stanza. You'd
have to use one of Amazon's own Kindle
| | 01:47 | ereaders, but it's not that difficult
to get your book into the Kindle store at all,
| | 01:51 | as you'll find out later on in this title.
| | 01:55 | Here is another place the people are
getting EPUBs from. This is the Sony Reader Store.
| | 01:59 | So a lot of device manufacturers, like
Sony, which has a line of really nice
| | 02:03 | ebook readers, have their own bookstore
that people can purchase books from and
| | 02:07 | that you, as an author or publisher,
can get your books listed here.
| | 02:10 | Such as Barnes & Noble.
| | 02:11 | They are called NOOKbooks for the Nook
ereader an ereader device that they sell.
| | 02:18 | And how about Google ebooks?
| | 02:20 | They just started up a couple months
ago. Google books has been around for a
| | 02:24 | while where you know you could see
scans of books, but they are starting
| | 02:27 | their own ebook store.
| | 02:29 | So if you go to books.google.com/ebooks,
you can see all these ebooks. A lot of
| | 02:34 | them are for sale and then there's a
lot of free ones and they are all in there
| | 02:37 | re-flowable EPUB format.
| | 02:39 | You don't have to be a big
store or a big organization.
| | 02:43 | You could just have your
own little publishing company.
| | 02:45 | Like my friend Adam Engst and his wife
Tony run "Take Control Ebooks," which is a
| | 02:50 | series of really great books that
are not too large, not too small.
| | 02:54 | And they help you out a lot if you're
working on anything on the Macintosh
| | 02:57 | or with publishing.
| | 02:59 | They started out as PDFs, but they're
also converting all their ebooks to EPUB as well,
| | 03:04 | so you could download them to
like a small device and Android or iPhone
| | 03:08 | and read them on that little screen as well.
| | 03:10 | So when you think she work on and find
an EPUB, there is a huge number of places
| | 03:15 | where you can find EPUBs.
| | 03:16 | That means that there is a huge
opportunity for authors and publishers to get
| | 03:20 | your digital ebooks in front of readers' faces.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
2. EPUB Production BasicsUnderstanding the EPUB file format| 00:00 | Now that you've finished your
whirlwind tour of the ebook and EPUB
| | 00:04 | ecosystem, how you find them, how you
read them, I think it's time that we
| | 00:08 | take a look under the hood.
| | 00:10 | It's important especially since you
are going to be a person converting your
| | 00:14 | InDesign documents to EPUB, to understand
really what is an EPUB, what's inside an EPUB.
| | 00:20 | I think I mentioned an EPUB is
essentially like a little website, then ereader
| | 00:25 | read that little website, but what do I
mean exactly? And that's what I want to
| | 00:28 | show you in this video.
| | 00:30 | I'm just going to go over it briefly.
| | 00:32 | Definitely later on in the title we're
going to take a very close look at the
| | 00:36 | contents of an EPUB file.
| | 00:38 | But I think it's good to know this
up front, so we know, "know thy enemy."
| | 00:41 | Know what we're dealing with.
| | 00:42 | So here we have a couple of EPUBs in this
exercise folder and I have one running here.
| | 00:47 | This is the Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland that we looked at in the last chapter.
| | 00:51 | So there is image and there's text
and so on, right. Not that big a deal.
| | 00:57 | But actually this EPUB here-- EPUB is
a compressed collection of files kind
| | 01:03 | of like a zip file.
| | 01:05 | In fact, you can change the extension
from EPUB to ZIP and then decompress the
| | 01:11 | ZIP into its component files.
| | 01:13 | I've done that here in
this folder called z-opened.
| | 01:16 | So I actually renamed EPUB to
ZIP and then I decompressed it.
| | 01:21 | Now if you're on a Mac it's a crapshoot
whether or not it's going to work if you
| | 01:25 | just double-click it.
| | 01:26 | I've noticed that in later versions
of the OS, it doesn't work and you need
| | 01:30 | to use like StuffIt Expander to do that,
to actually unzip it, but on a PC, it's a no-brainer.
| | 01:36 | This is actually how you get into the EPUBs.
| | 01:38 | So anyway, you don't have to worry about
that because I already expanded it for you.
| | 01:43 | So inside the folder, this is
the contents of that EPUB file.
| | 01:47 | We have this strange little XML file
and we have a folder with another XML file
| | 01:53 | and then we have this strangely
named folder OEBPS, which actually stand
| | 01:58 | for something significant that you
don't need to worry about, along with a
| | 02:01 | couple other strange little files and
then a folder called content with a
| | 02:06 | series of XML files.
| | 02:08 | Now, each one of these XML files is
actually a chapter in the EPUB book and
| | 02:15 | then inside data, we have a
series of JPEGs and PNG files.
| | 02:19 | So if you select one of these, you can see
that these are the images inside the EPUB file.
| | 02:26 | So, when you ask an EPUB reader, like
Adobe Digital Editions or Barnes & Noble
| | 02:31 | NOOK reader or Apple iBooks, to open
up an EPUB, what it's doing is it's
| | 02:36 | loading these XML files with the contents of
the book and then it's showing it to you as text.
| | 02:44 | And when the book calls for an
image, it's showing you an image.
| | 02:48 | Just as how a web site is a text file,
the HTML file is a text file that links to
| | 02:53 | images, and that's how images
appear within the web page browser.
| | 02:56 | I did the same thing to this other
EPUB that I have in this folder called
| | 03:02 | SFHistory, and you can see it right here.
| | 03:05 | So this is San Francisco History.
| | 03:07 | It's just an EPUB that we will be working
with quite a bit in this title, a very simple one.
| | 03:12 | When I expand it, you can see
that it has a same sort of structure as
| | 03:18 | Alice's. It looks slightly different
inside the OEBPS folder, and because this is
| | 03:25 | how InDesign exports EPUB files.
| | 03:28 | It creates XHTML files for every
chapter and then it puts the images into a
| | 03:33 | separate images folder and
exports them as JPEGs or as GIFs.
| | 03:38 | And this is what we're going to be
spending a lot of time on in this title is
| | 03:40 | exactly how it does this and
how to optimize what it exports.
| | 03:44 | But this is essentially what an EPUB is, is
that each one of these files is like a web page.
| | 03:49 | Let's go ahead and take a
quick look at this in Safari.
| | 03:52 | So this is the Contents page with links.
| | 03:54 | Let's take another look.
| | 03:55 | Let's just grab this guy.
| | 04:00 | Okay, so this is like a chapter
inside the EPUB and it's actually just a
| | 04:04 | standalone XHTML file.
| | 04:07 | So I'd hope that you can see that
EPUB readers are kind of like little web
| | 04:11 | browsers and then what it is that
you're creating out of InDesign is like a
| | 04:14 | little miniature web site.
| | 04:16 | So, if you're starting with an InDesign
document that's been designed for print
| | 04:20 | and you're trying to create
a little web site out of it,
| | 04:23 | that is a challenge in creating a
good-looking EPUB out of InDesign.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| How does an INDD file become an EPUB file?| 00:00 | So the InDesign to EPUB workflow
is a series of iterative steps
| | 00:05 | and there are some edits you do in InDesign,
some edits you do in an EPUB editor, and you're
| | 00:10 | always checking to make sure
that it's working along the way.
| | 00:12 | So let me give you an overview of how
this works and rest assured that we're
| | 00:16 | going to be examining each of these
steps in detail throughout this title.
| | 00:20 | So first of all we're
starting with an InDesign file.
| | 00:23 | By the way, EPUBs can be created from
Microsoft Word files, from HTML files, but
| | 00:27 | of course we're starting
with the pinnacle InDesign.
| | 00:31 | I'm going to talk about some things in
the InDesign file that translate already
| | 00:35 | EPUB and some things that don't and the
best ways to prepare your InDesign file for
| | 00:39 | an optimum EPUB export.
| | 00:41 | So there is some tweaking that you're
going to need to do to that InDesign file
| | 00:45 | In fact you probably find yourself if
you've designed it for print doing a Save As,
| | 00:49 | and then really tweaking
it heavily for your EPUB export.
| | 00:53 | Then inside InDesign there is a command
to Export to EPUB format, depending on
| | 00:58 | the version that you have, it might be
called Export for Digital Editions, which
| | 01:02 | is the name of the default utility that
Adobe ships with for viewing EPUBs and
| | 01:07 | I showed that in the previous video.
Or might be called Export for EPUB, but
| | 01:10 | even then the dialog box still says
Digital Editions Export Options, so
| | 01:15 | they're synonymous.
| | 01:16 | You end up with an EPUB file that opens
up in your default EPUB Previewer, which
| | 01:20 | as I said is probably Adobe Digital
Editions, and you use that as a rough proof.
| | 01:25 | Because ADE, Adobe Digital Editions,
really isn't a 100% accurate previewer of
| | 01:30 | what it's going to look like
say on iBooks or on a Nook.
| | 01:34 | The situation is similar to
web browsers and web sites.
| | 01:37 | You create a web site and it looks one
way in Firefox and quite different in
| | 01:41 | Internet Explorer for example.
| | 01:43 | That's what happens with
ereaders when they open up these files.
| | 01:47 | So we use ADE as a rough proof to make
sure that all your images came in and all
| | 01:51 | your text came in and that they are
in the right order as a rough proof.
| | 01:55 | At this point you probably want to
validate it and validating is an important step.
| | 02:00 | It's a free service that I'll be
talking about in a video, that checks your EPUB
| | 02:04 | file to make sure that it adheres to the
standards set forth for all EPUB files,
| | 02:09 | that the links are working like, that
the required files are there, and so on.
| | 02:13 | It's important because when you are
ready to sale this, when you are ready to
| | 02:17 | distribute it to the Barnes & Noble
store, the Sony Reader Store, the Apple
| | 02:20 | iBookstore, they will not
accept your EPUB unless it validates.
| | 02:23 | So it's a good idea to start now to
make sure that what got exported from
| | 02:27 | InDesign will validate and then
when we go on to the next step, which is
| | 02:30 | editing the innards of the EPUB file,
you'll know that if it doesn't validate
| | 02:34 | in the future it wasn't something from
InDesign. Yu know, you probably forgot to
| | 02:37 | close a tag or something.
| | 02:39 | So that's the next step, is that we are
going to open up the EPUB file and edit it.
| | 02:42 | And I showed what an EPUB file
looks like inside in the previous video.
| | 02:46 | So we're going to do some simple or
maybe complex editing of the XHTML files and
| | 02:51 | the CSS files. I'll be talking about
different ways to do that and some common
| | 02:55 | fixes that you might want to do.
You add metadata to the files and so on.
| | 02:58 | It's actually kind of interesting.
| | 03:00 | And then of course you want
to prove and validate again.
| | 03:04 | So it's like I said.
| | 03:05 | It's a series of iterative steps, but
at this point when you're proofing,
| | 03:08 | you probably want to go beyond Adobe
Digital Editions and actually get it say onto
| | 03:12 | your iPad and proof it in
iBooks or put it on a Nook.
| | 03:16 | In other words you want to preview it in
something closer to what your customers
| | 03:19 | are going to be looking at to
make sure it works there as well.
| | 03:22 | Finally when you're happy with how it
looks, you do a final validation, which
| | 03:26 | again is important, because it's just
going to be kicked back to you if it
| | 03:29 | doesn't validate, and then you upload it.
| | 03:31 | You upload it to your web site if you're
going to sell it by yourself on your own web site.
| | 03:35 | You upload it to the Apple iBookstore
or to a third-party aggregator who is
| | 03:39 | helping you distribute this EPUB in the
different venues that we will be talking
| | 03:43 | about later on in this title.
| | 03:44 | And if you're going to be selling it on
the Amazon Kindle Store, you can upload
| | 03:49 | that EPUB directly to the Kindle
Store and they'll convert it to the Kindle
| | 03:52 | format for you, because Amazon uses a
slightly different format. They don't use
| | 03:56 | EPUB; they use something called MOBI.
| | 03:58 | Now I have a chapter in this title all
about converting to MOBI files, because I
| | 04:02 | really think it's better if you
convert it yourself on your Desktop and then
| | 04:05 | preview it in the Kindle Previewer, and
even put it on a Kindle and see what it
| | 04:09 | looks like before you upload it.
| | 04:10 | But we'll get to that.
| | 04:11 | The main thing is that we start with a
valid EPUB, and then at the very end we
| | 04:16 | upload it to the reseller, and that
in a nutshell is the basic InDesign to ebook workflow.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| What can and can't be converted from INDD to EPUB| 00:00 | I think it's always interesting to take
an existing InDesign document, one that
| | 00:05 | you're perhaps thinking of converting to EPUB,
| | 00:07 | and if you've never done this before
so just go ahead and export it to EPUB.
| | 00:11 | Because it's very instructive
what gets included and what doesn't.
| | 00:15 | And knowing what will work and what
won't work will help you in the future as
| | 00:18 | you work with other InDesign documents.
| | 00:21 | So I have here a beautifully designed
file created by Nigel French, another
| | 00:26 | lynda.com author on
InDesign topics and other topics.
| | 00:30 | And as you can see it contains one
long threaded story with a number of
| | 00:34 | sidebars, pictures, picture credits, a table.
| | 00:38 | So it's beautifully designed.
| | 00:39 | It's not anything
spectacularly complex or anything.
| | 00:42 | But let's just go ahead and
export it to EPUB and see what happens.
| | 00:46 | So I'll just go to the File menu, go
down to Export for, and choose EPUB.
| | 00:52 | Now I've gone ahead and assigned a keyboard
shortcut Command+E or that would be Ctrl+E on a PC.
| | 00:58 | Because I do this constantly throughout
this title I went ahead and assigned a
| | 01:02 | special keyboard shortcut to it.
| | 01:03 | And go ahead and decide on a
location where you want to save it.
| | 01:06 | Click Save and then just go ahead click Export.
| | 01:09 | Don't worry about any of
these options in here, all right.
| | 01:11 | I've already done that and I've opened
it up in Adobe Digital Editions, which is
| | 01:17 | the default EPUB viewer that
you should already have installed.
| | 01:20 | And if you don't, you can go ahead and
download it from the URL shown here.
| | 01:24 | It's available for Macintosh and Windows.
| | 01:27 | And as you can see, it doesn't look very
much like what we were looking at in InDesign.
| | 01:32 | As I you know flip through
it it's kind of, what the heck?
| | 01:35 | So there I see text.
| | 01:38 | I see some formatting.
| | 01:40 | I am not seeing the images.
| | 01:43 | Where the images? Oh! Here's... wll.
| | 01:45 | I guess that was the table.
| | 01:47 | There is a bit of work to do in
your InDesign documents and then in
| | 01:53 | the resulting EPUB.
| | 01:54 | And that's what future chapters are about.
| | 01:56 | But just as an overview I want to
talk about in your InDesign documents
| | 02:01 | what does get transferred, what
doesn't get transferred, and what gets
| | 02:05 | partially transferred.
| | 02:06 | And this is not going to
be on the test or anything.
| | 02:08 | So just sit back and relax.
| | 02:09 | First of all, you know in general
all the text that's on your page gets
| | 02:13 | exported in the EPUB export.
| | 02:15 | You can't say you now
only export this one story.
| | 02:19 | I wish you could, but you can't.
| | 02:21 | All the text, all the captions, all the
sidebars, and so on gets exported, except
| | 02:27 | for any text that is from the
master page, like down here.
| | 02:33 | Anything that's on a master page that
has not been overridden on the document
| | 02:37 | page does not get included in the EPUB export.
| | 02:40 | Which is a good thing, because normally
you don't want running footers, running
| | 02:43 | headers, page numbers, because they
don't make any sense in an EPUB reader.
| | 02:47 | All these devices like the Nook and
iPad and so on, they put their own
| | 02:51 | little running header and running
footer, and page numbers, you know it makes
| | 02:55 | no sense in an EPUB because
you're constantly reflowing it.
| | 02:59 | So if you did put page numbers
individually on every page, you'd probably want to
| | 03:04 | get rid of them, or you know, send them
to the master page or something like that.
| | 03:08 | The same is true by the way for images.
| | 03:11 | Any images that are on your pages
get included in the EPUB export.
| | 03:15 | And you can't say just include this one
and that one, or you can't very easily.
| | 03:20 | Now optionally it will also bring
along the formatting of your images.
| | 03:24 | So in other words, it will maintain
the same crop, the same scaling, and any
| | 03:29 | kind of edge effects to the image frame.
| | 03:32 | So if you apply a stroke, or if it
has a drop shadow, those get included.
| | 03:36 | And that's quite different than the text
frames because what doesn't come across
| | 03:40 | is anything special that you
have done to the text frames.
| | 03:43 | In fact the text frames
themselves don't get exported.
| | 03:46 | The text just flows and you can think of
like the ebook reader as one big text frame.
| | 03:50 | So only the contents get exported.
| | 03:53 | If you've multiple columns, if you've
a stroke on a column, if you've a drop
| | 03:56 | shadow on a text frame, text
insets, all that is ignored.
| | 03:59 | Only the content and the formatting is exported.
| | 04:03 | Not all formatting either.
| | 04:05 | As long as you're reusing styles,
paragraph styles and character styles, all
| | 04:09 | those styles will be part of the EPUB.
| | 04:11 | But sometimes they cannot be replicated in CSS.
| | 04:15 | Your styles are converted to a
cascading style sheet, which is how we
| | 04:19 | format stuff on the web.
| | 04:21 | And there are some things that you can
do in InDesign, many things you can do
| | 04:24 | that you cannot do in CSS.
| | 04:26 | But the style names will appear and your
text will still be tagged with those styles.
| | 04:31 | And we'll be talking a lot more
about that in the future chapter.
| | 04:34 | Interestingly, if you have overset text,
like let's say in this that frame looks
| | 04:38 | like this, all the text gets exported.
| | 04:41 | And if you have auto bullets,
let's go down here, like here.
| | 04:49 | If you have a created text that has
the Auto Bulleting or the Auto Numbering
| | 04:53 | feature in InDesign, then that'll get
converted to auto bullets and auto numbers
| | 04:58 | on the web which is kind of interesting.
| | 05:01 | If you have images or text that is
partially overlapping into the Pasteboard,
| | 05:06 | like say this or that, as long as any
part of it is inside the page the entire
| | 05:13 | block of text, the entire
image, will get exported.
| | 05:16 | If you've anything sitting completely
on the Pasteboard, that gets ignored.
| | 05:20 | So it's a convenient way to, you know,
shove things aside that you don't want
| | 05:24 | included in the EPUB but
you want saved with the file.
| | 05:27 | So in general that's how it works.
| | 05:28 | All text and all images that are part
of the live document pages, not part of
| | 05:33 | the master pages, get
exported and included in the EPUB.
| | 05:37 | What order they appear in, what the
formatting looks like, that's something
| | 05:41 | we'll be covering in future chapters.
| | 05:43 | Now what does not get included
in the EPUB is everything else.
| | 05:46 | For example, not just stuff on the Pasteboard
but also the whole concept of the page size.
| | 05:52 | I've heard people say, "Oh,
| | 05:53 | should I reformat my documents so
that it matches the size of the iPad?"
| | 05:57 | Well no, unless you sort of want to get
a rough preview of what the text might
| | 06:00 | look like on that size but
there's better ways to do that.
| | 06:03 | But the entire concept the page
size or even facing pages, that's completely ignored.
| | 06:08 | All text just gets
exported into one long text frame.
| | 06:13 | Other things that might surprise you
are, for example, do remember that we have
| | 06:17 | a little text frame here of automatically
generated text from the Table of Contents feature.
| | 06:24 | This is completely ignored.
| | 06:26 | If it was generated from creating a table of
contents using this feature, it's ignored.
| | 06:31 | If you actually, you know, create this
yourself or you go into Story Editor and
| | 06:36 | get rid of some of the telltale links
that identified as being part of the table
| | 06:40 | of contents, then it will get included.
| | 06:42 | But automatically to generate a table
of contents and automatically generated
| | 06:46 | indices are also ignored.
| | 06:48 | Your links are not ignored. Links go through.
| | 06:50 | If you make a hyperlink, that works.
| | 06:52 | If you make a cross-
reference link, that sort of works.
| | 06:55 | We'll talk about that later
on, but links get included.
| | 06:58 | No other kind of
interactivity gets included though.
| | 07:00 | You don't get animations.
| | 07:02 | You don't get rollovers. Movies and sound,
| | 07:05 | we're not really going to be
covering that in this video but it's usually
| | 07:09 | something that you add
later on into the EPUB itself.
| | 07:12 | And not all the ereaders will
support embedded rich media.
| | 07:15 | Artwork that you have in your document
that you've created with InDesign tools
| | 07:20 | and that have no content otherwise,
such as this lovely curvy arrow that I
| | 07:25 | created with the Pen tool,
get completely ignored.
| | 07:28 | So if you've created any diagrams
with callouts and arrows and cartoon
| | 07:33 | bubbles and things like
that, all that will be gone.
| | 07:35 | Only the text that's inside there, the
live text, will be included in any images.
| | 07:40 | And I have a video where I talk about
how you can convert InDesign art into
| | 07:44 | something that will be included in the EPUB.
| | 07:47 | If you have arranged various text
frames in the same page, your text and image
| | 07:51 | frames in the same page, the
spacing between them is ignored.
| | 07:56 | So it's not going to add 5 inches of
space in between these two elements.
| | 07:59 | It's going to put them
right up against each other.
| | 08:01 | By the way these soft returns are for the
most part honored when you export to EPUB.
| | 08:07 | And in fact it's probably something
that you might want to do a Search and
| | 08:10 | Replace for because sometimes it can
mess things up if you're trying to force a
| | 08:14 | line break for a particular column width.
| | 08:17 | It's going to force a line break in the
resulting EPUB text, which might look kind of dumb.
| | 08:21 | Again, we'll talk about that later.
| | 08:24 | If you have used multiple returns to
add space, that's all ignored and it gets
| | 08:31 | collapsed into nothing. Just one return.
| | 08:35 | Same thing with space runs.
| | 08:37 | It gets collapsed into one space, so
that into nothing, but just one space.
| | 08:41 | Same thing with tabs.
| | 08:43 | A tab gets converted to a single space.
| | 08:45 | 30 tabs in a row get
converted to a single space.
| | 08:49 | Your tables do make, you remember
that horrible table that we saw.
| | 08:54 | The tables do get exported.
| | 08:57 | But none of the formatting
from the tables gets exported.
| | 09:00 | So you have to actually edit the CSS code to
make it look somewhat like what you want it to look.
| | 09:06 | If you use table dtyles it makes it a
lot easier and again we'll be talking
| | 09:09 | about that as well later on.
| | 09:11 | Any kind of text effects get ignored,
like even something as simple as rotating
| | 09:15 | a text frame 90 degrees. that's ignored.
| | 09:18 | It's just this will still be exported
because it's live text and it's on the page.
| | 09:21 | But it will appear left or right, and
it'll appear in the order of when it was
| | 09:26 | exported, which we'll be getting
in to in lot more detail later on.
| | 09:29 | Once you've done a few of these you
become very familiar with what will be
| | 09:33 | included and what won't be
included in the final EPUB.
| | 09:37 | And you'll be able to take a look at
any InDesign document and already give an
| | 09:41 | estimate of what this is going to look
like and what kind of work you need to
| | 09:44 | do to it in order to replicate its
look a re-flowable EPUB document.
| | 09:49 | And that's what the rest of
this video title is all about.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Preparing an InDesign CS5 Publication for EPUB ExportCreating chapter/page breaks via an InDesign book| 00:00 | One of the first things you'll want to
do with your InDesign file is to set it
| | 00:04 | up in such a way that when you
export to EPUB it automatically splits the
| | 00:08 | InDesign document into
separate chapters that make links.
| | 00:12 | Because all ereaders like Adobe Digital
Editions, the one that we're looking at
| | 00:16 | right now, have a feature called a
navigational table of contents, where they
| | 00:21 | will pick up automatically these
different chapter names and they'll be linked
| | 00:25 | over here on the left.
| | 00:26 | So I can click Early History and it
jumps terms to Early history, Arrival of
| | 00:31 | Europeans, and so on.
| | 00:32 | It's something that you can show and hide,
the navigation pane in this case, from here.
| | 00:37 | But it's something that the software
does automatically so you don't actually
| | 00:40 | have to create a table of
contents yourself within the EPUB.
| | 00:44 | But it doesn't happen so easily.
| | 00:46 | For example, let's take a look at a
couple typical InDesign documents.
| | 00:51 | Here we have a document that has the
contents of the same book in one long
| | 00:56 | story, and the story is
separated by frame breaks or page breaks.
| | 01:01 | So you can see here in San Francisco
Peninsula, if I zoom in in really close
| | 01:05 | with Command or Ctrl+ Plus there is a
little mark down here that indicates
| | 01:09 | that somebody pressed the Enter key to make
the rest of the story continue on the next frame.
| | 01:15 | This is a very typical way
of setting up a long document.
| | 01:19 | Now because I've selected it with the
Selection tool and I have already turned
| | 01:23 | down under Extras > Show Text Threads...
| | 01:25 | Now it says Hide Text Threads, because it's on.
| | 01:28 | You can see how they're all linked together.
| | 01:30 | SO let's export this document to EPUB.
| | 01:33 | I use the keyboard shortcut that I
set up earlier for Export to EPUB.
| | 01:36 | We'll just save it right on the Desktop.
| | 01:40 | And under Settings, just
leave it at the default.
| | 01:43 | It should be based on page layout here.
| | 01:45 | Turn on View eBook after Exporting.
| | 01:48 | Then down in Contents make sure that under
Table of Contents that this is turned off.
| | 01:53 | The settings you make in the Export to
EPUB dialog box will be remembered for
| | 01:58 | next time you use it for this
document, so they're sticky settings.
| | 02:01 | Just click Export, and it should
automatically open in our default EPUB reader.
| | 02:07 | So it looks like the
content made it through fine.
| | 02:09 | Here it starts out with Early History and so on.
| | 02:13 | But they're not separated
into individual chapters.
| | 02:16 | So exporting to EPUB you know know
what happens is that it ignores frame
| | 02:19 | breaks or page breaks.
| | 02:21 | Everything just gets exported into one long
chapter and you don't even see a chapter nam.
| | 02:26 | It's just the name of the InDesign document.
| | 02:28 | So when you export to EPUB, frame
breaks or page breaks are ignored and instead
| | 02:33 | it just exports as one long story.
| | 02:36 | And you don't even see the
name of the chapters appear here.
| | 02:40 | You just see the name of the InDesign document.
| | 02:43 | So we've lost the feature of being able to use
the ereader's navigational table of contents.
| | 02:49 | OK, so you might be thinking "Fine,
I'll go ahead, and I will split this up."
| | 02:53 | So here we have the same document, only each
story is separate stand-alone on each page.
| | 02:58 | They are not threaded together,
Let's go ahead and export this to EPUB.
| | 03:02 | I'm just going to export it back out
to the desktop and I'm checking to make
| | 03:08 | sure that my settings are still
the same as before. Click Export.
| | 03:12 | Same problem.
| | 03:13 | So even if your text isn't
completely separate stand-alone text frames in
| | 03:18 | your document, they are all merged together into
one long chapter when you're exporting to EPUB.
| | 03:24 | So what's the way out of this?
| | 03:26 | One way is to set up your
InDesign document as an InDesign book.
| | 03:31 | You may have noticed back here in
InDesign that under the File menu, under New,
| | 03:36 | you can create a new document,
but you can also create a new book.
| | 03:39 | So you would create a new book and call
it perhaps History of San Francisco and
| | 03:47 | save it out here on the Desktop and click Save.
| | 03:49 | That opens up a Book panel that has a
whole lot of commands in its panel menu
| | 03:54 | including Export Book to EPUB.
| | 03:56 | We're not going to be able to tallk in
detail about all the cool features that
| | 04:01 | are involved in a book.
| | 04:02 | For that I suggest you take a look at
some of the other InDesign titles at
| | 04:05 | lynda.com, especially David Blatner's
CS5 Essential Training, where he covers
| | 04:10 | working with books in detail.
| | 04:12 | So I'll get you started.
| | 04:13 | What you do with the Book panel is
you have to get a collection of InDesign
| | 04:17 | documents in here and the idea is you
would take your long InDesign documents,
| | 04:21 | and you would split it up into
multiple stand-alone documents, each one
| | 04:26 | containing the text from a complete chapter.
| | 04:29 | So for example we would come over here
and we would take the first page worth of
| | 04:34 | content and copy it and create new document.
| | 04:39 | Accept the defaults and paste it in here.
| | 04:43 | I'll save this on the desktop.
| | 04:44 | In fact I'll create a new folder in
here called SF History book files and we
| | 04:51 | will call this the 01_Early History.
| | 04:55 | So you've created a standalone document
that just has one chapter and then the
| | 05:00 | final step is to add that document to
your Book panel, is click the plus symbol
| | 05:04 | down here, locate that
document you want to add, and open it.
| | 05:09 | And then you would do this
successively for each one of the other chapters.
| | 05:13 | Now, I'm not going to go through that right now.
| | 05:14 | I've already set this up for you.
| | 05:16 | I'll close all this, and not saving any changes.
| | 05:20 | We don't need anything saved here.
| | 05:22 | Just to keep things straight.
| | 05:23 | And I'll go back to my exercise files.
| | 05:29 | In this folder I have a
couple different history books.
| | 05:32 | One of them we're just going to use is
just called history book and inside here
| | 05:36 | you can see I've already split this up
into five chapters and then this IMDB
| | 05:40 | file is the file that
opens up the actual Book panel.
| | 05:43 | So you double click this and you will see
that all the chapters are listed in here.
| | 05:48 | Now I'll just go to the history text Book
panel menu and choose Export Book to EPUB.
| | 05:53 | And we'll export it right to the desktop.
| | 05:57 | Again, I'm checking to make sure that
my settings are what I want them to be.
| | 06:01 | And then it's going to view the e-
book after exporting. Click Export.
| | 06:05 | There we have it.
| | 06:06 | So each one of those documents
created a separate chapter in my EPUB.
| | 06:11 | And clicking on them brings
me to the top of that chapter.
| | 06:14 | So that's pretty good.
| | 06:16 | One problem you might see is that maybe
you don't want the chapter's name this.
| | 06:20 | See how they pick up the
actual name of the document itself?
| | 06:24 | You might actually want this to
say, you know, Early History or San
| | 06:27 | Francisco Peninsula.
| | 06:29 | Again, this is something you can
edit yourself in the EPUB and we will be
| | 06:33 | talking about that in another video, But
it's always nice to be able to set this
| | 06:36 | up from the beginning in InDesign.
| | 06:38 | So let's see how to do that.
| | 06:40 | We will go back to InDesign.
| | 06:42 | We don't need to save changes.
| | 06:44 | I'll switch over to the Finder to show
you that in this history book- filenames,
| | 06:50 | what I've done is I've actually renamed
some of the InDesign files, and that's
| | 06:55 | really what you need to
do is to rename the files.
| | 06:58 | Now I didn't rename them all.
| | 06:59 | Four and five are still there.
| | 07:00 | I'm going to open up the IMDB file.
| | 07:03 | So there's Early History,
San Francisco Peninsula.
| | 07:06 | So let's say that this is your situation.
| | 07:08 | Maybe you have some documents in your
book file that aren't named correctly.
| | 07:12 | So how do you rename them?
| | 07:14 | Unfortunately you can't just
click here and rename them.
| | 07:16 | That would be sweet.
| | 07:17 | You need to actually rename them in
the Finder or in Windows Explorer.
| | 07:22 | So to locate this file the easiest way
to go to the Book panel menu and choose
| | 07:26 | Reveal in Finder or it will say
Reveal in Explorer. There it is.
| | 07:31 | And I want to rename this to,
we'll just call it Climate. Do that.
| | 07:36 | Now when I come back here to
InDesign, it says that book is missing.
| | 07:41 | Right, because it just goes by the filename.
| | 07:43 | This is kind of pain and it's always
better to do this before you create the
| | 07:46 | book actually, is to just go
ahead and rename all your documents.
| | 07:50 | But if you need to do it
midstream it's still doable.
| | 07:52 | I'm just going to remove that document
from the book and then add the renamed file.
| | 07:57 | Climate, and so one.
| | 08:01 | Now, they might not appear in the
correct order but you can easily drag and drop
| | 08:04 | them in the order that you want them to be in.
| | 08:07 | So I'll leave that 05_gold as before.
| | 08:09 | I'm going to click in the blank area
down here to make sure that nothing
| | 08:12 | selected, so that all the chapters get
exported, and choose Export Book to EPUB.
| | 08:18 | And save it on the desktop
and replace the existing one.
| | 08:21 | Check our settings,
everything looks great, and export.
| | 08:25 | So now the chapters have
recognizable names, just like any book chapter,
| | 08:30 | and Adobe Digital Editions
automatically picked them up and linked them to
| | 08:34 | the actual documents.
| | 08:35 | It's working great.
| | 08:37 | Oops, we forget the 05_gold won.
| | 08:39 | So it's still linking to the
correct file, but we don't like that name.
| | 08:43 | But I think now after watching this
video, you know how to correct that, right?
| | 08:47 | Just go back to InDesign, select
this, choose Reveal in Finder or
| | 08:52 | Explorer, rename it, come back here,
replace it with the correctly named
| | 08:56 | one and then re-export to EPUB.
| | 08:58 | So that's how you can use the InDesign
book feature to help you create a very
| | 09:02 | nice looking and workable
navigational table of contents.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating chapter breaks via a custom TOC style| 00:00 | So the issue is how do we set up our
InDesign document so that when we export
| | 00:04 | it to the EPUB format, it opens up in
the ereader with the navigational table of
| | 00:09 | contents here on the left that all
ereaders will automatically look for.
| | 00:14 | You can click on any one of these
headings on the left and it jumps to that
| | 00:18 | section of the ebook or to that chapter.
| | 00:20 | It's not how you InDesign
automatically exports EPUBs.
| | 00:23 | I showed one way in a different video
of how you can do this by creating a
| | 00:27 | series of separate InDesign files and
compiling them together in the Book panel.
| | 00:32 | But there's an easier way to do this,
especially if you're starting with a
| | 00:35 | single document, that's only
available in InDesign CS5. Let's take a look.
| | 00:41 | I am in InDesign CS5 and I have a
very simple document open with the
| | 00:45 | content of this book.
| | 00:46 | And as you can see that it's one long
threaded story. I am going to select
| | 00:50 | one of these frames.
| | 00:52 | Kind of hard to see, but there's little
triangles here, or if I turn on the View
| | 00:55 | menu, go to Show Text Threads, you can
see that this is just one long story and
| | 01:01 | you can see the connectors.
| | 01:03 | Now if I export this to EPUB as
is, we're not going to get that
| | 01:07 | navigational table of contents.
| | 01:09 | And let's see that for ourselves.
| | 01:10 | So I'll just press the keyboard shortcut that
I previously assigned to Export to EPUB format.
| | 01:16 | Let's save this out on the Desktop. Click Save.
| | 01:19 | And then in our Digital Editions
Export Options, I want to make sure and turn
| | 01:23 | on View eBook after Exporting so it'll
automatically open in Adobe Digital Editions.
| | 01:29 | And under Contents, I want to make sure
that table of contents is not selected.
| | 01:33 | I click Export and so there is the
problem, that we're not seeing these
| | 01:37 | chapters, and it's one long document.
| | 01:39 | OK, so let's go back.
| | 01:41 | Instead of splitting this up into
separate documents, what we can do is use the
| | 01:44 | power of InDesign's built-
in Table of Contents feature.
| | 01:48 | If you've never built a table of contents
before, don't worry about it. It's very simple.
| | 01:52 | In fact, we're not going to
go all the way through it.
| | 01:54 | You don't even need to include the
actual table of contents in this document.
| | 01:58 | You actually just need to set
up a table of contents style.
| | 02:00 | Kind of like setting up a paragraph
style, but not really applying it to a
| | 02:04 | paragraph, because there is a place in
that Export to EPUB dialog box that lets
| | 02:10 | you choose the table of contents style
that it should use to split this document
| | 02:15 | up into separate chapters.
| | 02:16 | So the first thing to do is to decide
where you want the chapters to start.
| | 02:20 | In this document we want them to
start with each of these yellow subheads.
| | 02:24 | The second thing is to look to see to
make sure that each one of these chapter
| | 02:28 | starts is distinguished by
a specific paragraph style.
| | 02:32 | And it's called Subhead.
| | 02:33 | So this is the same thing that you would
do if you're creating a table of contents.
| | 02:37 | If you want all these to appear in the
table of contents, you have to make sure
| | 02:39 | that they're all styled
with the same style name.
| | 02:42 | So if they're not styled,
then you need to apply the style.
| | 02:45 | Then we go to the Layout menu and we
want to create a table of contents style.
| | 02:49 | Now you can do so directly by going to Table
of Contents, where there is a Save Style button.
| | 02:54 | I am going click Cancel. Or you can
just go to Table of Contents Styles and
| | 02:59 | create it from scratch here.
| | 03:01 | Let's just do it this way.
| | 03:02 | Table of Contents Styles and click New
and we have the same dialog box, except
| | 03:07 | that it knows already that
we want to create a style.
| | 03:09 | We'll call this epub.
| | 03:10 | You don't need to worry about
anything except for which style should be
| | 03:15 | the chapter breaks.
| | 03:16 | We select the style here under Other
Styles, and we're going to click Add, and
| | 03:20 | move it into Include Paragraph Styles.
| | 03:22 | So we're looking for Subhead, select it,
click Add, and that's it. Click OK.
| | 03:28 | And you see that it is saved in our list
of table of contents styles. Click OK.
| | 03:33 | And now we'll Export to EPUB again.
| | 03:34 | I'll use my keyboard shortcuts,
we'll click Save, we're going to replace
| | 03:38 | the existing document.
| | 03:40 | And then the critical thing to do
here after you've created your table of
| | 03:43 | contents style is to tell InDesign to use it.
| | 03:47 | Go to the Contents panel, turn on
Include InDesign TOC Entries, and you have to
| | 03:52 | remember to choose the correct TOC Style.
| | 03:55 | Turn on the other two options
as well and then click Export.
| | 04:00 | And now you can see that each one of
these subheads is a chapter start and
| | 04:04 | we've link to them. Pretty cool, huh?
| | 04:07 | So let's take a look at a document
that's slightly more complicated to see some
| | 04:12 | other things we can do these TOC styles.
| | 04:14 | It's the same document, except that
we also have this section at the end.
| | 04:19 | It's another page with a Colophon
and it's just a standalone frame.
| | 04:23 | Now if we export this to EPUB using the
same TOC style, let's see what happens.
| | 04:29 | First, because this is a new
document we have to create a new TOC style.
| | 04:33 | So I'll click New, I'll call this again
pub, and we want to include the Subhead.
| | 04:39 | Okay, and then we'll Export to EPUB,
to the Desktop, and make sure that under
| | 04:47 | Contents that we have
chosen epub, and click Export.
| | 04:52 | And what happens is that in the
last chapter, these all worked fine,
| | 04:57 | but as you scroll down there is the Colophon.
| | 04:59 | It just ran right into that last chapter,
because remember, separate text frames
| | 05:03 | and frame breaks, all that stuff
is ignored when you export to EPUB.
| | 05:06 | You have to tell InDesign that you
want this to start in its own chapter.
| | 05:11 | You want this to be a link here.
| | 05:13 | And in order to do that you need to
get this style into your TOC Style.
| | 05:18 | So go back to InDesign.
| | 05:19 | It can't be in a TOC style
unless it's already a paragraph style.
| | 05:23 | So of course, we want to check to
see the name of the paragraph style.
| | 05:25 | So I'll click inside the word, look
inside the Paragraph Styles panel, and oh!
| | 05:30 | It doesn't really have the style.
| | 05:31 | it's locally formatted.
| | 05:33 | You definitely want to make it its own style.
| | 05:35 | So I'll go to the Paragraph Styles
panel menu and choose New Paragraph Style.
| | 05:39 | We'll just call this colophon and
Apply Style to Selection. So there it is.
| | 05:45 | And you would do this then for every
other kind of section in your document,
| | 05:49 | whether it's on its own page or existing
in the middle of the text, that you want
| | 05:53 | InDesign to automatically
start a new chapter from.
| | 05:56 | Let's go to Table of Contents Styles and
we'll edit our style to include the new style.
| | 06:04 | So I select it and click Add.
| | 06:06 | Now notice that InDesign automatically
indented this and that's the default behavior,
| | 06:12 | is that as you add multiple paragraph
styles to your TOC, InDesign assumes that
| | 06:16 | they should be sort of like subheadings.
| | 06:18 | And you can see that down here under the
Style details that it's set to be at Level 2.
| | 06:24 | If you're not seeing in the section
by the way, you might be looking at it like
| | 06:27 | this, with More Options as a button.
| | 06:30 | So click More Options so that
you see this expanded down here.
| | 06:34 | For now what we want to do is we want to
make colophon the same level as Subhead.
| | 06:38 | We don't want it indented.
| | 06:40 | So with that entry selected, I choose
Level 1 and that skooches it over. Perfect!
| | 06:46 | Click OK. Okay, and now let's try
exporting this once again to EPUB.
| | 06:52 | I'll replace the existing EPUB and
then in Contents make sure this is
| | 06:56 | selected. Click Export.
| | 06:58 | There we go. Now at the bottom of
The gold rush we don't see it, until we
| | 07:02 | actually click on Colophon,
then we see it, all right?
| | 07:05 | Which is exactly what want to happen.
| | 07:07 | One last thing that I want to talk
about is that sometimes you do want to have
| | 07:11 | multiple levels in your navigational TOC.
| | 07:14 | For example, up here on page 1,
we have some sub-subheads,
| | 07:19 | for lack of a better term, that we would
like these to also be links in the
| | 07:23 | navigational table of contents.
| | 07:25 | But we like them to
appear underneath this subhead.
| | 07:28 | So these sub-subheadings are all styled
with the same style, which is, remember,
| | 07:32 | one of the requirements it's Subhead2.
| | 07:35 | And there's nothing else in this
document, other than these guys that are
| | 07:38 | styled with Subhead2.
| | 07:39 | So we don't have to worry about creating a
whole bunch of chapters that we don't want.
| | 07:41 | Let's edit our table of
contents style to include this.
| | 07:45 | Or we could always create a new table
of contents so we have two different
| | 07:48 | one to choose from.
| | 07:49 | But for now I am just going
to choose that one and edit it.
| | 07:53 | So I want Subhead2 to be underneath the Subhead.
| | 07:56 | So I select Subhead, go down to Subhead2.
| | 07:59 | Choose Add, and it paid no
attention to what I had selected.
| | 08:03 | So instead I am just going
to drag it up, there we go.
| | 08:04 | And I am going to leave it at level 2.
| | 08:09 | So that's still epub, TOC style.
| | 08:11 | Let's export this to EPUB, replacing our
existing one, everything else is still the same.
| | 08:19 | And there we go.
| | 08:20 | So we still have the subheads
are still the main chapter breaks.
| | 08:24 | There's our Colophon, but notice
there's a little plus symbol here indicating
| | 08:27 | that if you click it it's going
to expand into the sub-subheads.
| | 08:31 | And if you click these, it
doesn't start them at the very top.
| | 08:34 | It just gets to that section of the page
which is exactly what we want in this case.
| | 08:39 | If you wanted them to start at the very
top, then you would need to turn them in
| | 08:43 | to level 1 subheads.
| | 08:45 | So I think you can see that by using,
| | 08:48 | creatively using, InDesign's TOC styles
you can easily take a single InDesign
| | 08:54 | document and split it up into
multiple chapters in your EPUBs.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Combining both strategies to create chapter breaks| 00:00 | With InDesign CS5, the two methods that
we have to automatically create chapter
| | 00:05 | breaks when exporting EPUB, the
InDesign book method with the collection of
| | 00:10 | standalone documents, and the table of
contents style method with a single doc
| | 00:14 | whose TOC style defined where the
chapter breaks are, these two methods can be
| | 00:19 | combined quite easily, making this part
of your job a little bit more flexible.
| | 00:24 | For example, let's take a
look at this History text book.
| | 00:28 | You may remember this from a previous video.
| | 00:30 | I am going to open up the INDB file
from the History Book folder, from
| | 00:34 | the Exercise Files.
| | 00:35 | This is the collection of individual
documents that when you export them to an
| | 00:40 | EPUB create a navigational table
of contents using the book method.
| | 00:44 | So we will go ahead and do
that by choosing Export Book.
| | 00:47 | We will export this to the Desktop and
under Contents, make sure that table of
| | 00:53 | contents is not checked and we
will click Export and it should open
| | 00:57 | automatically in your default EPUB
reader, usually Adobe Digital Editions, and
| | 01:01 | you can see that yes indeed it made
a navigational linked table of contents
| | 01:05 | that I can click on but
the chapter names are dumb.
| | 01:08 | They are the exact same chapter names as the
InDesign documents themselves in the book file.
| | 01:13 | So I showed it in a different video how
you can tediously rename these files if
| | 01:18 | you want, but why not just use
the TOC styles with the book?
| | 01:23 | All you need to do is open up the
master documents, and again watch the "Working
| | 01:27 | with InDesign books" videos from one of
the other titles here on lynda.com, if you
| | 01:31 | are not quite sure what the master
document is and what its significance is, but
| | 01:35 | basically you know it's the little icon here.
| | 01:38 | Double-click it to open it and you want to
add the TOC style to this master document.
| | 01:43 | Now the TOC style is going to call on
the same style that we've been using in
| | 01:48 | our TOC styles videos of, if we click
right here and open up the Paragraph
| | 01:52 | Styles panel, its Subhead.
| | 01:54 | So as long as all the documents in
your book begin with a paragraph that is
| | 01:59 | styled same with the same
paragraph style, this will work like a treat.
| | 02:02 | So again use the master documents, have
that open, and to that master document go
| | 02:07 | to Layout, choose Table of Content Styles,
and we are going to create TOC style.
| | 02:12 | New, we will call this epub,
and we want to use subhead.
| | 02:17 | So I went over this in detail in
a previous video about using styles.
| | 02:21 | It should be Review, click OK and OK,
and now when we go to export the book to
| | 02:30 | EPUB, click Save and replace the one on
the desktop, and in Contents we want to turn
| | 02:36 | on the Include InDesign TOC entries.
| | 02:40 | Let's turn on these two checkboxes as
well and choose Export and here they are.
| | 02:45 | It's the same book but now it's using
the actual TOC entries, that paragraph
| | 02:50 | text, that's been styled the subhead
and we didn't need to rename or re-link
| | 02:54 | anything in our book.
| | 02:56 | That's pretty cool, isn't it?
| | 02:57 | So say that you are working with this
document and you are using the TOC style
| | 03:02 | of creating chapter breaks, and then
somebody says "You know what, we need this
| | 03:06 | other document to be part of the book as well."
| | 03:10 | So I will go ahead and open that up
from the same Exercise Folder, combo book
| | 03:16 | files, the colophon page, and I say,
"Hey this needs to be part of it too."
| | 03:20 | Now maybe for whatever reason you don't
want to add this page to the existing document.
| | 03:26 | Well you can easily combine these two
files into the same book by going to File
| | 03:32 | > New Book, naming it, and then adding
the files, which I have already done for you.
| | 03:36 | We don't have to go through that.
| | 03:38 | Here in the Exercise Files, I have Combo
book.indb. Double-click that and you can
| | 03:42 | see I have already added them.
| | 03:44 | So here's History Texts, which is done
with breaks, and here's the colophon page.
| | 03:49 | Now again if we export this to EPUB,
because it's a book we have use the Book
| | 03:55 | panel command here. We can't use the
normal File > Export to EPUB command.
| | 03:59 | However the TOC is not going to include
the style from colophon because in this
| | 04:06 | document, History text breaks,
we'll don't use that style anymore.
| | 04:10 | In other words, if you want to add
more documents that you want to include in
| | 04:13 | TOC styles, you have to make sure that
they are used in the master document.
| | 04:18 | Now if you have already been using a
document with the TOC styles method of
| | 04:24 | creating chapter breaks and then you
include it in a book, you can't assume
| | 04:29 | that TOC style is going to include the
paragraph styles for the other documents as well.
| | 04:34 | Even though you are working with a
book, you are going to be using the TOC
| | 04:38 | styles method to create your chapter breaks.
| | 04:41 | So you want to make sure that
all the right styles are there.
| | 04:42 | So let's go ahead and open up the
original history text breaks document from our
| | 04:48 | book file and then go to a Layout >
Table of Content Styles. We are going to
| | 04:54 | create a new style, I will call it epub
again, and we want to include subhead.
| | 05:01 | Now the style used in the other
document here, which is open, you can't really it,
| | 05:05 | the colophon page, is called colophon.
| | 05:09 | We happen to be able to see colophon
here only because we have this item
| | 05:12 | selected down here, Include Book
Documents, which is turned on by default when
| | 05:17 | you open up TOC styles from the Book panel.
| | 05:20 | If for some reason it's turned off
and you are like where is that colophon
| | 05:25 | style, it's not going to be there.
| | 05:26 | So if you want to make sure to be
able to choose from all of the paragraph
| | 05:29 | styles in all the documents in your book,
you have to remember under Options to
| | 05:34 | turn on Include Book Documents.
| | 05:36 | Oh yeah, there is colophon. So we will
add that. Once again we need to change
| | 05:41 | this to level 1, save this, epub, then
say OK and OK right and then we go to the
| | 05:47 | Combo Book panel menu > Export Book to EPUB.
| | 05:51 | We will export this to the Desktop and
under Contents we want to make sure that
| | 05:57 | the TOC style is chosen, pub,
and click Export, there you go.
| | 06:02 | So here are the normal chapter starts
from our single long documents and then
| | 06:07 | here's the additional document they
were able to include in this EPUB simply by
| | 06:11 | adding it to the Book panel.
| | 06:13 | So by combining the TOC style method
and the Book panel method, you can get a
| | 06:18 | lot of flexibility in creating
automatic chapter breaks when you export to
| | 06:21 | EPUB from InDesign.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the layout to manage content flow| 00:00 | So up until now in this chapter about
preparing your InDesign publication for
| | 00:05 | EPUB export, we have been
working with fairly simple files;
| | 00:08 | just plain text, one story that is
threaded among multiple frames or that is
| | 00:14 | split into multiple chapters in a book.
| | 00:17 | You can also export basically
anything that you create in InDesign;
| | 00:20 | you can export to EPUB and let's look
at something that has a little bit more
| | 00:23 | complicated layout and see what happens.
| | 00:27 | Because what I want to talk about here
is how InDesign decides the order of the
| | 00:32 | content when you export to EPUB.
| | 00:34 | We only have one text frame that's a
no-brainer, the text; it's exported.
| | 00:38 | Let's take a look at this weird
little document that I created.
| | 00:42 | It has a number of elements in separate frames.
| | 00:46 | There is the title and the byline, and I
will for some reason rotate it little callout.
| | 00:51 | Here's the main text of the story.
| | 00:54 | The picture of the dog
and the caption are grouped.
| | 00:57 | There is a little continued box here and
this story indeed continues on to Page 2.
| | 01:03 | There is the end of the story and there is
some overset text and there's another image.
| | 01:08 | Let's export this to EPUB and see what happens.
| | 01:11 | I am going to use my keyboard shortcut
to you choose file export to ePub format
| | 01:17 | and will export this document
directly on the desktop, click Save.
| | 01:21 | Make sure that under Ordering we are
choosing Base on Page Layout, this is the
| | 01:25 | focus of this video, the Page Layout Order.
| | 01:28 | And then under Contents you don't
want to include InDesign TOC entries,
| | 01:31 | it's just one document so we are not worried
about chapter breaks and then click Export.
| | 01:38 | Look at that;
| | 01:39 | doesn't look anything like
the InDesign document, does it?
| | 01:41 | Well it should be no surprise that
those big green background squares didn't
| | 01:46 | get exported because as I mentioned
earlier empty content frames are ignored
| | 01:51 | when you export to ePub.
| | 01:52 | So, just image frames and text frames that
don't belong to the master page are exported.
| | 01:58 | But how did you decide that my favorite
dog should be the very first thing and
| | 02:03 | then the byline and then the headline?
| | 02:06 | Because InDesign goes from left to
right and top to bottom border page by page
| | 02:12 | when it exports to EPUB.
| | 02:14 | Even if you have a two page spread, it
is going to do an individual page and
| | 02:17 | then go on to the next page.
| | 02:19 | So in this document,
what is the leftmost object?
| | 02:22 | It is this rotated frame
that says my favorite dog.
| | 02:25 | So that is the first line.
| | 02:28 | Now, it does not pay any
attention to text effects in InDesign.
| | 02:32 | So it just brought it in, but it did adhere
to its paragraph style which made it centered.
| | 02:37 | Then the next thing was byline because
if you move from left to right on this
| | 02:41 | page to the next object is the byline.
| | 02:45 | Then as you move from left to right
again you might think well the body copy
| | 02:48 | that starts at Carol and
handsome is the next leftmost object.
| | 02:52 | But look, there is something above it.
| | 02:53 | Alright, so it doesn't go all the way through
marching left to right and then go top to bottom.
| | 02:57 | It does a combination;
| | 02:58 | starts from the left and then it looks at
the top to bottom as it moves to the right.
| | 03:02 | So My Dog, Carol was the
next one and then the story.
| | 03:06 | Notice the story continues all the way
until the words but not at all in the,
| | 03:12 | and then we have the jump line and then
we have the picture of the dog and then
| | 03:16 | we have the dogs caption and at
the very end we have the picture.
| | 03:21 | So let's take a look at that.
| | 03:23 | When it exports a text frame, it
doesn't just export this text frame and then
| | 03:28 | later this text frame;
| | 03:30 | this as one continuous story.
| | 03:32 | If I turn View>Extras>Show Text Threads,
you can see that it is one continuous story.
| | 03:36 | So as soon as it exported, this exported
the entire story including the overset text.
| | 03:42 | So if we open this up in the story
editor you could see at the very bottom that
| | 03:46 | included the overset text.
| | 03:48 | Then after it exported that story,
it is still working on page 1, still
| | 03:52 | crunching through here;
| | 03:53 | the next thing that came to in the
left or right, top to bottom order was
| | 03:58 | continued on page 2.
| | 04:00 | Alright, so top to bottom and then
the picture and then the caption.
| | 04:06 | So even though the picture and the
caption are group together, you would think
| | 04:09 | that InDesign will say, oh!
| | 04:11 | We definitely want the
caption to be above the picture;
| | 04:14 | it pays no attention to that.
| | 04:16 | It pays no attention to
groups really when you export.
| | 04:19 | The only thing it pays attention to is
where is the upper left-hand corner of
| | 04:24 | the bounding box of the group.
| | 04:26 | So in this case it's right here and so
as it was deciding what to export left
| | 04:31 | or right, top to bottom I can hit this item,
and then when I hit this item and showed, oh!
| | 04:36 | The image is further most
to left than the caption.
| | 04:39 | Now if I came in here and I double-
click to be able to edit this object and I
| | 04:45 | dragged this guy to the left so that
it's to the left of the picture, but
| | 04:49 | still in a group, alright, but it's to
the left of the picture, let's export
| | 04:52 | this to EPUB again.
| | 04:53 | In fact even before we do this,
let's move some other things around.
| | 04:56 | Let's move this over here to the right
and let's move the headline to the left.
| | 05:02 | So what we are trying to do is to force
the order that we want and this is the
| | 05:06 | essential task, nightmare choose
whatever you want to choose in exporting based
| | 05:12 | on layout order to EPUB.
| | 05:15 | In that if you have a complicated
layout you have to pay close attention to how
| | 05:19 | things are ordered and how things
appear in left to right, top to bottom.
| | 05:22 | We don't want that jump line in here at all.
| | 05:24 | It makes no sense to have anything
that refers to a page number in an EPUB
| | 05:28 | because it doesn't use page numbers.
| | 05:30 | So what we can do is we can drag this
off to the pasteboard because it ignores
| | 05:34 | the pasteboard items;
| | 05:35 | the Export process. Let's try again.
| | 05:37 | We will export to EPUB again and
we will replace our existing EPUB.
| | 05:41 | Use the same setup as before,
click Export and there we go.
| | 05:45 | So now the headline appears first, then
the byline, then the body copy, then the
| | 05:51 | caption and then the image.
| | 05:52 | Now the caption is still right aligned
because that is the paragraph style for the caption.
| | 05:57 | It is right aligned in the text frame,
but because we move the text frame itself
| | 06:01 | to the left of the picture,
it appears before the picture.
| | 06:04 | And then finally my favorite dog,
which was the item on the right well not
| | 06:08 | finally because we still have
that big fat picture at the bottom.
| | 06:10 | Now let's look at a book that has
images and talk a little bit more about
| | 06:14 | getting pictures to
appear in the right location.
| | 06:17 | I have a document here from the
exercise files called a california-normal only
| | 06:23 | because it's just like a
normal InDesign document.
| | 06:25 | It's a section from a book
called Stories of California.
| | 06:29 | Let me take a quick look at
this, we have a text frame.
| | 06:33 | That's not threaded to anything and
that's the title page and we have a little
| | 06:36 | flourish that's just an
image that has been placed here.
| | 06:39 | We have some folios from the master page
which if you recall are not exported to EPUB.
| | 06:44 | Master page items that are
not overridden are ignored.
| | 06:48 | There is the forward and then we
have the main content of the story.
| | 06:52 | Let's zoom out so you can see that
the story is threaded just like in a
| | 06:55 | regular trade book.
| | 06:57 | Now the image and the caption our
grouped like the picture of the dog and the
| | 07:00 | caption in the end of document,
but they are floating above the text.
| | 07:05 | They have a text wrap on it which
is typical for how you lay out a
| | 07:09 | normal InDesign document that you
are going to export to PDF to get
| | 07:12 | commercially printed.
| | 07:13 | Let's export this document to EPUB, click Save.
| | 07:17 | Based on page layout order we don't
need any TOC entries so I am turning that
| | 07:21 | off if it is turned on; click Export.
| | 07:24 | So we are not paying any attention now
to chapter breaks so don't worry about
| | 07:27 | what's happening over here, but
take a look at what's happening.
| | 07:30 | Let's make this larger and we will make
into two pages by making the type size
| | 07:34 | smaller in Adobe Digital Editions.
| | 07:37 | So here is that first chapter and
the caption appears near the end.
| | 07:41 | In fact all the pictures and
captions appear near the end.
| | 07:44 | And also this flourish is
kind of like moved over;
| | 07:47 | it is not really in the correct place.
| | 07:49 | So we'll go back to InDesign and again
we are using layout order and we want
| | 07:54 | to make sure that each page has the correct
order that we want the objects to be exported in.
| | 07:58 | Let's look at the problem
first with the main text.
| | 08:01 | We want this picture and image to
appear after the first paragraph.
| | 08:04 | But it wasn't in the ePub, it was
appearing at the end of the story and that's
| | 08:08 | because it hit this item on this page;
| | 08:10 | the main story and remember it always
exports the entire text, the contents of
| | 08:15 | the entire thread first.
| | 08:17 | So after it exported this, then it got to
the picture, that's why it ended up at the end.
| | 08:22 | If you have images that you want to
appear within the text flow, you need to
| | 08:26 | anchor them within the text
flow and that's very simple to do.
| | 08:28 | We are just going to move this image
out, you want to put them in their own
| | 08:32 | paragraph and if you want to be able
to actually make sense of this document
| | 08:35 | while it is InDesign, if we just pasted
this image in now as an in-line object,
| | 08:40 | it would overlap the text.
| | 08:41 | So you want to make a custom
paragraph style that includes not only the
| | 08:46 | alignment of the image while it's
anchored but also you want to have it set to
| | 08:51 | be Auto Leading so that the text will
automatically move out of the way for the image.
| | 08:56 | I have already created that style in
the paragraph styles document called an
| | 09:00 | inline_image_centered-cap.
| | 09:01 | As you can see it is using auto leading.
| | 09:05 | So we will take this image that
happens to be group with the caption, we will
| | 09:08 | cut it to the clipboard with Command+X
or Ctrl+X, we will double-click inside
| | 09:13 | the text frame to switch to the Type
tool, click right next to that paragraph
| | 09:17 | that we just inserted and
paste with Command+V or Ctrl+V.
| | 09:20 | You would do this for all the
other images in your document.
| | 09:23 | You would embed them in the text flow.
| | 09:25 | And now let's do that also settle
for the little flourish up here.
| | 09:28 | We will take the flourish which
is right now just a normal image.
| | 09:32 | I have already inserted the paragraph there.
| | 09:34 | So we will cut this to the clipboard,
switch to the Type tool and paste and now
| | 09:39 | let's export to EPUB.
| | 09:42 | Use my keyboard shortcut and we will
overwrite the existing one, Export and
| | 09:48 | reduce the type size.
| | 09:49 | So now I know that is not final,
alright but take a look, we have the flourish
| | 09:53 | appearing on the right location because
we embedded it in the text flow and we
| | 09:58 | also have the image in the
caption in the right location;
| | 10:01 | right after that paragraph.
| | 10:02 | We would still need to do some work
with paragraph styles or CSS styles to get
| | 10:06 | the alignments right, but
now you have the basic concept.
| | 10:09 | When you are exporting an existing
InDesign document to EPUB that is more
| | 10:14 | complicated than a single story
you need to spend some time and
| | 10:18 | consideration into arranging the
objects in the layout so they appear in
| | 10:22 | EPUB in the right order.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using XML tags to manage content| 00:00 | Normally when you export an InDesign
document to EPUB the layout order of the
| | 00:05 | individual content items the text and
the images are based on their position on
| | 00:10 | the page, left to right or top to
bottom as I showed in previous video and in
| | 00:14 | order to force the correct order you
need to move things around on the page or
| | 00:18 | thread things together or
embed images in the text flow.
| | 00:22 | Now in CS5 there is a way that you can
manage their reading order, that's what
| | 00:28 | it's called of the resulting EPUB
without having to mess around with items in
| | 00:33 | the layout and that is by using XML.
| | 00:36 | Now don't be scared alright, we are
not talking about an XML workflow with
| | 00:39 | importing and all that kind of stuff,
we are actually just talking about
| | 00:43 | using the built-in XML tagging feature
and the structure panel to create the
| | 00:49 | order that we want, sort of how we
used the InDesign ability to create table
| | 00:53 | of contents style to make chapter
breaks even though we weren't really using
| | 00:57 | a table of contents in the document, that's
basically what they've added in CS5 with XML.
| | 01:02 | Let's take a look, so here we have the
same document that I used in the previous
| | 01:05 | video about using layout order just a
two-page document with various objects,
| | 01:10 | text frames and image frames and if we
exported this to EPUB right now the very
| | 01:16 | first item on the EPUB document would
be the text from this little pull quote
| | 01:21 | here that says My Favorite Dog
because it's leftmost on the page.
| | 01:24 | But we would actually want
the headline to be first.
| | 01:26 | So how can we do that with XML?
| | 01:29 | Well the first thing you do is you
create XML tags, you do that by opening up
| | 01:33 | the XML Tags panel, go to the Window menu,
go down to Utilities and choose Tags,
| | 01:40 | there is a default route tag sort of
like a default layer 1 or default basic
| | 01:45 | paragraph style you don't need to worry
about it, just leave it alone, but you
| | 01:48 | want to create a tag for the different
elements that you want to export. For example;
| | 01:52 | just use our friend a new tag button
down here we want to export the headline,
| | 01:58 | so I am just going to type headline.
| | 02:00 | We want to export a byline, new tag,
byline, another one, one we want to
| | 02:06 | export the body copy.
| | 02:07 | Now if by the way you start typing in
body copy and you hit Return you are going
| | 02:11 | to get an alert because XML has
very specific rules about tag name.
| | 02:17 | So they can't contain spaces or tab as
you see here, so I would say an image the
| | 02:21 | image of the dog and we want
her caption, real simple, right.
| | 02:26 | So now how do you apply the tag to the
elements, we can just do it really simply
| | 02:31 | by selecting a frame and then
clicking the name of the tag.
| | 02:34 | Now it's turning pink because I've
turned on a special view option, if you go to
| | 02:38 | the View menu and go down to structure
I've turned on Show Tagged Frames right
| | 02:44 | now it says Hide Tagged
frames because it's turned on.
| | 02:46 | If it's by default you can't
really tell if you've tagged it or not.
| | 02:50 | I think if you're going to try this
make sure and to down to Structure and
| | 02:53 | choose Show Tagged Frames.
| | 02:55 | Let's do the same thing for byline and
body copy and the image and the caption.
| | 03:05 | So notice that we do not have to
change any kind of layout and this is a
| | 03:09 | nonprinting frame color okay so we could
actually export to PDF without a problem.
| | 03:13 | Now to see the order that it is going
to be exported and we need to open up
| | 03:17 | the Structure panel.
| | 03:18 | Go back to View, go down the
Structure and choose Show Structure.
| | 03:22 | This shows all of the XML elements
in your documents and there's a little
| | 03:27 | disclosure triangle next to route
and you can see what we have exported.
| | 03:31 | I'm seeing little snippets of these
elements because from the Structure panel
| | 03:36 | menu I've turned on Show Text
Snippets which now says Hide Text Snippets.
| | 03:41 | It's a good idea to do that to help you
orient yourself as to what exactly these
| | 03:45 | items are referring to.
| | 03:47 | But also notice that if you select an
item on the layout that item becomes
| | 03:51 | underlined here or if you double-
click something in the Structure panel, it
| | 03:55 | becomes selected in the layout.
| | 03:56 | So you can tell what
these elements are all about.
| | 03:59 | Let's go ahead and export this to EPUB,
I will use my keyboard shortcut to
| | 04:04 | export it to the EPUB
formats right on to the desktop.
| | 04:08 | Now it's critical here that under
Ordering you want to choose the Same as XML
| | 04:12 | Structure, alright that's the
whole point of this exercise, Contents;
| | 04:15 | we are not worried about making chapter
breaks so we can just leave it off for
| | 04:18 | now and click Export and there we go.
| | 04:21 | The headline appeared first and then
the byline and then the Text and then the
| | 04:25 | Picture and the Caption,
just like how we wanted.
| | 04:27 | Let's look at another example that same
California document that we are working
| | 04:31 | with before, this was a document
that's like part of the book, instead of it
| | 04:36 | creating your tags by hand and then
manually applying every single tagged to
| | 04:41 | every single element, you can have
InDesign help you by automatically applying
| | 04:46 | tags based on style names, in fact you
could really automate this if you made
| | 04:50 | your names match your text.
| | 04:52 | You can learn a lot more about that in
the Lynda.com title by Jim Maivald on
| | 04:57 | XML for InDesign users.
| | 04:59 | But we will just do a
little bit of automation here.
| | 05:02 | First of all I've already exported
a list of tags to a text file and we
| | 05:07 | can import them here.
| | 05:08 | So if you have done this once you can
export your tags by going to the Tag
| | 05:12 | panel menu and choosing Safe Tags, then
you put them on the server or give them
| | 05:16 | to your freelancers or whatever and have
them low tags, that's here in the Exercise File.
| | 05:21 | So everybody is using the
same tags to make life easier.
| | 05:23 | And what we want to do is we want to
map styles to tag, so everything has been
| | 05:28 | styled with a paragraph style, body
first and chapter title, there's lots of
| | 05:34 | styles here but were not
going to do all of them for now.
| | 05:37 | Go to the Tags panel menu and choose
the Map Styles to Tags and we want to
| | 05:44 | map for example the Body style to the
body XML tag and the Caption style to
| | 05:52 | the caption XML tag.
| | 05:54 | We will just keep that with body and
chapter title will map that to headline.
| | 06:01 | Now if you have actually named your
styles according to the XML tags you could
| | 06:05 | have just chosen map by name and it
would do this for you automatically.
| | 06:09 | Also know that you can map more than one
style in your document to the same tag,
| | 06:14 | as I mapped both body first
and body to the single tag here.
| | 06:18 | Go ahead and say OK and it goes ahead
and it maps everything that's been styled
| | 06:23 | to a tag, except for images, images
you need to actually select with the
| | 06:28 | Selection Tool as I have done here and
then you need to click on Image itself.
| | 06:33 | But the caption has already been tagged.
| | 06:35 | Now notice it did a little more than
what we did in the previous document and
| | 06:39 | that it didn't just tagged frames but
it tagged the text inside the frames and
| | 06:44 | if you open this up in the Story Editor
like I have a caption selected here and
| | 06:48 | I go to the Edit menu and
choose Edit in Story Editor.
| | 06:51 | You can actually see the tag
names captioned surrounding the text.
| | 06:56 | So when you are editing text in an
InDesign document that you have already
| | 06:59 | tagged, you need to be careful
not to accidentally delete these.
| | 07:03 | They are kind of hard to see in Layout
view they are very faint, but they are
| | 07:07 | easy to see in Story Editor view, so
you might want to tell people if they need
| | 07:11 | to do any editing to use Story Editor view.
| | 07:14 | Now I am going to ahead and open up
the Structure panel again and remember to
| | 07:18 | turn on Show Text Snippets if
you are not seeing this little bit.
| | 07:22 | Now the point about doing Map Styles
to tags is that now we can see every
| | 07:25 | individual paragraph rather than just
one big thing called body and that means
| | 07:30 | that we can now select at this image
here that we've tagged and we want this
| | 07:35 | image to appear right above the
paragraph that starts among those who believed.
| | 07:39 | So you can see a paragraph right up here
right among those who believed and here
| | 07:44 | is the image that's underlined.
| | 07:45 | So you can just drag and drop this guy
into position, it doesn't change anything
| | 07:51 | in the layout, but it does change the
order of where it's going to appear when
| | 07:55 | we export to EPUB which
is the coolest thing ever.
| | 07:58 | Alright now we need to move the
caption Natural Bridge up with that as well.
| | 08:05 | Now let's go ahead and export this to
EPUB with our usual keyboard shortcut,
| | 08:09 | right on to the desktop, make sure
that you choose Same as XML Structure, we
| | 08:13 | are not worried about creating chapter
breaks, but you could include that as
| | 08:17 | well if you wanted to.
| | 08:18 | Click Export, let's make the text
smaller so we can see couple pages side by
| | 08:23 | side and there is the image along with
a caption in the correct location in the
| | 08:28 | document rather than at the end and we
did not have to change the layout at all.
| | 08:33 | So this is another option that you
have in CS5 to manage the reading order of
| | 08:37 | the resulting EPUB files when you export
your InDesign documents to EPUB without
| | 08:43 | having to change anything in the layout.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Naming styles and linked assets| 00:00 | Remember an EPUB document is
essentially a collection of XHTML files.
| | 00:06 | An EPUBReader's like Adobe Digital
Editions or the iBooks and the iPad are able
| | 00:12 | to open up those XHTML files and
show them to you like a book sort of how
| | 00:17 | browsers are able to open up HTML or
XHTML files and show you web pages.
| | 00:22 | And you've ever worked on a website
then you know that file naming is crucial,
| | 00:27 | because if you add the wrong case to a
letter or you add a space where there
| | 00:31 | shouldn't be a space then links can get
broken images can get missing and things
| | 00:35 | will just be screwed up.
| | 00:37 | So the same thing applies to
your InDesign to EPUB workflow.
| | 00:41 | There are some rules about file
naming that will help save you.
| | 00:45 | Alright, so first of all let's take a
look at one of the documents we've been
| | 00:49 | working with the History book.
| | 00:51 | I have here in the exercise files a
collection of these documents along with the book file.
| | 00:57 | Notice that these InDesign files are
named according to be chapter name;
| | 01:02 | which is one strategy of creating
sensical navigation tables of contents.
| | 01:08 | If I open up the book file and then I
export the book to EPUB which I've already
| | 01:13 | done earlier you can see that when
it's opened up in your eReader that the
| | 01:17 | navigational table of contents are
the same as the InDesign file names.
| | 01:22 | Now that is usually not a problem,
but I definitely know of at least a few
| | 01:27 | e-readers and a few distributors that
caution against using spaces in filenames,
| | 01:33 | because internally often these files are
referred to and they all referred to in
| | 01:38 | XML or XHTML format where you're really
not supposed to use spaces in filenames.
| | 01:44 | For example, if we look at the San
Francisco Climate page you can see that
| | 01:49 | InDesign user added a cross-reference
here and the cross-reference links to this
| | 01:55 | chapter which is actually a separate document.
| | 01:58 | If we look at it in InDesign and we
open up San Francisco Climate there is
| | 02:03 | a line of text here that is actually a cross-
reference that opens up the other document.
| | 02:08 | If we open this up in the edit and
story editor view you can see the actual
| | 02:12 | cross-reference here.
| | 02:13 | Now that's what it looks like an
InDesign, but what does it look like in those
| | 02:17 | XHTML files and the EPUB?
| | 02:19 | I mean what's the big deal that appears to
be working perfectly fine in the EPUBReader?
| | 02:23 | We're going to look at that EPUB file
in one of my favorite EPUB editors called
| | 02:28 | Sigil that I'll be talking about
in more detail in other videos.
| | 02:31 | I've started it up and I want to go to
the File menu and choose Open and locate
| | 02:37 | that EPUB file that I have on my desktop.
| | 02:40 | Sigil by the way runs on both
Macintosh and Windows and Open it up.
| | 02:45 | So this is what the actual chapter is
look like they've been split apart into
| | 02:50 | individual XHTML files.
| | 02:52 | And if we look at the Climate file
there is our link and if we look at this in
| | 02:56 | Code View the cross-
reference link is right down here.
| | 03:00 | Notice that the spaces has have been
replaced with %20 and that is unique
| | 03:06 | these for whitespace.
| | 03:08 | You may have seen that already in URLs
while you're web browsing and the problem
| | 03:12 | is that some systems that distribute
EPUBs or that check for validity of EPUBs
| | 03:18 | they don't like to see the %20 in links.
| | 03:21 | So it's just something to keep in
mind you maybe thinking well heck!
| | 03:25 | How are we going to get a navigational
table of contents that looks good if we
| | 03:30 | can't use spaces in the filenames?
| | 03:32 | Well welcome to the wonderful
wild early days of EPUB creation.
| | 03:37 | What you might end up doing is actually
getting into the guts of the EPUB file
| | 03:41 | and naming these yourself which is
something that a program like Sigil or
| | 03:45 | another program can do for you.
| | 03:46 | And or you could wait awhile and hope
that everybody understands that spaces and
| | 03:52 | links will be escaped to %20 and that
they'll understand then will be able to
| | 03:57 | live with it, but that's something to
keep in mind is that if possible you
| | 04:01 | should not include spaces in
your InDesign document filenames.
| | 04:07 | Also and this is probably even more
important please keep your filenames
| | 04:11 | suggested alphanumerics, just
A through Z and 0 through 9.
| | 04:15 | Don't use accent marks, don't use
slashes, don't use exclamation points I've
| | 04:19 | seen all sorts of crazy things in filenames.
| | 04:21 | If you're exporting to EPUB this is
surely a road to disaster so just use
| | 04:26 | alphanumerics in these filenames.
| | 04:28 | What about linked images you also need
to rename the images I have not found
| | 04:32 | anybody that insist that you should.
| | 04:34 | I have found some documentation from
various publishers that says that the image
| | 04:39 | that you use for the book cover
should adhere to those same rules.
| | 04:43 | So the image for the cover
shouldn't be called mydogfill, it should be
| | 04:47 | my-dog-fill.jpg or whatever it is.
| | 04:51 | And in fact you want to go even
further than that and use XHTML filenaming
| | 04:56 | guidelines for all your
images and even your styles.
| | 05:00 | If you have the opportunity to start
creating InDesign file from scratch
| | 05:04 | you might as well use on filenames that
though you're creating website use all lowercase.
| | 05:09 | They never have to worry is this
uppercase or lowercase and always use
| | 05:13 | alphanumerics and always use underscores
or hyphens, never use actual spaces for
| | 05:18 | images that you place and for
the style names that you create.
| | 05:21 | That brings me to one other thing I need
to mention out styles not really a file
| | 05:26 | naming thing, but maybe
if that positioning thing.
| | 05:30 | It's a little known bug that has
to do with style groups in InDesign.
| | 05:35 | I'm going to Open up a document here in
our Exercise Files called history texts
| | 05:44 | 3 we don't need the book anymore and
this is just a regular document that even
| | 05:48 | working with before just one long story.
| | 05:50 | We'll open up the Paragraph Styles
panel what I want to call your attention to
| | 05:54 | is the use of the style group here.
| | 05:56 | We have a style group of folder in
other words called headings where the user
| | 05:59 | has placed these two
headings Subhead and Subhead2.
| | 06:03 | The issue with style groups has to do
with if you're ever using a trick of using
| | 06:07 | a table of contents to force chapter breaks.
| | 06:10 | If the styles in your TOC style are
in a style group it's not going to work
| | 06:16 | they're going to be ignored when you try to
export to EPUB it's not going to break there.
| | 06:20 | So for example if we come up over
here and look at Table of Contents Styles
| | 06:24 | there is the epub one and it knows that these
are all in the headings folder so that's cool.
| | 06:30 | If we export to EPUB we'll put this
right on the desktop and we'll make sure
| | 06:36 | to turn on Table of Contents epub and
Export when it opens up in Adobe Digital
| | 06:42 | Editions that there is no table of
contents we didn't find that at all and
| | 06:46 | it's just one long file.
| | 06:48 | So what you want to do is in your
Paragraph Styles panel you can just drag them
| | 06:51 | right out of there,
they're inside of style group.
| | 06:54 | You can keep other styles in the
style group just don't put the table of
| | 06:57 | contents ones in there and what is
nice is that your Table of Contents Styles
| | 07:01 | will automatically know that you've
moved them, but if you want to check
| | 07:05 | yourself anyway you can just see that
it doesn't have the parenthesis with the
| | 07:08 | name of the group after it anymore.
| | 07:10 | Now let's go ahead and export this one
to EPUB, replacing the other one and make
| | 07:15 | sure that we're using the
epub TOC Style and they're back.
| | 07:20 | Okay so you want to be
careful about using style groups.
| | 07:25 | So it's a quickly changing world as
far as EPUB is concerned and maybe five
| | 07:30 | months from now we're not going to
have to worry about spaces in filenames or
| | 07:33 | style groups and TOCs, but at this point
this is the information that I know and
| | 07:38 | it's better to be safe than sorry.
| | 07:40 | So at least make sure that your
InDesign documents adhere to the rules and that
| | 07:44 | the style names you're using in your
TOC styles are not in the style group,
| | 07:49 | you'll avoid a lot of problems.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Modifying Text and Images for EPUB ExportCleaning up the text flow| 00:00 | You know what I like?
| | 00:01 | I like to save time.
| | 00:03 | I don't like to work hard and that's
one of the reasons why I think it's
| | 00:06 | important that we all learn how to
clean up our InDesign files before we export
| | 00:11 | them to EPUB, because it will save us a
lot of time in having to fiddle around
| | 00:17 | and clean up the actual XHTML
files that are inside the EPUB file.
| | 00:20 | So do it right from the start.
| | 00:22 | Now there are a few different issues
that you might not even consider that can
| | 00:26 | take you by surprise and that's what I
want to show you in this video, as well as
| | 00:29 | some fast ways to clean up your InDesign files.
| | 00:32 | So what we're looking at here is a
simple two-page spread from the beginning of
| | 00:35 | a book, the title page spread, and if we
switch to Preview Mode, you can see that
| | 00:40 | this is the kind of spacing
that I would like to achieve.
| | 00:43 | I have achieved this spacing by
putting every block of text in a text frame
| | 00:48 | and then I just move the text
frame around to make them look good.
| | 00:51 | Fine, this is a very typical way to
lay out a book for print or for PDF.
| | 00:56 | Let's see what happens
when we export this to EPUB.
| | 00:58 | I am going to use my keyboard shortcut
to get the Export to EPUB dialog box up.
| | 01:04 | I'll export it right to the Desktop,
and in my Digital Editions Export Options
| | 01:09 | dialog box I want to make sure that View
eBook after Exporting is turned on, and
| | 01:14 | under Contents, it makes no difference
if we're using table of contents or not
| | 01:18 | because we only have one document.
| | 01:19 | But we do want to make sure that Generate
CSS and Include Style Definitions is turned on,
| | 01:24 | because we want to bring over the formatting.
| | 01:26 | So I'll click Export and
that's not quite what I wanted.
| | 01:31 | Everything is jammed up
together. So why is that?
| | 01:34 | It's because when you export to
EPUB, all of your text frames get
| | 01:41 | conglomerated into one story.
| | 01:43 | It pays no attention to the positions
of the text frame other than to figure
| | 01:47 | out which order these blocks of text should
appear, which I covered in a previous video.
| | 01:52 | All right! So you might think okay, fine,
I'll put this all in one text frame and I'll
| | 01:56 | space it out, all right?
| | 01:57 | So here's a fast way by the way
to thread multiple frames together.
| | 02:01 | First, make sure that every
frame ends with a paragraph return.
| | 02:05 | This will help you. And then I'm going to
click the little outport of the first one.
| | 02:11 | Hold down the Option or the Alt key
on a PC, and keeping it held down, just
| | 02:16 | click, click, and click, and now all
these frames are threaded together.
| | 02:20 | I'll select the Selection tool
again to get rid of that extra text.
| | 02:23 | Now because this is one story, I can go
ahead and delete these three frames and
| | 02:28 | just drag this one frame.
| | 02:29 | Here is a nice little tip
you just learned, all right?
| | 02:31 | So this is actually what
the EPUB saw when we exported.
| | 02:35 | So you might say okay, I will just do
this and then I want to add a few returns
| | 02:40 | there, like that, how about that?
| | 02:43 | Okay, let's try this one.
| | 02:44 | We'll export this to EPUB
again, replacing the old one.
| | 02:48 | It's remembering our last setting, so we
don't need to worry about that. Huh, what happened?
| | 02:53 | Well, when you export to EPUB, all of
your multiple space runs or multiple
| | 02:59 | returns get ignored.
| | 03:02 | So multiple carriage returns are
replaced basically with one carriage return.
| | 03:06 | Multiple spaces are replaced with one
space, and if you've ever done any web
| | 03:10 | design, you know this is the rules
for creating HTML files as well.
| | 03:14 | You can hit Return as much as you
would like, but it's going to just ignore
| | 03:18 | those carriage returns and
just put one carriage return.
| | 03:21 | So I have a document here called
calif-titlepg-after that shows the fix.
| | 03:28 | Now it isn't a requirement that all the
text be in one text frame but it helps
| | 03:33 | us to visualize what's going to happen
when we export to EPUB if we do that.
| | 03:38 | Because what I've done is I've modified the
styles to have space above and space below.
| | 03:43 | If we click here on the Author
and look at Paragraph Styles,
| | 03:47 | in Author Name I am going to edit
author name so we can see what the settings
| | 03:50 | are for indents and spacing.
| | 03:52 | There are two picas and eight picas below.
| | 03:55 | Now, when you export to EPUB, as long
as you have Retain Style Definitions
| | 03:59 | checked on in that CSS section, then
the EPUB will convert your paragraph and
| | 04:06 | character styles to cascading
style sheet definitions, CSS definitions, and if
| | 04:11 | you didn't understand a word I said in
that last sentence, don't worry about it
| | 04:15 | because we have a whole chapter coming
up talking about what is CSS and how to
| | 04:18 | work with the CSS in your EPUBs.
| | 04:20 | The main rule is that you want to use
styles for everything, and if you want
| | 04:25 | to force spacing in between paragraphs,
you need to use space above and space below.
| | 04:31 | Now I didn't do this on a paragraph by
paragraph basis. I actually edited the style,
| | 04:35 | because it's usually better not
to do this as a local override, which
| | 04:39 | I'll talk about in another video in this
chapter when I talk about using styles.
| | 04:44 | But take it from me that I've done
this for all the paragraphs in question.
| | 04:47 | Let's go ahead and export this
out to EPUB again. There we go.
| | 04:53 | That's a little better.
| | 04:54 | All right, let's make this a smaller
type size so we can see it better on screen.
| | 04:59 | That's a closer match.
| | 05:00 | It actually converted that space above
and space below to CSS rules for all of
| | 05:05 | these paragraph styles, and that's
how you are able to maintain formatting.
| | 05:10 | Now like I said, you didn't really have
to put it into one frame. You could have
| | 05:13 | edited each one of these.
Let me revert this to show you.
| | 05:16 | You could have just added space
above and below here with it here but you
| | 05:19 | can't really see if it's going to work or not
unless it's in one long text frame like this one.
| | 05:25 | Let's take a look at a few pages from
this book and you can sort of see what a
| | 05:28 | problem might be now taking a look at
this page, is that the designer set off the
| | 05:34 | chapter heads from the first body
copy by using a run of paragraphs.
| | 05:39 | So if you want to do this correctly
you're going to have to select the name
| | 05:42 | of the chapter title and then edit the
paragraph style for chapter title to have space below.
| | 05:48 | So I am going to go to Indents and Spacing,
Space After, Space Below, same thing.
| | 05:53 | Let's try eight picas.
| | 05:56 | Well that pushed it way down.
| | 05:57 | So now in order to give a good
preview of what this is going to look like,
| | 06:01 | you're going to want to delete all
these carriage returns, and that can get
| | 06:04 | tedious if you have multiple chapters
in this document, which you probably do.
| | 06:08 | Now, the same thing is true
by the way for space runs.
| | 06:11 | Take a look on this page on the left.
| | 06:13 | I'm sure that nobody watching this
video would do this, but maybe you have a
| | 06:16 | freelancer or an intern who did this,
who decided to use spaces instead of an
| | 06:22 | indent measure in the paragraph style
to create a first-line indent, or maybe
| | 06:25 | they decided to use tabs.
| | 06:27 | Tabs by the way are ignored in EPUB.
Tabs get converted to a single space.
| | 06:32 | So in other words if you want first
line indents, then you need to specify that
| | 06:37 | in the paragraph styles.
| | 06:39 | I select this paragraph or put my
cursor in the paragraph, which is the
| | 06:43 | Body paragraph style.
| | 06:44 | I will edit the Body paragraph style.
Under Indents and Spacing, I want a First
| | 06:48 | Line Indent of 1 pica.
| | 06:51 | Now they're way far apart.
| | 06:53 | Now, that's too big and I want again
the good idea of what this is going to
| | 06:55 | look like, and I need to
get rid of the space runs.
| | 06:58 | Here we have some other multiple
paragraph returns and then we also have
| | 07:02 | this bad boy up here.
| | 07:04 | Can you see what that is, that
little angled line to the right?
| | 07:08 | If I open it up in Story Editor under the
Edit menu, you can see it a little better.
| | 07:13 | That is a soft return.
| | 07:15 | And soft returns aren't ignored.
They're actually honored by the EPUB file
| | 07:19 | but soft return really doesn't make
much sense when you have no control over
| | 07:24 | the width of the page.
| | 07:25 | Somebody might be
reading this book on an iPhone.
| | 07:28 | So you normally want to
get rid of soft returns too.
| | 07:31 | So you can see that in order to really
clean up an InDesign file, you're going
| | 07:35 | to have to do some Find/Changes.
| | 07:36 | Let me go over what it is that you
need to Find/Change and then I'll tell you
| | 07:41 | about a couple of ways to make this
go very quickly for you. All right!
| | 07:44 | So Find/Change for EPUB.
| | 07:46 | in order to preview what the EPUB is
going to look like better in InDesign,
| | 07:52 | you need to get rid of multiple space
runs and change to one space, multiple
| | 07:57 | returns, change to one return, and
remember it doesn't support tabs. The EPUB file
| | 08:02 | format doesn't support tabs.
| | 08:03 | So even if you have a tab stop in your
paragraph style, the actual tab character
| | 08:08 | gets changed to a space.
| | 08:10 | So you have to find one or more
tabs and change them to a single space.
| | 08:14 | Now, this is not going to hurt the
EPUB if you don't do any of these.
| | 08:17 | It's just that you won't get an accurate
preview in InDesign of what the EPUB is
| | 08:20 | going to look like unless you do this.
| | 08:22 | And then to prevent problems in the
EPUB file by things that actually aren't
| | 08:26 | ignored, you probably want to search
for any soft returns, also known as line
| | 08:30 | breaks, and change them just to
nothing so that the space in between the two
| | 08:35 | halves of the word or the
line is brought together.
| | 08:38 | And then if you've inserted any non-
breaking spaces, you probably want to change
| | 08:43 | that to a single space, because non
breaking spaces are brought over and
| | 08:47 | converted to XHTML entity, it's called.
We will talk about them more later.
| | 08:52 | So how can you do all
these Find/Changes quickly?
| | 08:55 | Well, I would recommend that if you're
not familiar with Find/Change, then you
| | 08:58 | go to lynda.com and just search for
InDesign Find/Change and you'll find a lot
| | 09:02 | of videos that talk about how
to use Find/Change in detail.
| | 09:06 | If I go to Edit, go down to Find/Change,
you can search for all these things.
| | 09:11 | You can search for Forced Line Break,
which is a soft return, you can change it
| | 09:15 | to None, you can go down to White
Space, and say find a non-breaking space,
| | 09:19 | change it to a single space just by
clicking here and pressing the Spacebar.
| | 09:23 | Now, you can save these Find/Changes.
| | 09:26 | You can use GREP Find/Change as well to
find multiple returns and replace them
| | 09:32 | with a single return and so on.
| | 09:34 | But I have an even better way.
| | 09:36 | Let's close this out.
| | 09:38 | There is such a thing called a script.
| | 09:40 | A free script that comes with
InDesign called FindChangeByList.
| | 09:44 | If you go to the Window menu, down to
Utilities, go to Scripts, and inside your
| | 09:52 | Application folder and Samples--
JavaScript is bi-platform, so you'll find this
| | 09:58 | whether you're on a Mac or PC.
Scroll down and you'll see an entry called
| | 10:02 | FindChangeByList along with a
folder below it called FindChangeSupport.
| | 10:06 | Now, this is beyond the scope of this
video of how to use this, but essentially
| | 10:13 | let's take a quick look here
at what this file is all about.
| | 10:18 | If you run this script, what happens
is that InDesign does a whole bunch of
| | 10:21 | Find/Changes in a row and the ones that
it comes with are a bunch of GREP and
| | 10:26 | regular text Find/Changes.
| | 10:28 | So it does things like finds all
double returns and replaces with a
| | 10:31 | single return, see that.
| | 10:33 | So this is all explained here and as I
said, if you look up FindChangeByList,
| | 10:39 | one word, or even just FindChangeList one
word in lynda.com Search Field, I just did this.
| | 10:45 | There are about eight different videos
that talk about how to use the script.
| | 10:48 | So in InDesign, when you double-click
on this script, it says do you want to
| | 10:53 | run all the Find/Changes that are
listed out here on the document or the
| | 10:57 | selected story, and you can do that
however you like. So I will just say go
| | 11:01 | ahead and do them to the document. Boom!
| | 11:04 | Look at how fast it cleaned that up.
| | 11:05 | Now, it didn't get rid of the soft
returns and there are a couple of other
| | 11:09 | things it didn't get rid of.
| | 11:10 | So I made you a present.
| | 11:12 | Let me revert this.
| | 11:16 | In the Exercise Files I made a
version of the Find/Change list script
| | 11:21 | that's just for EPUBs.
| | 11:22 | So I've already installed it by, I have
a folder called epub, I just dropped it
| | 11:26 | into my Scripts panel folder in my
Application folder and there's lots of videos
| | 11:30 | that talk about how to install scripts.
| | 11:32 | It's just really no-brainer.
| | 11:33 | You don't even need to quit
out of InDesign to do this.
| | 11:36 | All I did was I added a few more
entries in the Find/Change list that also gets
| | 11:41 | rid of non-breaking spaces and soft returns.
| | 11:45 | So if we run FindChangeByList-epub on
the document, it's everything that the
| | 11:52 | original script does, plus a few more things.
| | 11:55 | You might also have some weird or
unusual characters in your publications that
| | 12:00 | you always need to do a Find/
Change before you export to EPUB.
| | 12:03 | It's very easy to edit this text file
and then point the script to that text file.
| | 12:09 | As long as you don't change the name,
you don't need to change the script at all.
| | 12:13 | Well, phew!
| | 12:14 | That was a lot to go over in one video I know.
| | 12:16 | Now that you know how to do a Find/
Change on an InDesign document to make a
| | 12:20 | cleaner EPUB, I think you'll
find your work a lot easier.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Applying paragraph and character styles| 00:00 | When you export your InDesign
document to EPUB, the formatting that you have
| | 00:04 | applied to your text will more or
less also appear in the final EPUB and
| | 00:11 | mastering that issue of which
formatting makes it through to the EPUB and which
| | 00:16 | doesn't is key to becoming
an expert with this process.
| | 00:21 | Especially when it comes to styles,
because the styles that you have defined in
| | 00:26 | your InDesign document, the paragraph
and character styles, will get converted to
| | 00:31 | web sort of styles, known as a
CSS or cascading style sheet file.
| | 00:36 | Let's take a look at a typical InDesign
document, when we export it to EPUB what
| | 00:40 | happens to the text formatting, and
I'll show you some fixes and workarounds
| | 00:44 | and some best practices for this.
| | 00:45 | What we are looking at right now is
a very simple three-page document with
| | 00:50 | some text that has been styled.
We've some paragraph styles. They've been
| | 00:54 | applied to the text.
| | 00:56 | so we have subhead and body texts, and so on.
| | 00:58 | We also have some bolds and italics here.
| | 01:03 | Now this is just been applied manually
to the body, just like if you want here
| | 01:08 | and press Command+Shift+B or Ctrl+
Shift+B to make something bold, something
| | 01:11 | people do all the time. This is small
caps, done the same way. So it's typical.
| | 01:16 | Let's go ahead and export this to EPUB.
| | 01:18 | I will use my keyboard shortcut to export
and we will save it right out to the Desktop.
| | 01:23 | When you get to this dialog box, I want
you to check two things. First of all in
| | 01:27 | General, make sure that View e-book
after exporting is turned on, so it will
| | 01:31 | open up automatically after we clicked export.
| | 01:34 | In the Content section, I want you to
make sure under CSS options that Preserve
| | 01:39 | Local Overrides is disabled.
Generate CSS should be on.
| | 01:43 | We're going to export this without
local overrides, just using the style
| | 01:47 | definitions. And surprise, surprise
our local formatting didn't come through.
| | 01:54 | All right so, it was all ignored.
| | 01:58 | We have lost our bolds and italics.
| | 02:00 | We've lost the small caps and there's
also some surprises like check out this text.
| | 02:06 | Let me make all the overall
text smaller, so it's easier to see.
| | 02:10 | This text should be fine.
| | 02:12 | I mean if we look at the paragraph
that starts "European visitors to the San
| | 02:16 | Francisco Bay Area" here, it looks
exactly like the rest of the paragraphs but as
| | 02:22 | you can see in my Paragraph Styles
panel, this is actually an override.
| | 02:26 | Somehow somebody did not apply the
Body style to this paragraph; instead it's
| | 02:32 | basic paragraph that looks
like the rest of the text.
| | 02:35 | "No matter," you think, "that's why
CS5 has that option to Preserve Local Overrides."
| | 02:40 | Let's try that. I will
go ahead and export it again to EPUB,
| | 02:43 | overriding the other one.
| | 02:46 | This time in Contents, I am going
to turn on Preserve Local Overrides.
| | 02:52 | There, that's better.
| | 02:53 | So the Local Overrides came
through. We have our bolds and italics.
| | 02:57 | The small caps didn't come through, but
that's an issue having to do with CSS
| | 03:01 | that we will deal with later.
| | 03:02 | So you might be thing, "Okay well
then I will just do that, let's move on."
| | 03:05 | But actually it's really not a good
idea to maintain local overrides in the
| | 03:10 | resulting EPUB file.
| | 03:12 | It's nice for just a one-off quickie job,
but seriously if you are going to be
| | 03:16 | selling this EPUB, you want to do it
right. Let me show you why. Because you are
| | 03:19 | definitely going to have to edit the
actually resulting EPUB file to some extent
| | 03:24 | and having it maintain local
overrides makes your job much more difficult.
| | 03:29 | I am switching to Sigil, one of my
favorite EPUB editing programs because it
| | 03:33 | will let us look at the actual code of
the EPUB file without having to unzip it.
| | 03:37 | So I am just going to open that EPUB file and
this is the actual history text XHTML file.
| | 03:45 | Let me switch to Code View and make
it a little larger, let me zoom in, let me
| | 03:51 | zoom in a few times, here we go, easier to see.
| | 03:56 | This is just like a web page. If you are
familiar with that at all, you will be right at home.
| | 04:01 | But basically, take a look at this.
| | 04:03 | Take a look at where it says major port.
| | 04:05 | it is surrounded by a span tag, a span
class called no-style-override, and then
| | 04:13 | it closes after major port.
| | 04:15 | So this class is actually a CSS
style, called no-style-override-2.
| | 04:20 | So you see, what happens is that see,
if you have applied an override,
| | 04:25 | InDesign will make up a fake
character style and include that in the
| | 04:29 | resulting EPUB and the fake character
style is going to be called no-style-
| | 04:33 | override-2. There are a ton of them here.
| | 04:36 | You can see in the next paragraph,
there's a couple of them, actually there is 3,
| | 04:41 | and if we look at the actual CSS file,
which we can do in Sigil, the stuff at
| | 04:47 | the top looks kind of familiar, and
actually it should be accessible to most users.
| | 04:51 | Let me zoom in again, there we go.
| | 04:54 | So there is subhead and body first.
These are the actual paragraph styles that
| | 04:58 | we created in InDesign and if you
wanted to edit what this EPUB look like,
| | 05:02 | you could actually do so here. You could
change color, font size and so on, but as
| | 05:07 | we scroll down, oh my goodness, look at this.
| | 05:11 | so we have multiple styles that have
been applied to the local overrides and if
| | 05:17 | we try to do a search and replace
for example on these, it would be very
| | 05:20 | difficult to do because each one has a
unique name. {lus this is very long name
| | 05:25 | for a character style. We are just
dealing with a three page document.
| | 05:29 | If you had a 400 page book, this would
really add to the weight or the file size
| | 05:33 | of the EPUB, having to repeat these
characters style names through out.
| | 05:37 | The better thing to do would be to go
back to InDesign and convert all your
| | 05:40 | local overrides to actual character styles.
| | 05:43 | You can do it manually or
you can it with a script.
| | 05:46 | To do it manually, you simply would go
to the Find/Change from the Edit menu
| | 05:53 | and you would search for
anything that has been styled italic.
| | 05:57 | So I am going to Basic
Character Formats. We will say italic.
| | 06:01 | For example, we're going to create a
character style for italic text and then
| | 06:06 | we want to replace that, so change
format with a character style called italic.
| | 06:12 | I haven't created one yet, but I could.
| | 06:14 | I could just come up here and
created an italic character style that
| | 06:18 | automatically makes something italic.
| | 06:19 | Now I am going to go ahead and do this,
because I think it's way too much work.
| | 06:24 | Instead I am going to use this
fantastic script and there is a few out there.
| | 06:28 | This is a really good one that
works great in CS5, called and PrepText.
| | 06:34 | If we go under Window > Utilities >
Scripts, I have already installed it on
| | 06:39 | this copy of InDesign, preptext.jsx,
and we will put a link where you can
| | 06:44 | download it and learn more about prep text.
| | 06:47 | It's written by a friend of mine called
Jong Ware, and what it does is it goes
| | 06:51 | through the document and converts all
local formatting to character styles,
| | 06:55 | creating the character styles along the way.
| | 06:57 | So I am going to go ahead and open up
the Character Styles panel, so you can see
| | 07:01 | there is nothing on my sleeve.
| | 07:02 | It's empty. And I will
double-click PrepText. The end.
| | 07:07 | It created character styles. Let's zoom in here.
| | 07:11 | So this word right now has the
character style Bold, and if I open up the
| | 07:17 | paragraph style there is no plus symbol,
which tells me that there is no local overriding.
| | 07:22 | Everything has been done
with actual characters styles.
| | 07:26 | So this one is major port, and look we
don't need to open up character style,
| | 07:30 | here we go. This is small caps,
and this is bold, italic, and so on.
| | 07:36 | Now when we export this to EPUB, I am
going to go ahead and override the old one,
| | 07:42 | and we go to Contents, do
not preserve local overrides,
| | 07:50 | we still get our actual bold
and italics and bold italics.
| | 07:54 | The only thing that it missed was this
entire paragraph, so we would have had
| | 07:58 | to find it ourselves.
| | 07:59 | This is not really a case of a
character style; this is an actual
| | 08:02 | incorrect paragraph style.
| | 08:04 | The other problem that you may have
noticed is that the small cap is not here,
| | 08:07 | and that's actually an issue having to
do with the CSS that we will be talking
| | 08:10 | about in a later video.
| | 08:12 | So what about those paragraph styles.
How
=can you find those paragraph styles quickly?
| | 08:16 | I do have one tip that I learned from
my friend Rufus. If we come back over
| | 08:20 | here and we open up the Story Editor
of this story, so my cursor is blinking
| | 08:25 | inside this frame and I go to
Edit > Edit in Story Editor.
| | 08:29 | The Story Editor on the left
lists all of the paragraph styles
| | 08:34 | that have been applied to every single
paragraph in the story, and all you need
| | 08:38 | to do is scroll through here and look
for anything that doesn't say the name
| | 08:43 | of an actual style, like
this one, basic paragraph.
| | 08:46 | So you shouldn't have any of that say
basic paragraph in your document, unless
| | 08:50 | you actually do wanted to
format it with basic paragraph.
| | 08:53 | The story editor unfortunately doesn't
show plus symbol here, but you can assume
| | 08:56 | that if it says basic
paragraph, there is something wonky.
| | 08:59 | So you can select this and then
close the Story Editor and then find that
| | 09:04 | text here and fix it.
| | 09:07 | So you need to go through your documents
and apply paragraph styles, and character
| | 09:10 | styles before you export to EPUB.
| | 09:13 | So the whole InDesign to EPUB export
process depends a lot on how well you have
| | 09:18 | applied your paragraph and
character styles. So that's it.
| | 09:22 | The best practice then is to make
sure that all your text is formatted with
| | 09:26 | paragraph styles and character styles.
| | 09:28 | The resulting EPUB will be
a lot easier to work with.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Modifying nested, GREP, and line styles| 00:00 | When I'm laying out a publication
and formatting the text, I look for every
| | 00:04 | opportunity I can to save time.
| | 00:08 | For example, I'm always looking for ways
to take advantage of InDesign's ability
| | 00:12 | to automatically apply character styles
to text based on some kind of parameter.
| | 00:17 | What we're looking at is kind of like
an ugly document right here that has
| | 00:22 | the three different kinds of automatic
character style applications that InDesign can do.
| | 00:27 | We have nested styles,
GREP styles and a line style.
| | 00:31 | The problem is that when you export
to EPUB, EPUB doesn't know anything
| | 00:35 | about nested styles and it completely ignores
these character styles that have been applied.
| | 00:40 | So I'm going to show you that and then
I'm going to show you how to fix that in
| | 00:43 | a manual way and a fast automated way.
| | 00:46 | So let's review this document.
| | 00:48 | I'm going to zoom in a little
bit and open up Paragraph Styles.
| | 00:52 | Now this first paragraph, body no
indent, has this green line at the top and
| | 00:58 | that's because it has an actual line
style that makes the first line green.
| | 01:05 | So that means that as I edit this,
arriving on or about, you see that as it
| | 01:12 | wraps then it automatically just keeps, the
green on the first line. That's a line style.
| | 01:17 | And then what we have here, I'll talk
about the red San Francisco in a second.
| | 01:21 | This bold leading into this text here,
this is the facts paragraph style and
| | 01:27 | if we look there, we have a bold
nested style occurring that takes place
| | 01:32 | through the first colon.
| | 01:35 | So that's why that is bold.
| | 01:37 | If I keep writing 1846 to
1847 and so on, it stays bold.
| | 01:43 | And then this red San
Francisco is a very simple GREP style.
| | 01:47 | A GREP style that's been added to
the body style and what I told it to do
| | 01:52 | was every time it came to the text
that said San Francisco to apply the
| | 01:56 | character style Red bold.
| | 01:57 | All right, before I even export this to
EPUB, I want to show you one little thing
| | 02:02 | about character styles.
| | 02:04 | If we open up the Character Styles
panel and you click in any of this style text,
| | 02:08 | you'll see that it says None at the top
and None is selected here and that is normal.
| | 02:15 | If you take a close look, you'll see
the actual name of the character style
| | 02:19 | down here preceded by the paragraph
symbol, aka the pilcrow, and it tells you
| | 02:25 | that this character style called Red bold
right now is being applied via a paragraph style.
| | 02:30 | So it's a little clue.
| | 02:31 | So if you're wondering gee, how did this
occur here, is it manual formatting or is
| | 02:36 | it a character style or is it an
automatic nested style, this little area down
| | 02:40 | here will inform you.
| | 02:41 | Now let's export this to EPUB.
| | 02:43 | I'll use my keyboard shortcut
to get it right on the Desktop.
| | 02:48 | In this dialog box, I want to make
sure that you turn on View eBook after
| | 02:52 | Exporting so we can see it right away,
and in Contents make sure the Generate
| | 02:57 | CSS is turned on, turn off Include
Embeddable Font, and turn off Preserve Local Overrides.
| | 03:04 | Now the Preserve Local Overrides makes
no difference whether it's turned on or off.
| | 03:07 | You're going to get the same results,
but I've noticed that if you turn on
| | 03:11 | Include Embeddable fonts, I don't
know if it's just because of these nested
| | 03:14 | styles, but that really
confuses Adobe Digital Editions.
| | 03:17 | So just leave that off.
| | 03:20 | So we exported it and you can see that
we lost all of our character formatting.
| | 03:24 | Well, all of the automatically
applied character formatting.
| | 03:27 | So let's go back here.
| | 03:29 | What you need to do then is you need to
what's called flatten nested styles or
| | 03:33 | I've heard people call it expand nested styles.
| | 03:36 | If you've ever done the kind of
expanding of effects, for example, in
| | 03:39 | Illustrator, it means make it not automatic.
| | 03:42 | Make it as though you had done it manually.
| | 03:44 | So you would select the word, San
Francisco, here and actually click on Red Bold.
| | 03:50 | And you have to do that for every
application of every character style.
| | 03:53 | Then when you export it, the EPUB will
recognize that this is supposed to be Red Bold
| | 03:58 | and it'll be coded as
such in the internal XHTML file.
| | 04:01 | Well, that is very tedious.
| | 04:03 | You could speed it up a bit
though if you use Find/Change.
| | 04:06 | You got to Edit, go down to Find/Change.
Just ignore the Find what and Change to
| | 04:13 | fields. Leave them empty.
| | 04:15 | In the Find Format field, click on the
little magnifying glass, you want to
| | 04:20 | search for the character style.
| | 04:22 | Let's try Red Bold first.
| | 04:24 | Actually, let's just try Bold.
And then you want to replace with that
| | 04:31 | same character style.
| | 04:32 | So then you click Find and it finds
the first instance of character style
| | 04:41 | bold being applied.
| | 04:42 | So you see, InDesign knows that it
has been applied, even though it's been
| | 04:46 | applied by a nested style.
| | 04:47 | But when you click Change, it's
actually going to apply the character style
| | 04:51 | bold on top of that.
| | 04:55 | So if I click Change, you
see how it actually applied it.
| | 04:59 | So you could do this a few times and
just click Change All and do this for
| | 05:02 | every single one of your
character styles and that'll work.
| | 05:06 | But that's still a little too tedious for me.
| | 05:08 | You know me, I am a big script person.
| | 05:10 | So I actually found a script that
will do this for you automatically.
| | 05:16 | We'll put up the URL to the
path to download the script.
| | 05:19 | It's written by a friend of mine
named Herbs who is a wonderful plug-in
| | 05:23 | developer for InDesign and he
wrote this free script, because we were
| | 05:27 | complaining about it on InDesign
Secrets, how difficult it was to do this.
| | 05:30 | If we go down to Utilities >
Scripts, I've already installed it.
| | 05:35 | It's called Apply Nested Styles.
| | 05:38 | In the tool tip, you can see that he's
put a little warning, because it's just a
| | 05:42 | freebie scripts, not one for sale.
| | 05:43 | So he didn't make it completely
bulletproof. And the warning is that if you
| | 05:48 | had applied another character style
on top of this text like you can always
| | 05:51 | select San Francisco and then make it
Italic or something like that, you can
| | 05:57 | apply multiple character styles to the same
bit of text if you're using a nested style,
| | 06:02 | it's going to clear out that
additional bit of character style.
| | 06:05 | That's what the warning is about,
but I didn't do that in this document.
| | 06:09 | So I'm not worried about it.
| | 06:10 | All you do is double
click it. You get no feedback.
| | 06:14 | Again, it's a freebie script, but
if you click inside the text, look in
| | 06:19 | the Character Styles panel to confirm that
the actual character style has been applied.
| | 06:25 | So what you want to see is you want to
see the name of the style here and then
| | 06:28 | also at the top and then you can see
down here that running the script did not
| | 06:33 | change the paragraph style at all.
| | 06:35 | So it's still a nested style, but now
let's go ahead and export it to EPUB
| | 06:39 | again, using the same
exact settings. There you go.
| | 06:48 | So now it has reasserted the character
styles, just because they have one cool script.
| | 06:55 | Thank you, Herbs.
| | 06:57 | So if you are one of the smart and
advanced users who are using nested styles,
| | 07:01 | line styles, or GREP styles in your
InDesign documents, that's very cool but
| | 07:06 | make sure that you expand them or
flatten them, whatever you want to call it,
| | 07:10 | before you export to EPUB.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Modifying tables| 00:00 | If your document contained a table
that you created in InDesign, like this
| | 00:04 | one that you see here, the good news is
that it will be included in the export to EPUB.
| | 00:10 | Now most tables are actually part of the
text flow already, so you don't have to
| | 00:14 | worry about them being in
the right order or not.
| | 00:15 | Of course, if they're in their own text
frame, then you need to cut the table out
| | 00:21 | and place it into the text flow like I
showed in the layout order video earlier.
| | 00:25 | But the text itself in the table and
the table construction will be included in
| | 00:31 | the export. Let's see what that looks like.
| | 00:33 | I am going to use my keyboard shortcut
to export the EPUB and we will just go
| | 00:37 | right onto the desktop, turn on View
eBook after Exporting and in Contents, turn
| | 00:43 | off Include Embeddable Fonts.
You do want to generate the CSS.
| | 00:49 | And I must make this larger.
There is the table. Am I being mean?
| | 00:55 | Did I not mentioned that the table
formatting wouldn't come across? Sorry.
| | 00:58 | The actual paragraph and character styles
that you apply to the table do come across.
| | 01:04 | I mean that first column is blue and
the text is blue here, all right, but the
| | 01:10 | formatting going to come across and
that is just, you know, themes the breaks.
| | 01:14 | Tables are problematic. If you have
a whole lot of tables in your InDesign
| | 01:18 | document, then this might not be the
way for you to go. There is another way
| | 01:22 | that I will show you in a bit.
| | 01:23 | But the good news is that if you just
have a few tables, what's interesting is
| | 01:27 | that the code does come
across for the table code.
| | 01:31 | Let's take a look at this in Sigil,
one of my favorite EPUB Editors. We will
| | 01:36 | open up that EPUB file and here is
that file that we were just looking at in
| | 01:42 | Adobe Digital Editions.
| | 01:44 | Let's look at it in Code view, and
take a look down here. See those TDs?
| | 01:52 | That means start table cell, end table
cell, table data is what it stands for.
| | 01:57 | TR means started new row, so there is
a guy's name, Marcel, and then his middle
| | 02:03 | initial is R I guess, and so on.
| | 02:05 | The problem though is that if you look
in the CSS file that is governing the
| | 02:11 | formatting here, we have all of the
CSS definitions for the styles, for the
| | 02:20 | paragraph and character styles, but none
for the table styles, and yes I did use
| | 02:26 | a table style to format this.
| | 02:29 | In fact, I believe it's only if you use
a table style will you get the TD and
| | 02:36 | TR sort of code here.
| | 02:38 | So the answer is that what you could do
is you could edit the CSS file and add
| | 02:45 | some CSS rules for how you want the TDs
and the TRs in the table cell to look.
| | 02:51 | So for a TD for a table cell, you can
specify background color and inset and all
| | 02:56 | kinds of stuff and that will be a
topic that we might touch on later but
| | 03:00 | definitely it's a little bit more
advanced CSS formatting is table formatting.
| | 03:04 | But it is possible to do because
you do have the bones there available.
| | 03:08 | Now if that's not really your cup of tea,
you just want to get the data in there
| | 03:11 | and you want it to basically look kind
of nice, there is another way to skin
| | 03:15 | this cat and that is to
change the table into an image.
| | 03:20 | Now you have to be a little bit
careful because if the table is too large,
| | 03:24 | the readers will automatically scale the
image that you are going to convert this
| | 03:29 | to small enough to fit inside the
screen and the table data might be
| | 03:34 | completely unreadable.
| | 03:35 | So you might actually prefer to keep
it looking like this, so that as the
| | 03:40 | screen becomes smaller the table data
still stays together and is accessible
| | 03:46 | and also of course it's searchable.
If the ereader has a search feature, they
| | 03:51 | can find this text inside the table,
but if you convert it to an image, they
| | 03:55 | wont be able to find it.
| | 03:57 | So just some precautions to keep in
mind and I'll tell you a tables are
| | 04:00 | problem with EPUBS.
| | 04:02 | But let's see how we
would turn this into an image.
| | 04:05 | I am going to turn on hidden characters
so we can see all our little paragraph
| | 04:09 | markers and stuff. You can see that
this table is sitting inside of a paragraph
| | 04:13 | and by the way even that paragraph of
the table is sitting inside is called
| | 04:17 | table and has a setting of it being
centered the space above and below, which is
| | 04:22 | why that was maintained
when we moved into the EPUB.
| | 04:26 | What I am going to do is I am going to
cut off this table. I am just going to
| | 04:28 | select this whole thing and press
Command+X or Ctrl+X, and then out here on
| | 04:33 | the pasteboard, I'm going to just drag
out of text frame, all tables have to
| | 04:37 | go inside of a text frame, and then with this
table selected I'm going to export it as a JPEG.
| | 04:45 | Now you might think "Well, I can just
take a screen shot," but most screenshot
| | 04:48 | programs will only take the
screenshot at the resolution of your screen.
| | 04:53 | What's cool about being able to
export the JPEG is that you can set
| | 04:56 | the resolution of JPEG.
| | 04:58 | So I will go down to the File menu and
I will choose Export. Now there are many
| | 05:03 | other formats we could choose to
export it. An EPS might be possible to use.
| | 05:07 | I just kind of like JPEG because that is
a format that is part of the EPUB spec.
| | 05:12 | It would have to convert the EPS to a
JPEG when you exported it and it might
| | 05:16 | downsample it. In fact it probably would.
| | 05:19 | You might want to say oh!
| | 05:19 | What about a PDF or something like that?
| | 05:21 | The problem is that we're looking for
an Export mode that will let us export
| | 05:25 | just the selection. We don't want to
export the whole thing and really the only
| | 05:29 | thing here that will let
us do that is EPS and JPEG.
| | 05:32 | So I am going to go ahead and export it
right to the same folder and so we want
| | 05:39 | to sure that Selection is chosen at the top.
| | 05:41 | We want Maximum image quality, and
Resolution usually defaults to 72. Make sure
| | 05:47 | that it's set at a high-resolution.
| | 05:49 | You don't want to go too high because
then that might make the image too large
| | 05:53 | or when InDesign needs to downsample
it, if it doesn't downsampling when it
| | 05:57 | exports then it might have even worse results.
| | 06:00 | So just leave it at a decent resolution.
| | 06:02 | We will leave it at color space RGB
and keep these two options turned on and
| | 06:07 | export it, and that's done. That was
quick. Let's go and bring it back in, File
| | 06:13 | > Place, and it's inside Tables. We don't
want to replace anything that's selected.
| | 06:26 | There it is. Now it doesn't look really
good, but if you increase the display
| | 06:30 | resolution, it might get a little
bit better, a little bit better.
| | 06:35 | It will look good in an
EPUB, take my word for it.
| | 06:38 | But now what we have to do, remember, is
we need to anchor it inside the text flow.
| | 06:41 | So I'm going to cut or copy it. I will
just copy it. I will click right inside
| | 06:46 | that same paragraph style and then I
will just click Paste or I will press
| | 06:51 | Command+V or Ctrl+V. If when you do
this the image obscures the text above or
| | 06:56 | below, it's probably because the empty
paragraph that you've pasted it into is
| | 07:01 | set for an absolute amount of leading.
Make sure that it is set to Auto Leading
| | 07:05 | so that the text will expand to hold it.
| | 07:08 | Now let's go ahead and export this to
EPUB again, out to the desktop and replace
| | 07:13 | our old one, and make sure that
it's all set, and there it is.
| | 07:23 | Let's get our text smaller, so we can see it.
| | 07:26 | So the table came through intact.
| | 07:28 | It's quite easy to read I think, but
it is an image. So again you can't search
| | 07:32 | for any text in here and on some devices
it may need to be scaled so small that you
| | 07:37 | couldn't really read the text.
| | 07:39 | However, there it is and it's got the same
beautiful formatting that you worked so
| | 07:42 | hard to achieve in InDesign.
| | 07:44 | If you use this method, one idea that I
should tell you about is to make sure to
| | 07:48 | keep the editable table in the pasteboard.
| | 07:50 | This guy over here, like this one that we
brought in we can delete because we don't have it.
| | 07:55 | But later on if you need to update
this file, you don't want to have to
| | 07:58 | re-create this table from scratch. So
keep this guy handy. You might even want to
| | 08:02 | put a little note here for the next
person who takes over this file. Update this
| | 08:06 | table, export to JPEG, and replace this
image, before you export it to EPUB.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Converting InDesign graphics| 00:00 | As you've learned by now, when you export
from InDesign to EPUB, the text that is
| | 00:05 | on the pages comes across and the
images that is on the pages, they come across too,
| | 00:10 | but what doesn't come
across is InDesign artwork.
| | 00:15 | You can create lots of interesting
things with InDesign's frames and lines and
| | 00:19 | arrow styles and all of that stuff is ignored.
| | 00:22 | You might think, oh, I never use that
anyway, but what about something like
| | 00:26 | callouts like in this file
that we have open right here.
| | 00:29 | We have this picture of my dog, Zoey,
with a couple graphics pointing out her
| | 00:34 | ears and her tail, and of course
this is facetious, but I created these
| | 00:39 | graphics with the Frame tool over here.
In fact, we even have an objects style
| | 00:43 | to add the red color and make them 2
pixels thick. Same thing for these strokes.
| | 00:48 | All right, now I just grouped them
altogether and this should be perfectly fine
| | 00:51 | for PDF for print, but let's export
this to EPUB and see what happens.
| | 00:55 | Let me zoom out and then we'll use my
keyboard shortcut for File> Export to EPUB.
| | 01:01 | Let's put this on the desktop and
under Contents, we want to make sure that
| | 01:07 | Generate CSS is turned on, turn
off Embeddable Fonts like export.
| | 01:13 | Okay, the title came across fine and the
byline and the text, but those two bits
| | 01:19 | of captions, they're sort of on top
and below the picture, which is on the
| | 01:23 | left, and our callout
graphics are completely gone.
| | 01:26 | They're nowhere here.
| | 01:27 | So how can you get it back?
| | 01:29 | Well, you know, I'm sorry, but InDesign is
just too dumb to do the conversion itself.
| | 01:33 | I think it's a huge flaw in the
program and hopefully, in an upcoming version,
| | 01:37 | they will add it in or decide oh yeah,
that would make life easier for all of
| | 01:43 | our users who are using this EPUB export.
| | 01:44 | In the meantime, grouping doesn't help,
as you can see that's what I tried first.
| | 01:48 | What you need to do is basically export
this conglomeration to some other file
| | 01:54 | format and then place it in here as a
linked graphic, similar to what we had
| | 01:59 | to do with the table in a previous video,
if you want to get that table formatting in.
| | 02:04 | So you can use the same method that we used
for the table, which is to make this selection.
| | 02:08 | It doesn't have to be group to select it.
| | 02:10 | Just select everything that you
want and then you can export it to JPEG.
| | 02:13 | So you just go to File > Export and
choose the JPEG format and then place that.
| | 02:19 | But I want to show you a couple
different ways that you can do this and one of
| | 02:22 | them involves a script that might
make your life a heck of lot easier.
| | 02:26 | First, let's place this into a new
blank InDesign document and then we'll
| | 02:31 | place the InDesign file, because of
course you can do that for the past
| | 02:33 | couple of versions.
| | 02:34 | So I'm going to take this. I'll
move it over to this side for now.
| | 02:39 | I'm a going to copy it and then
create a new InDesign document by pressing
| | 02:43 | Command+N or Ctrl+N and
I don't need Facing Pages.
| | 02:46 | I'll just leave that all
set up and then I'll paste.
| | 02:50 | So there is my little artwork
and then I'll save this document.
| | 02:54 | I'll save it on the
desktop as zoey graphic pasted.
| | 03:01 | Then back in my original file, I'll go
to File > Place and find that InDesign
| | 03:07 | file and then just click to place it.
| | 03:10 | Now see the problem here is that it
places it with the bounding box of the
| | 03:14 | entire page and so you need to crop it
by dragging these things in, just like
| | 03:21 | you would with an image.
| | 03:22 | Unfortunately, when you place it, you
can't say just bring in the artwork like
| | 03:26 | you can if you place a PDF and you're
looking options, you don't want to do
| | 03:28 | that, not with an InDesign file.
| | 03:31 | But anyway, now we can just move
this InDesign file over here and this is
| | 03:35 | actually a linked graphic.
| | 03:36 | If you look in the Links panel, you'll
see the InDesign file is there and it
| | 03:40 | knows that it has zoey.jpg there.
| | 03:41 | Of course, it's not going to export this
out on the pasteboard because exporting
| | 03:45 | to EPUB ignores stuff on the pasteboard.
| | 03:48 | I'm using the same keyboard shortcut.
| | 03:49 | We'll export and replace this,
same settings. View eBook.
| | 03:54 | Same settings for CSS.
| | 03:56 | So that's a little better, but let me
show you an automated way to do that.
| | 04:00 | I'm going to get rid of this and we'll go
back to how we were, this guy right here.
| | 04:05 | This time, I've installed before I
even started recording this video, a free
| | 04:10 | script that I love called Layout Zone and it's
available cross-platform for CS3 through CS5.
| | 04:17 | It's a little more
complicated than a normal script.
| | 04:19 | You can't just drop it into your Scripts folder.
| | 04:21 | You actually have to drop a bunch of
folders into your Application folder and
| | 04:25 | then restart the program.
| | 04:26 | That's only because Layout Zone adds an
actual menu item here that you can even
| | 04:31 | assign a keyboard shortcut to if you want to.
| | 04:33 | What I'm going to do is I've selected this
graphic with zoey in the callouts and again,
| | 04:39 | it doesn't have to be group.
| | 04:40 | You can just make a multiple selection
and then with it selected, you come to
| | 04:43 | Edit > Layout Zone and choose Assign Zone.
| | 04:47 | What it's going to do is create a
separate InDesign document, just like we just
| | 04:50 | did manually, except it's much faster.
| | 04:53 | So it's asking where do you want that
InDesign file to be saved and what do
| | 04:56 | you want to name it.
| | 04:57 | So I call it zoey layout zone, save
it on the desktop, and then you get this
| | 05:03 | wonderful dialog box that
says what do you want to save.
| | 05:06 | The Selection or the Page that you
were on, and should it replace the
| | 05:11 | objects with the document?
| | 05:12 | Yes, that saves a ton of time.
| | 05:14 | There are some other settings
here that you can just leave as is.
| | 05:17 | Click OK and there it is.
| | 05:18 | So it is already placed
it as an InDesign document.
| | 05:23 | There it is again, up here.
| | 05:25 | Now actually even before I export
to EPUB, I'll just do one more thing.
| | 05:28 | Let's actually bring it inside the text.
| | 05:30 | I'm going to anchor this to the text
flow, if you remember from my previous
| | 05:35 | video about how to get the
images in the middle of the text flow.
| | 05:39 | I have a style here called Image
Centered, there we go, and then I'm just going
| | 05:44 | to take this graphic.
| | 05:45 | Notice this actually has
nothing to do with the script.
| | 05:47 | I'm cutting it to the clipboard and
then pasting it in as an anchored graphic.
| | 05:50 | I just want to you know show best
practices, that normally you don't want to have
| | 05:54 | graphics just sort of floating around.
| | 05:55 | If you want the graphic to appear in the body
of the text, you need to anchor it in the text.
| | 06:00 | There we go.
| | 06:00 | Now let's go ahead and export this to
EPUB replacing the existing file. Export.
| | 06:07 | So it's still an image. Again, like
what happened when we place the table
| | 06:12 | that we converted to JPEG, this is artwork
and you cannot search for things in the artwork.
| | 06:18 | But the beauty of it is that it
maintains the exact same formatting that you had
| | 06:23 | done so carefully in InDesign.
| | 06:25 | It brings along all the things that
InDesign is too dumb to bring along, all the
| | 06:28 | InDesign artwork, and what's even
better is that other people can work on the
| | 06:33 | external InDesign file, that zone, and
they can edit it and then it would show up
| | 06:38 | as being out of date, or if you've
used the Layout Zone to do this, as I have,
| | 06:44 | now Layout Zone though has a
problem with anchor graphics.
| | 06:47 | So if you need to do something related
to that script, you have to un-anchor it.
| | 06:50 | So I'm selecting it, cutting into the
clipboard, and then pasting it so it's
| | 06:54 | just a floating image.
| | 06:55 | I can go back up to the Edit menu to
Layout Zone and say Convert Zone and what
| | 07:01 | it will do will be to create the objects
just as they were originally there. There we go.
| | 07:07 | There is our original InDesign file.
| | 07:08 | So we didn't even have to recreate it
or export it or whatever you want to do.
| | 07:12 | It's just another feature that's
part of Layout Zone, a free script
| | 07:14 | from Automatication.
| | 07:16 | So when you're trying to include your
beautiful InDesign artwork in your EPUB,
| | 07:21 | there's no way around it
for now, I'm sorry to say.
| | 07:23 | You need to turn it into a
graphic and then place that graphic.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Manually optimizing images| 00:00 | All the artwork that you place or
import into your InDesign document, whether
| | 00:04 | it's an image or a PDF page or even
another InDesign file, as long as it is
| | 00:10 | within the page boundaries of your
InDesign document, it's going to be
| | 00:13 | included in the EPUB Export.
| | 00:16 | And regardless of what resolution it's
at or how you sized it, what you see is
| | 00:21 | really what you get, except at a lower res.
| | 00:23 | All right, so the size that you
have in InDesign, the dimensions are
| | 00:28 | matched when you export to EPUB;
however, InDesign will automatically down
| | 00:33 | sample the image to 72 ppi.
| | 00:37 | I've placed here a medium res image,
it's a 180 pip, and if we look at the Links
| | 00:43 | panel down here in Link Info, you can
see that I have scaled it smaller so that
| | 00:49 | the effective PPI is 517.
| | 00:52 | Now the image width and height I have
measured up here in pixels and you can see
| | 00:56 | that I have changed my ruler to pixels as well.
| | 01:00 | So if you just right-click, you might
change it to pixels on both the horizontal
| | 01:04 | and vertical. That way you get an idea of what
this is going to look like in the final EPUB.
| | 01:09 | Notice that this document I have set to
be 600 pixels wide, which is the width of
| | 01:14 | a lot of ereaders, and if you are
creating a document from scratch in InDesign
| | 01:19 | you might as well set up the dimensions
to match the live page size or the live
| | 01:25 | image size of the ereader that you're
targeting or that you think that most of
| | 01:28 | your users will be using.
| | 01:30 | Dimension of 600 wide by 800 pixels
tall is usually a good compromise.
| | 01:35 | So as you can see, this image should
take up about half of the screen width.
| | 01:41 | So, let's go ahead and export this to EPUB.
| | 01:43 | I use my keyboard shortcut to export to EPUB
and we will export it right on the desktop.
| | 01:49 | We want to turn on View eBook after Exporting.
| | 01:53 | And under Images now I am going to
cover this in a lot more detail in another
| | 01:57 | video later on, but for now just know
that whether or not you have Formatted
| | 02:03 | turned on, InDesign is automatically
going to down-sample this image to 72 ppi.
| | 02:09 | Now if you want InDesign to match the
scaling and the cropping when it exports to
| | 02:13 | EPUB, which you probably do, then
make sure that Formatted it turned on.
| | 02:17 | So we will go ahead and export this
and there is the image in EPUB document.
| | 02:25 | Now if we switch back to InDesign and we
change the View scale to 100%, the size
| | 02:32 | of the image that you see here is
the size of the image here in EPUB.
| | 02:37 | If we go back to InDesign and we do
something like say rotate the image and
| | 02:42 | then export that to EPUB, replacing
the existing one, and as long as Formatted
| | 02:48 | is turned on, Export, then it's
also automatically exported with that
| | 02:53 | formatting in the EPUB.
| | 02:55 | Now a couple things about optimizing
your images in InDesign. I know a lot of
| | 02:59 | people wonder well, if it's going to
down-sample everything to 72ppi and I
| | 03:04 | really have no control over that, then
shouldn't I downsample my own images to
| | 03:08 | 72ppi so I can apply my own
sharpening in Photoshop first?
| | 03:12 | Well, actually you might want to
consider doing that if the images are critical,
| | 03:16 | so understanding what's happening in
your EPUB. You know if the images are just
| | 03:20 | sort of illustrative then it's a lot of
work and InDesign does a pretty good job
| | 03:25 | of the downsampling.
| | 03:26 | But I did a test here. What I've done is
I've created a two page document and on
| | 03:31 | each page there is a different kind of
image. There is a GIF and there is a JPEG
| | 03:35 | and on each one I have a high res
version of it that I created in Photoshop.
| | 03:40 | All right, so this is just a square
that is a Photoshop file and its 300 PPI.
| | 03:45 | This is the same square that I've down-
sampled to 72 and I have saved it out as
| | 03:50 | a GIF and then on this page, it is a high-
res picture that I took and that is 300,
| | 03:58 | called window-hires and below that I
change the resolution in Photoshop to 72
| | 04:02 | and saved it out as a JPEG.
| | 04:05 | What I want to show you here is two things.
| | 04:07 | First of all, we're going to be able
to compare how InDesign does when it
| | 04:12 | compresses or re-samples each one of
these images to 72, and it does touch even
| | 04:18 | the ones that are already at 72.
| | 04:20 | Second, we are going to see that when
InDesign does its automatic conversion to
| | 04:24 | either GIF or JPEG, it will
almost always choose JPEG.
| | 04:29 | In fact in my experience the only
images that it exports to GIF are the ones
| | 04:33 | that are GIF to begin with.
| | 04:34 | Let's export this to EPUB, image
tests, and make sure that View eBook after
| | 04:41 | Exporting is turned on. Under Images
it is going to say formatted and we are
| | 04:46 | going to leave it at Automatic.
| | 04:48 | You would think that this means
that InDesign is going to look at the
| | 04:50 | composition of the image and if
it's a solid color it'll keep it at GIF,
| | 04:54 | otherwise it will convert it
to JPEG, and actually it doesn't.
| | 04:58 | It convert everything to JPEG.
| | 05:00 | Let's move the JPEG options image
quality to high and then let's export this and
| | 05:05 | let me expand so we can see it better.
| | 05:09 | So this was a high-res PSD
file and here's the low-res GIF.
| | 05:13 | Now actually it looks exactly the same
as how it does in InDesign and you can
| | 05:18 | see there's a little bit color
difference between the PSD and the GIF file.
| | 05:21 | So that one didn't make that much
difference, so if you have images that are just
| | 05:24 | flat color even if they are at a high
-res from Photoshop, it really makes no
| | 05:28 | difference if you downsampled them.
| | 05:31 | But take a look at the difference
between these two photographs. This was the
| | 05:35 | 300 ppi image that InDesign down
sampled to 72 on its own and this was the 72
| | 05:42 | ppi image and it did a much better job with 72.
| | 05:45 | All right, so if your images are
high-res, you might want to consider
| | 05:50 | downsampling them yourself and
replacing them in your InDesign file before
| | 05:54 | you export to EPUB.
| | 05:56 | Just FYI in your exercise folder, I
created a folder where I took that EPUB from
| | 06:02 | image test and I expanded it
so you can see its contents.
| | 06:05 | We will be talking a lot more
about this in future videos.
| | 06:09 | But in the folder where it contains the
images that it downsampled, notice that
| | 06:13 | it made a JPEG,
even of that flat color.
| | 06:17 | So everything came out as JPEG except
for the one that was a GIF to begin with.
| | 06:22 | One last tip I want to tell you about
especially people who are creating ebooks
| | 06:25 | specifically for the iBook store on
the Apple iPad and that is people have
| | 06:31 | discovered that you can create an
image that is the exact height and width of
| | 06:37 | the entire iBook page if you
resize it to exactly these measures.
| | 06:42 | 860 pixels high by 600 pixels wide,
I've heard it called the magic dimensions
| | 06:50 | because it effectively acts like a
chapter break or page break. This will always
| | 06:55 | appear completely on its own page. The
iPad will never break it up into two pages
| | 07:00 | like it sometimes does with larger
images or images of a different resolution.
| | 07:04 | And so, an image that's exactly half of
this, like 600 pixels wide by 430 pixels
| | 07:11 | tall, like this image, will
take up exactly half a page.
| | 07:15 | Now if you want to do this to your
images in InDesign what you do is make this
| | 07:20 | back to zero, is that you come over
here to the width and the height and you
| | 07:26 | enter exactly 600 wide by 860 tall.
Of course in pixels all right or points.
| | 07:35 | So all we have done is resize the
frame and then you go to the Object menu >
| | 07:39 | Fitting and choose Fill Frame Proportionally.
| | 07:43 | So now this image is exactly 600 x
860 and of course you can move the image
| | 07:48 | around within these dimensions to get it to
you know fit better or to do a better crop.
| | 07:53 | I went ahead and exported this document,
starting from up here, to EPUB and then
| | 07:59 | I put it on my iPad and took
screenshots you can see what it looks like.
| | 08:03 | So looking at it in normal portrait
orientation, this is page 1 and then when
| | 08:08 | you flip the page this is page 2.
| | 08:10 | So that image, that large image, took
up the entire page and there is page 3.
| | 08:14 | So if you want to have an image
separate chapters for example you could do this way
| | 08:18 | by inserting that large
image in between sections of type.
| | 08:22 | Here is the half page image.
| | 08:24 | That looks pretty good and even if you
rotate the iPad so that the orientation
| | 08:29 | is landscape, here is page 1, here is
page 2, it looks pretty cool, huh, and there is
| | 08:36 | the half page image.
| | 08:37 | So those are some tips for optimizing
your images in your InDesign document
| | 08:41 | before you export to EPUB.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a cover image| 00:00 | When you're looking in the iBookstore or
you're on Amazon, looking in the Kindle
| | 00:04 | bookstore or you're in B&N Nook
bookstore, when you're looking for ebooks,
| | 00:10 | you're looking at covers.
| | 00:11 | So it's not all about the content
when it comes to digital publishing.
| | 00:15 | A lot of people are still making
choices based on the book's cover.
| | 00:19 | So the cover image is very
important when you're creating an ebook and
| | 00:24 | unfortunately, it's a moving target as
far as exact technical specifications.
| | 00:30 | A lot of the specifications are moving target.
| | 00:31 | There are a few things that we know for
sure and that's what I'll tell you now.
| | 00:36 | I'll also give you some pointers in
this video and in my final video about how
| | 00:40 | to keep up with the field and
learn about where the target is now.
| | 00:44 | I guess the question is first
of all, what do we know for sure.
| | 00:47 | Well, we know for sure that
the cover has to be an image.
| | 00:50 | So let's say that you're laying out a
book, like take a look at this book that
| | 00:54 | we have on screen right now.
| | 00:55 | I'm going to zoom in a bit and we have a
page that's made up to be the book's cover.
| | 01:01 | Now you might have an InDesign file that
stands on its own that's for the cover.
| | 01:05 | It's not merged with the
content of the document.
| | 01:07 | That's perfectly normal.
| | 01:09 | But I would imagine that you've created
the books cover in InDesign, even if the
| | 01:15 | background art is safe from Photoshop,
you've added titles and the author's name
| | 01:20 | and other information to the cover this way.
| | 01:23 | Now, if you export this document to EPUB,
I think by now you know what's going
| | 01:27 | to happen, but let's check it out.
| | 01:29 | If we use my keyboard shortcut for
export to EPUB format and we want to make
| | 01:34 | sure to View eBook after Exporting and in
under Contents, Generate CSS, Include
| | 01:39 | Style Definitions. Let's export this guy.
| | 01:42 | What happened is that it took the text
from that text frame on the cover, here
| | 01:46 | and here and then it took the image
and then that's just part of the EPUB.
| | 01:50 | Let's come back here.
| | 01:52 | When you export to EPUB, you don't get
the cool drop shadows or anything like
| | 01:56 | that either so that was deleted.
| | 01:58 | What you need to do is you need to convert
this into an image and make that the cover.
| | 02:03 | You'd do it the same way that we
converted artwork to images in the video about
| | 02:09 | working with InDesign art and the
video with working with tables is that you
| | 02:13 | need to export this part of your
InDesign file to some other format so that you
| | 02:17 | can place it in here.
| | 02:19 | So for example, you might even cut
and paste it into Illustrator of it's a
| | 02:22 | simple cover, or you could make a
selection here and export your selection to
| | 02:28 | JPEG and place the JPEG.
| | 02:30 | It's a perfectly legitimate way to do
this. I would just select it, choose
| | 02:34 | Export, choose the JPEG format,
and then on the desktop, I'll call it
| | 02:38 | calif-stories-cover.
| | 02:42 | And what's cool about export for JPEG
in CS5 is that you can export just the
| | 02:45 | selection rather than the
entire page, for example.
| | 02:49 | Choose a nice high-resolution and click
Export and then we'll move this guy out
| | 02:54 | to the pasteboard so that if we ever
need to edit it we can, and then we'll
| | 02:59 | replace it by placing. I just
press Command+D or Ctrl+D to place.
| | 03:03 | We'll place the JPEG right
there. So let's try that.
| | 03:08 | So we've placed the JPEG and
now let's export this to EPUB.
| | 03:12 | It's going to ignore this because EPUB
ignores stuff that's completely on the
| | 03:16 | pasteboard, and we'll just check our
settings that everything is same as before.
| | 03:20 | Yup and there we go. There's the cover.
| | 03:23 | So the cover came through as an image.
| | 03:25 | Now I would not worry about, I know
that you're looking over here, maybe the
| | 03:28 | thumbnails, saying "The thumbnail is cutoff!!"
| | 03:30 | This is an issue with Adobe Digital
Editions and I really don't know of a
| | 03:35 | way to get around it.
| | 03:36 | But I can tell you that if you're
looking at on a Nook or on a Kindle or
| | 03:39 | on the iPad, that the
thumbnail image is perfectly fine.
| | 03:43 | But you know, while I'm talking about
those different readers, one issue that
| | 03:46 | a lot of people ask me is "Well, I want
the cover image, when they open up the
| | 03:51 | EPUB, I want the cover image to take
up the entire imageable area of the device.
| | 03:56 | So how do I do that?"
| | 03:58 | They don't want any white
space surrounding the cover.
| | 04:00 | Well, I think that there're better
things that you can spend your time on, but
| | 04:04 | what you would need to do would
be to go to one of these pages.
| | 04:07 | These are all from a Wiki that's
been put together by the good people who
| | 04:11 | populate mobileread.com, one of my
favorite resources, the free online forum for
| | 04:17 | people who are working with mobile ereaders.
| | 04:21 | What they've done is they've come up
with product matrices for every single
| | 04:25 | ereader known to man along with all the details.
| | 04:28 | Like this is the one all about web tablets.
| | 04:30 | So you can see here are the
actual dimensions of an iPad and its
| | 04:34 | display resolution.
| | 04:36 | So according to this, you would have to
make your image 1024x768 to completely
| | 04:41 | fill the iPad screen.
| | 04:42 | Now actually, it's not that simple and
it's not that bad, because first of all,
| | 04:47 | as long as you match basically the ratio
of height to width then you can use CSS
| | 04:52 | to automatically scale the image to
fit the device's screen and we'll be
| | 04:58 | talking about that in the later chapter,
but if you want, this is actually
| | 05:00 | very good information and all these
pages with information about all of the
| | 05:04 | different kinds of ebook readers.
| | 05:06 | So here we're looking at the
ones that use e-ink devices.
| | 05:09 | So there's the Sony ereader, and it goes on
and on forever, six-inch devices and so on.
| | 05:14 | By the way, you know, right now
as I am recording this, Kindles are
| | 05:18 | black-and-white, but who knows one
day they are going to come up with a
| | 05:21 | colo, Kindle, right?
| | 05:22 | And the Kindle ereader software that
you can install on a PC and on Mac and on
| | 05:28 | iPhone shows color images.
| | 05:30 | So if you are worried,oh, I need to
make a black-and-white version of my cover
| | 05:34 | for the Kindle, don't.
| | 05:35 | Create a color image and then when we
talk about converting to a Kindle, we'll
| | 05:39 | talk a little bit more about the
conversion that they do to grayscale.
| | 05:43 | But don't worry about
creating two different covers for the
| | 05:46 | black-and-white versus color.
| | 05:47 | I'd say in general this is a Sisyphean
task trying to make an image fit each
| | 05:53 | one of these devices perfectly.
| | 05:56 | What I would recommend instead is that
you shoot for 600x800 or a similar kind of
| | 06:02 | ratio, and even that's
not necessary on the iPad.
| | 06:05 | If you make a square book cover, it'll
show up as a square book cover miniature
| | 06:11 | on the iBookstore shelves. It looks pretty cool.
| | 06:14 | And once a person clicks it and they
start reading, they don't really care about
| | 06:17 | what the cover looks like.
| | 06:18 | They just care about the interior of it.
| | 06:21 | Something else that you should know
about covers is that if you're going to be
| | 06:26 | distributing them through a reseller
like the iBookstore or Kindle, they often
| | 06:31 | have their own requirements about what
can go on the cover, and when we get to
| | 06:34 | that chapter about working with the
resellers, we'll talk about some of that.
| | 06:38 | But I can tell you for sure what they
don't want to see is information about the
| | 06:42 | other editions that this ebook is available at.
| | 06:45 | So you don't want to have any content on your
cover that says also available as paperback.
| | 06:51 | You don't have anything like that and you
don't want any pricing information on the cover.
| | 06:55 | So just have a title, an author, and
that kind of generic text along with any
| | 07:00 | kind of graphics that you might want.
| | 07:02 | But basically what you need to do is
create an image of the cover in any of the
| | 07:05 | ways that we've talked about so far.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding a custom TOC as the first page of an EPUB file| 00:00 | When I'm reading an EPUB one of the
things I really appreciate is if the
| | 00:04 | producer has taken the time and trouble to
create an internal linked table of contents.
| | 00:10 | I mean whenever you're using an
ereader like we are using right now, Adobe
| | 00:14 | Digital Editions, they usually have a
special section that is an automatic table
| | 00:19 | of contents and we've talked about that
in a number of videos, of how to populate
| | 00:23 | this section over here in
the left with those links.
| | 00:26 | It is something that can be hidden or
shown from somewhere within the ereader.
| | 00:30 | Like in ADE I can just
choose Hide navigational pane.
| | 00:34 | So you see that this is how
I prefer to read this EPUB.
| | 00:37 | If I want to quickly jump from section
to section, it would be nice if there is
| | 00:41 | a way to do that and actually in this
EPUB there is, because the person who
| | 00:46 | created it made a linked
table of contents within here.
| | 00:49 | So I can just click on the Foreword
section to jump to Foreword for example or
| | 00:55 | let me move back up California's Name
and Early History to go there and it is
| | 01:00 | also good because a lot of ereaders,
I don't know how many you've tried, like
| | 01:03 | the Nook and all those other ones,
sometimes they have little tiny icons in the
| | 01:07 | corner and you can never remember
which one is the table of contents.
| | 01:11 | The navigational table of
contents, the navigation pane.
| | 01:14 | But it is usually pretty easy to get to
the beginning of the book and if at the
| | 01:18 | beginning of the book you have a
linked table of contents, that makes it a lot
| | 01:21 | easier on your readers.
| | 01:22 | plus of course, the other advantage is
that if you are actually adding this to
| | 01:26 | the content of the InDesign file,
this page with its links, then you have
| | 01:30 | complete freedom about
what you want to put in here.
| | 01:33 | It could be a list of illustrations.
| | 01:35 | It could be a list of recipes.
| | 01:37 | It could be links to pictures.
| | 01:39 | It doesn't have to just be the same
thing as the chapters over here on the left.
| | 01:42 | So how do we create this?
| | 01:44 | Well, let me show you.
| | 01:45 | We will go back to InDesign where I
have a version of the book that we've been
| | 01:50 | working with, Stories of
California, that has a number of chapters.
| | 01:54 | California's Name And Early History
and so on, and there already is a spread
| | 01:58 | with the contents page here.
| | 02:00 | Now this is actually not quite usable.
| | 02:04 | What I did was I placed an
actual table of contents.
| | 02:08 | Let me show you what I mean.
| | 02:09 | If I delete this frame and I go to
the Layout menu and I choose Table of
| | 02:14 | Contents, then I can just click OK and
then it will load a table of contents for
| | 02:20 | me using these settings.
| | 02:22 | Now I have already created the table of
contents style and I know what I want to
| | 02:26 | include there, because I have been
using this to chunk up my long InDesign file
| | 02:31 | into multiple chapters so that that
automatic navigation panel appears
| | 02:35 | correctly, and you might be tempted to say, "Hey!
| | 02:38 | I already did this work.
| | 02:39 | why not use this as my
internal table of contents?"
| | 02:42 | So I am going to click OK and place it.
| | 02:45 | There it is and let's see happens
when I export this EPUB to the Desktop.
| | 02:50 | Let me call it something else.
| | 02:52 | I'll call it cali-1 and you want to, based
on page layout, View eBook after Exporting.
| | 02:59 | Under Contents we are going to go ahead
and chunk it up into the Basic TOC and
| | 03:04 | then generate the CSS.
| | 03:05 | That's all good. Click Export.
| | 03:08 | So that all came out, but where
is the thing that says Content?
| | 03:11 | Well maybe I didn't-- I forgot to
include that header. Let's just scroll.
| | 03:16 | Well, where is the foreword? It is
not there and we are on page 3 already.
| | 03:19 | You know, what happens and it is so
evil I think is that when you place an
| | 03:23 | automatic table of contents, the Export
to EPUB command ignores it and if you're
| | 03:29 | wondering, you know there is no
dingleberry or anything hanging off the frame
| | 03:32 | edge as to say this is an
automatically generated TOC.
| | 03:34 | What you need to do is select the frame
and go to the Edit menu, go to Edit in
| | 03:39 | Story Editor, and if you see these
little icon surrounding everything, then you
| | 03:43 | know this was an
automatically generated table of contents.
| | 03:47 | So the first order of business is
getting these contents in here a normal text
| | 03:51 | frame and that's something that was
automatically generated, so that it will be
| | 03:54 | retained in the Export to EPUB process.
| | 03:57 | What you could do would be to actually
manually delete each of these from this
| | 04:01 | text frame or you could just copy and
paste these words on to a new text frame.
| | 04:06 | Or another way is to take this existing
TOC and export it to a Rich Text Format
| | 04:13 | and when you do that, that retains the
styling information, but loses the "TOC-ness"
| | 04:18 | of it and then you can replace that.
| | 04:20 | An in fact that's what I did in this
little frame to the right edge here.
| | 04:23 | So let's replace this. I am
just going to delete this.
| | 04:26 | This is a normal text
frame using the same content.
| | 04:30 | So that's the first order of
business is getting content ready for you to
| | 04:32 | start linking and I am just going to
double-check, by pressing Command+Y or
| | 04:36 | Ctrl+Y, that there's no little links around here.
| | 04:39 | So it is a normal text frame, right?
| | 04:41 | And in fact I can just quickly export it just
to make sure that it is going to be included.
| | 04:47 | Contents. There it,
all right, but nothing is linked.
| | 04:50 | All right, so let's get started linking.
| | 04:52 | There is two ways to make links in InDesign CS5.
| | 04:56 | One is by making a hyperlink.
| | 04:57 | The other one is by making a cross reference.
| | 04:59 | It is really up to you which one you want to do.
| | 05:02 | The first order of business though is
opening up the panel, so that's under
| | 05:05 | Interactive and you can choose Hyperlinks
and Cross-References is at the bottom here.
| | 05:10 | If you want to learn more about
Hyperlinks and Cross-References, definitely
| | 05:14 | watch videos on those in any of the
other InDesign titles at lynda.com. We are
| | 05:18 | not going to be able to
talk about this in detail.
| | 05:21 | But first let's talk about
creating an internal hyperlink.
| | 05:24 | Say that we want Foreword to
link to the Foreword section.
| | 05:27 | You can't really create an internal
hyperlink without first creating the destination.
| | 05:32 | So what you will do is you go to where
it says Foreword, select it, and then in
| | 05:37 | the Hyperlinks panel menu
choose New Hyperlink Destination.
| | 05:41 | It's going to be a text anchor and
it automatically selects what you had
| | 05:45 | highlighted gives it that name, which is nice.
| | 05:48 | All right so now you have that anchor.
| | 05:49 | Now we can select the word Foreword and in
the Hyperlinks panel click New Hyperlink.
| | 05:55 | You don't want to link to an external URL,
you want to link to a text anchor, and
| | 05:58 | the anchors that you have created so
far in this document appear in a list.
| | 06:02 | All right, that's pretty straightforward.
| | 06:04 | Now if you are working in a book, in a
collection of multiple InDesign files,
| | 06:08 | then you would need to still make
the anchor in those other files.
| | 06:12 | If you are doing hyperlinks across
documents you'd still need to do that.
| | 06:15 | Then you just need to remember to
open up the correct document file here.
| | 06:19 | Otherwise it is not going to
show you the text anchor there.
| | 06:21 | Anyway, we will just go ahead and do that as
one example. And we didn't apply any formatting.
| | 06:25 | We could have if we wanted to, but we
are just going to leave it alone for now,
| | 06:27 | and most ereaders will apply their
own default formatting by the way.
| | 06:32 | Now, let's do a Cross-Reference.
| | 06:32 | So I am going to select this and
instead of making a hyperlink-- what's nice
| | 06:36 | about Cross-References is that you do
not need to create a text anchor first and
| | 06:41 | also the Cross-Reference is made up of
the text of the destination paragraph, so
| | 06:45 | if later you edit this chapter name,
this will automatically update to match.
| | 06:49 | So the Cross-Reference is
this little cross-arrow here.
| | 06:52 | We want to create a Cross-Reference to
that chapter called California's Name and
| | 06:57 | so we need to know the paragraph style.
| | 06:59 | I know it is chapter title
and there is California's Name.
| | 07:03 | We want the full paragraph.
| | 07:04 | We don't need the page number.
| | 07:05 | So we are using the Cross-
Reference format full paragraph.
| | 07:08 | We don't want to apply any kind of
special linking formatting to this, so
| | 07:13 | we will just say OK.
| | 07:13 | Now it automatically used quote marks
around here, which is part of that default
| | 07:18 | format, but you can always
create your own custom formats.
| | 07:21 | All right, so let's export
this to EPUB and see how it works.
| | 07:25 | Just use the same
settings as before. Use Contents.
| | 07:29 | There is the links and click
and it doesn't work. Click.
| | 07:34 | It doesn't work!
| | 07:35 | This is a known bug in InDesign CS5.
| | 07:39 | Maybe by the time you are watching this
| | 07:41 | they would come up with an
update that fixes this bug.
| | 07:45 | There is a script and here is the URL.
| | 07:48 | If you go to this person's site, he has
got a script called "Corrections of links
| | 07:53 | in epubs made with InDesign CS5."
| | 07:56 | It's a free script, like all the
scripts that I have shown you so far.
| | 07:59 | It will request a
donation if you really like it.
| | 08:01 | It has got information here about
what the script does, but I've already
| | 08:05 | installed it in InDesign.
| | 08:06 | I want to show you how it works.
| | 08:08 | Like a couple of the others scripts I
have talked about, it adds a menu command.
| | 08:13 | Under the File menu > Export for,
| | 08:16 | look at this, EPUB with corrected links.
| | 08:19 | All right, so choose that instead of
the EPUB and it is almost exactly the
| | 08:26 | same as exporting to EPUB.
| | 08:27 | We get the same dialog box.
| | 08:29 | I will replace that. All this is the same.
| | 08:32 | Click Export. You get one more alert
that asked you to enter the publication
| | 08:38 | year and this is just an extra thing
that Taos added because you are supposed to
| | 08:43 | be able to include a publication year
as metadata inside of an EPUB file and
| | 08:48 | InDesign doesn't let you do that.
| | 08:50 | So he just threw this in to make a
little easier down the road. So go ahead
| | 08:54 | and enter something.
| | 08:55 | All right, so here we are.
| | 08:57 | Let's go to Contents, there are the links. Ah@
| | 09:02 | Now they work, right?
| | 09:05 | If you go to Taos's website and read
those instructions, they will tell you when
| | 09:09 | it works and when it doesn't. It's not
perfect, but at least in this example it
| | 09:13 | makes your links work correctly.
| | 09:15 | Now if you are not able to use the
script or you run into one of the issues
| | 09:20 | with links that Taos talks about that
his script doesn't fix, you can always fix it
| | 09:25 | later in the EPUB file.
| | 09:26 | You can always fix it in post as they say.
| | 09:28 | And we are going to have a whole video
about working with links and fixing them
| | 09:33 | in the EPUB files themselves later on.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding metadata to an InDesign file or book| 00:00 | When you open up an EPUB one of the
things that shows you other than the content
| | 00:04 | is some information about the book itself.
| | 00:07 | Like even as simple as the name of the
book and the author appears here in Adobe
| | 00:11 | Digital Editions in the navigation\ panel.
| | 00:14 | The title is A Brief History of San
Francisco and the author is Anonymous.
| | 00:18 | This is metadata and it's just two
different kinds of metadata that an EPUB can
| | 00:23 | have, and an EPUB can have dozens of
different entries, publication dates, author
| | 00:28 | name, copyright information, description,
subject headings, all sorts of things.
| | 00:33 | Now there is a limited amount of
information related to metadata that you
| | 00:39 | can add to the InDesign file itself;
otherwise to add additional metadata to
| | 00:44 | the file you'll need to edit the EPUB
file and we'll be talking about that
| | 00:48 | in the later video.
| | 00:49 | But first let's talk about how do you
add this kind of information in InDesign.
| | 00:53 | We switch back to InDesign where
we have a document opened, that's just
| | 00:57 | simple three pages worth of text with
some headings. Let's just go ahead and
| | 01:01 | export this document to EPUB
without doing anything special.
| | 01:05 | So I'm going to go to the Desktop,
export history text.epub, with my keyboard
| | 01:11 | shortcut, and we want to view the
ebook after exporting. Include Document
| | 01:16 | Metadata, you might have noticed there
is something that you can include here
| | 01:19 | but we're just going to bypass
this for now. Just leave it alone.
| | 01:22 | In Contents I want to include the
InDesign TOC entries with these checked, so
| | 01:28 | chunks of the document and
Generate CSS, not the fonts. Export.
| | 01:34 | So look at over here. Instead of the
title of the document it's a title of the
| | 01:38 | InDesign file or the title of the EPUB
actually because it ends with .epub and
| | 01:43 | the author is unknown.
Everything else seem to work fine.
| | 01:46 | So where do you add the title of the
book and the author name, at least here?
| | 01:52 | You do it in a very lonely
dialog box called File Info.
| | 01:57 | It's something that not a lot of
the InDesigners are accustomed to.
| | 01:59 | If you are photographer you're very
accustomed to adding metadata to your photographs.
| | 02:04 | But over here in the File menu, if you
go down to File Info toward the bottom,
| | 02:09 | you'll open up this big dialog box.
| | 02:12 | It's pretty empty as you can see, and
this is where you'd enter the name of
| | 02:16 | the book. So we would call this A Brief
History of San Francisco. You see I've
| | 02:20 | done this a few times.
| | 02:21 | So it's remembering the recent titles
that I did, and the author instead of
| | 02:26 | Anonymous I'm going to say my name,
just for fun, right. You can give yourself
| | 02:30 | a title if you'd like. I'll say Grand
Poobah, and then a description of the book.
| | 02:36 | Enter whatever you'd like, and
something else you might want to enter are keywords.
| | 02:40 | Now the thing is that you'd like why am
I even bothering with this information
| | 02:43 | if you can't see keywords in the EPUB Reader.
| | 02:46 | It's because with tens of thousands
of EPUBs out there, when you go to a
| | 02:52 | bookstore like the Kindle store or the
Nook store or the iBookstore and you
| | 02:57 | search for a book, you are often
entering keywords in the Search field.
| | 03:01 | Maybe you don't know the exact title but you
know you're looking for something having
| | 03:04 | to do with California.
| | 03:06 | Now this title does not have the word
California in it, so one of the keywords
| | 03:11 | should be California.
| | 03:12 | So you'll go ahead and enter multiple
keywords here. This is something that you
| | 03:16 | can also do in the EPUB file itself
after you start editing it. A little more
| | 03:21 | difficult there let me tell you, and
also I've noticed that a lot of ebook store
| | 03:25 | retailers when you upload your EPUB
they'll often have a form for you to fill-out
| | 03:29 | with additional metadata as well.
| | 03:31 | But my feeling is if InDesign is
offering the feature right here, why not
| | 03:35 | take advantage of it?
| | 03:36 | I mean, you paid for it, right. So
California History San Francisco, go ahead
| | 03:42 | and enter all of these as well, and
just separate these keywords as this says
| | 03:46 | with semicolons or commas.
| | 03:48 | You can choose the Copyright Status,
so if it's in public domain, if it's
| | 03:51 | something that they got from Gutenberg
like we did with this book you can choose that,
| | 03:56 | or if it's actual copy written
then you can go ahead and enter in your
| | 03:59 | copyright information along with
the URL. And we'll just say OK.
| | 04:04 | And now let's go ahead and export it to
EPUB again, replacing our old one using
| | 04:10 | the same exact settings, and there we go.
| | 04:13 | I wrote this wonderful book called
A Brief History of San Francisco.
| | 04:16 | So the File Info panel is where you want
to go in InDesign to add your metadata.
| | 04:23 | And by the way if you are using the
book approach to creating an EPUB, you know
| | 04:27 | with the book panel and a collection of
InDesign documents, you want the master
| | 04:31 | document in that Book panel to be
the one that you add the File Info to.
| | 04:36 | That way it'll be included with
the entire EPUB when it's exported.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Exporting to EPUBChoosing general EPUB export options| 00:00 | When you choose Export for EPUB and you
get the Digital Editions Export Options
| | 00:06 | dialog box, there are three panels
that you need to make decisions in.
| | 00:11 | So let's talk about the decisions in
the General panel and this is easy as pie.
| | 00:16 | First of all under eBook itself, do you
want to include document metadata and you
| | 00:21 | normally always want to.
| | 00:22 | You can add a publisher entry for
yourself so if you happened to know that
| | 00:26 | you're Acme Publishing go ahead and do that.
| | 00:29 | This is not something that's going to
make or break your EPUB file. If you forget
| | 00:33 | to enter the correct information or
you entered it wrong, you can always edit
| | 00:37 | the actual component files of the
EPUB later. But why not add it now?
| | 00:41 | Now under Unique Identifier, this is
kind of funny. InDesign will automatically
| | 00:45 | enter this weird combination of numbers
for you if you don't enter anything here
| | 00:49 | yourself and you have turned on
Include Document Metadata, because every EPUB
| | 00:53 | has to have a unique identifier. That's
actually one of the requirements to pass
| | 00:58 | validation for an EPUB file.
| | 01:00 | Normally what you're entering here is
your ISBN number. So if you know your ISBN
| | 01:05 | number then you should go ahead and enter it.
So I'll just say 123-456-123456, there we go.
[00:01:014.00]
We can just leave it at that.
| | 01:15 | It can be any number that you want, but this
is normally where the ISBN number should go.
| | 01:20 | Then how should InDesign export the
content of the EPUB, should it be based on
| | 01:25 | page layout or based on the XML
structure that you have created in set up?
| | 01:30 | And I covered each of these in
detail in a previous video.
| | 01:34 | The default is to base it on the page layout.
| | 01:36 | Then under Bulletin and Numbers if
you're using automatic bulleted lists or
| | 01:41 | automatic numbered lists from InDesign,
the kind that are part of a paragraph
| | 01:45 | style or from the paragraph
formatting menu, then InDesign can automatically
| | 01:51 | convert those to the closest equivalent
in a web design land, called an Unordered
| | 01:59 | List and an Ordered List.
| | 02:01 | So an Unordered List is a bulleted list
in the web code, and a numbered list is
| | 02:07 | called an Ordered List.
| | 02:08 | Now it's not 100% successful in that
if you had special formatting for your
| | 02:13 | bulleted and numbered lists,
that doesn't go through as well.
| | 02:17 | It just sort of creates generic ordered
and unordered list and then you have to
| | 02:22 | fiddle with it in the CSS.
| | 02:24 | But it's usually something
that you want to keep turned on.
| | 02:27 | You don't want to have to
re-create these on your own.
| | 02:29 | You have the option of having InDesign
automatically convert them to text before
| | 02:34 | it exports it to EPUB, and this is exactly
equivalent if you had chosen Convert to
| | 02:40 | Text within InDesign by selecting some
automatically bulleted text, for example,
| | 02:44 | right-clicking and choosing Convert to Text.
| | 02:47 | So it's an actual hard-coded bullet, an
actual left indent, and hanging indent
| | 02:52 | set up for this thing.
| | 02:53 | And that will also be
supported in the final EPUB file.
| | 02:57 | So it will still look like a bulleted list,
except it'll be coded as a regular paragraph.
| | 03:02 | It makes it a little difficult to deal with.
| | 03:04 | So normally you want to keep these set to
at the defaults to map to their equivalent.
| | 03:09 | And finally do you want to view the
ebook after exporting? Well of course you do.
| | 03:13 | I don't even know why there is a checkbox.
| | 03:15 | I have a special affection for this
panel because it's one of the easiest ones
| | 03:19 | to deal with in the entire
InDesign to EPUB workflow.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Choosing EPUB export options for images| 00:00 | When you export an InDesign file to
EPUB and you arrive at the Digital
| | 00:04 | Editions Export Options dialog box,
you need to make some decisions about the
| | 00:08 | images in your file.
| | 00:10 | Now if you have no images in your file,
you can go ahead and skip this whole panel.
| | 00:14 | But you know there are a lot of things
that you might have in your file that
| | 00:17 | you forget our images like graphics that you've
pasted into the text flow and things like that.
| | 00:22 | So it's asking, first of all,
should it maintain the formatting of your
| | 00:27 | images or should it not.
| | 00:29 | If you say maintain formatting,
which is the default, it's checked on,
| | 00:33 | that means that it will maintain the
same crops, for example, of the images you
| | 00:37 | brought in and it will
maintain the same scaling.
| | 00:40 | It will also maintain any kind of
effects that you have applied to the image
| | 00:45 | frame, which is very unusual,
| | 00:46 | something that you
cannot do with the text-frame.
| | 00:48 | So for example, if you apply a stroke
or a color to the stroke of an image
| | 00:52 | frame, that will come through in the EPUB.
| | 00:55 | If you apply a drop shadow,
that will also come through.
| | 00:58 | So normally, you do want to turn on formatting.
| | 01:01 | You know I've seen people who forget to
turn this on and then they end up with
| | 01:04 | an image that's huge.
| | 01:06 | That's because it's not maintaining
their scaling when they export to EPUB.
| | 01:09 | So you normally want to keep that turned on.
| | 01:12 | InDesign will automatically convert your
images into a format suitable for an EPUB.
| | 01:18 | In other words, it's going
to convert it to an RGB file.
| | 01:21 | So it's okay if you have CMYK images.
| | 01:23 | You don't need to convert them to RGB
first and it's going to go ahead and
| | 01:26 | downsample them to a reasonable size
when it converts them to RGB, and it will
| | 01:32 | automatically convert them whether they
are native PSD files or they're InDesign
| | 01:37 | files that you've placed or
PDF files that you've placed.
| | 01:40 | It's going to convert them
to one of these two formats.
| | 01:42 | Now unfortunately, PNG is not one of
the formats and I hope that they add that
| | 01:47 | in a future version because that's
one of the ones that can be supported
| | 01:50 | inside of an EPUB file.
| | 01:53 | It's just going to convert them to
either a GIF or a JPEG file, the simple
| | 01:57 | image formats that you
see all the time on the web.
| | 01:59 | Automatically, it's just going to look
at the content of the image and choose
| | 02:02 | which of these to convert them to.
| | 02:04 | I would recommend that you just leave it
at Automatic and let InDesign go ahead
| | 02:08 | and decide which format to export it to.
| | 02:11 | Now if it's going to export a GIF
then you have your choice of what kind of
| | 02:15 | color palette it should use, because GIF
images have a limited number of colors.
| | 02:20 | I believe it's 256 colors in a GIF.
| | 02:23 | Normally, you just want to keep it at
Adaptive (no dither) and Interlace means
| | 02:27 | it will show up slowly in an ereader that
doesn't have a whole lot of processing power.
| | 02:32 | I've never actually seen a GIF appear,
interlace slowly when it appears in an ereader.
| | 02:38 | So I wouldn't even worry about that.
| | 02:40 | What is of more concern is down
here under JPEG Options, because in my
| | 02:44 | experience very seldom will
InDesign convert an image to a GIF image.
| | 02:49 | About 99% of the time it will be a
JPEG, even if it's a solid square color
| | 02:54 | that should be a GIF.
| | 02:55 | It's going to convert it to a JPEG.
| | 02:57 | I would always recommend that you
choose Image Quality: Maximum, because you
| | 03:02 | want your images to look as good as
possible and these days most EPUB readers
| | 03:06 | are getting more and more
powerful. They can take that.
| | 03:09 | If you were, for some reason,
creating an EPUB for people with some of the
| | 03:12 | first generation of ereaders, then I might
say well, you know what, don't make it Maximum.
| | 03:16 | Make it Medium quality, but normally,
I'll just say leave it at Maximum.
| | 03:20 | And under Format Method, Progressive
means that people get a low-res version of
| | 03:25 | a maximum quality JPEG as it draws into
the screen. Otherwise it's just going to
| | 03:30 | appear line-by-line and I've never
actually seen either one of these at work.
| | 03:35 | Normally what happens is that
the JPEG just appears instantly.
| | 03:38 | So again, I think this is kind of
leftover from old-school web stuff and you can
| | 03:42 | just leave it at the default of Baseline.
| | 03:44 | And that's it. Just a few
choices to make in the Images section.
| | 03:48 | The main thing that you want to do is
make sure that Formatted is checked on.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Choosing EPUB export options for content| 00:00 | The third panel of the Digital Editions
Export Options dialog box has a bunch of
| | 00:05 | important choices that you should be making.
| | 00:07 | A couple of them you can just leave as
is for the vast majority of your work.
| | 00:13 | For example, up here under Format for
EPUB Content, it wants to know which
| | 00:17 | formats the exported EPUB contents
should be in: XHTML files or DTBook.
| | 00:24 | Now XHTML files are the ones that 99%
of the time you're going to be dealing
| | 00:28 | within EPUB, and you can
just leave this turned on.
| | 00:31 | DTBook is a special kind of format for
people with visual impairment and it's
| | 00:35 | a way for a special kind of talk-
allowed readers will be able to access the
| | 00:39 | content of an EPUB.
| | 00:41 | Normally you want to just leave it at
XHTML, unless somebody tells you differently.
| | 00:45 | A table of contents is an interesting section.
| | 00:48 | Now table of contents refers to the
navigational table of contents, that part
| | 00:52 | that opens up automatically in any ereader.
| | 00:55 | So in Adobe Digital Editions, it's the
part that open up on the left-hand side
| | 00:59 | of the page that was like a linked
table of contents that we've seen, and you
| | 01:03 | can also get that automatic table of
contents from Kindle or from the iPad and
| | 01:08 | the iBookstore or the NOOK. They all
have a place where you can see this
| | 01:11 | navigational table of contents.
| | 01:13 | Now InDesign will always create the
navigational table of contents, even if you
| | 01:17 | have this turned off. It's
going to create something.
| | 01:20 | What's it's going to create though,
will be the name of the InDesign document.
| | 01:23 | That will be the name of the link, and
if you are exporting a book made up of
| | 01:28 | multiple InDesign files to EPUB, you'll
see a list of each individual InDesign
| | 01:34 | file's name will appear as a link in
the navigational table of contents.
| | 01:38 | What this allows you to do is to
override that default behavior and use actual
| | 01:42 | text from your document as the table of
contents, so like chapter names makes a lot of sense.
| | 01:48 | I've talked about how to use this
feature in a couple of videos, but just to
| | 01:52 | quickly review is that you want to
create a specific table of contents style
| | 01:56 | that includes which paragraph styles
should be included in the table of contents,
| | 02:01 | which I've already done
for this one that says EPUB.
| | 02:04 | And then if you don't want InDesign to
include the actual names of the documents
| | 02:08 | in the navigational table of contents
which assumably you don't, then you would
| | 02:12 | turn this on, Suppress
Automatic Entries for Documents.
| | 02:16 | Finally, Used First Level Entries as
Chapter Breaks is a new feature in CS5
| | 02:21 | and it allows people to export
one long document and have InDesign
| | 02:26 | automatically split it up or chunk it
up into individual XHTML files. Each one
| | 02:32 | is separated by a paragraph style.
| | 02:34 | Starts out with a new paragraph style
that's according to whatever TOC style you
| | 02:38 | included. So that's a great new feature.
| | 02:40 | But when you export to EPUB, because
all of your XHTML files are governed by a
| | 02:46 | cascading style sheet that decides
what kind of formatting they have,
| | 02:50 | InDesign will always export a CSS
file, no matter what you choose here.
| | 02:54 | Now, how robust that CSS
file depends on what you choose.
| | 02:58 | Typically you wanted to generate the
CSS file and include the style definition,
| | 03:02 | so that if, for example, you're heading
style has two picas of space below it,
| | 03:07 | the CSS document will also include that
specification. And if you don't want to
| | 03:12 | include all the specifications of your
paragraph styles, we do want to just have
| | 03:17 | the name there, so you can add them
yourself. Maybe you're really good with CSS
| | 03:20 | then you might want to
choose Style Names Only.
| | 03:23 | That way you'll still get a CSS file
and it will have the name of all your
| | 03:26 | paragraph and character styles,
but the definitions, the settings, the
| | 03:30 | attributes, for each one of these
will be left empty, and then you can just
| | 03:33 | add them on your own.
| | 03:34 | Sometimes that's a lot faster
than having to clean out every single
| | 03:37 | attribute that InDesign adds.
| | 03:39 | if you have an existing CSS file,
perhaps you're doing a series of books that
| | 03:44 | are all using the same paragraph and
character styles, you exported one, you
| | 03:47 | tweaked the CSS file until it's perfect,
well, you can do a Save As to that CSS
| | 03:51 | file and save it elsewhere and then
link to it for all your success of EPUBs,
| | 03:55 | which saves a ton of work.
| | 03:56 | Now if you're going to have InDesign
generate the CSS, then you have a couple
| | 04:01 | other choices here. Do you want it
to Preserve Local Overrides? And say
| | 04:06 | then if you made some kind of manual
formatting like say made the word bold by
| | 04:10 | selecting it and choosing the Bold
style, rather than actually creating
| | 04:14 | character style for bold and applying
that, InDesign is going to create separate
| | 04:18 | class styles for every single instance
that you do that and it's not normally
| | 04:22 | something you want to do, because it
just makes a lot more difficult to edit
| | 04:26 | the document and to clean up the CSS.
| | 04:28 | But if necessary, if somebody was
really bad with applying character styles,
| | 04:32 | then you might want to keep that turned on.
And then this last one is Include Embeddable Fonts.
| | 04:37 | InDesign can include the font that you
used in this document. They can obscure
| | 04:42 | them or encrypt them actually, so
that they're difficult to remove, but
| | 04:46 | however that encrypted font
information will make it very difficult for this
| | 04:52 | EPUB to be validated.
| | 04:53 | We're going to be talking about
validating an EPUB file later.
| | 04:57 | I think that in the coming months we're
going to see a lot more flexibility as
| | 05:00 | far as embeddable fonts are concerned,
but for now we're going to keep this
| | 05:03 | turned off or I would
recommend you keep it turned off,
| | 05:06 | unless you know for sure that your
workflow will support it in the end.
| | 05:09 | So the Contents panel of the Digital
Editions Export Options had a lot of
| | 05:13 | critical decisions you need to make that
govern what's going to happen with your
| | 05:16 | final EPUB. So make sure and take a
second to review all the settings before you
| | 05:20 | click the magic Export button.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
6. Previewing and Validating EPUB FilesPreviewing EPUBs on your computer and devices| 00:00 | So far we've only been using Adobe
Digital Editions to preview our EPUBs, but
| | 00:05 | that's not the only EPUB reader out there.
| | 00:08 | In fact I would venture to guess that
there are people that hardly ever use
| | 00:12 | ADE to look in EPUBs.
| | 00:13 | What I want to show you in this
video are the different choices that you might have.
| | 00:17 | Now this field is exploding, all
right. So there are always new ereaders
| | 00:21 | coming out on deck.
| | 00:22 | But in preparation for the title I
asked a lot of people who are in the
| | 00:26 | business what they prefer to use to
preview the EPUBs that they're working on
| | 00:31 | for distribution.
| | 00:32 | So let me go through a few.
| | 00:33 | Now Adobe Digital Editions is great for
quick checks, but also a lot of people
| | 00:38 | like to use this program call Calibre.
| | 00:40 | And Calibre is an open source program
also available for Macintosh, Windows,
| | 00:46 | and Linux computers.
| | 00:47 | And when you install Calibre you can
have it set to automatically be your
| | 00:52 | library, your organizer of all of your EPUBs.
| | 00:56 | Not just on your computer but also on
a lot of connected devices like iPads
| | 01:00 | or Android phones.
| | 01:01 | Now Calibre is also used for
converting EPUBs, and PDFs, and MOBI files from
| | 01:08 | one format to another.
| | 01:10 | And in the videos where we talk about
converting, especially like converting to
| | 01:13 | Kindle, we'll be talking about using
Calibre and seeing how that works in
| | 01:17 | converting an EPUB to Kindle format.
| | 01:19 | But Calibre is also just
a wonderful EPUB reader.
| | 01:22 | I've already added by clicking Add
books the Brief History of San Francisco,
| | 01:27 | book that we've been working with before.
| | 01:29 | And if you double-click it, it
opens up into Calibre's E-book Viewer.
| | 01:34 | And you can hide this other
view behind it if you would like.
| | 01:36 | But here you can just click the
Right Arrow and Left Arrow to move
| | 01:40 | from page-to-page.
| | 01:41 | There are also keyboard shortcuts for
all these, and here are the contents and
| | 01:46 | the pages just appear.
| | 01:47 | So this is a really good way to check
to see what your EPUB looks like outside
| | 01:51 | of Adobe Digital Editions.
| | 01:52 | And there are a couple that I'd
like to use that are available online.
| | 01:56 | For example, Ibis Reader is
developed by a Threepress Consulting,
| | 02:00 | the same company who worked on
creating the EPUB Validation Checker, and
| | 02:06 | they're very well-known in the field as EPUB gurus.
| | 02:09 | They have their own online EPUB library
where you can keep your books all in one
| | 02:14 | place and they're stored in a cloud.
| | 02:16 | But you can also download
the books to your computer.
| | 02:19 | So it's not a completely
online way to manage your e-books.
| | 02:24 | Now here I've added A Brief History of
San Francisco, and if you click it, it
| | 02:27 | opens up in the Ibis Reader.
| | 02:29 | And here is our navigational
table of contents on the left.
| | 02:33 | You can click No distractions and it
hides a lot of the chrome from around the
| | 02:38 | browser for you, and click the NEXT
and PREVIOUS to go from page-to-page.
| | 02:41 | I'll go back to the site.
| | 02:44 | And then also Firefox itself has a
plug-in that came out in late 2010
| | 02:50 | called EPUB Reader.
| | 02:51 | And I've installed it in Firefox and
what happens is that if you click on a
| | 02:55 | link to an EPUB in Firefox,
it automatically opens in Firefox.
| | 02:59 | Or if you want to preview what an EPUB
looks like that's on your computer in
| | 03:03 | Firefox, you just go to File
and then choose Open File.
| | 03:07 | And then navigate to where your EPUB is.
| | 03:10 | Select it and choose Open and
it opens directly within Firefox.
| | 03:13 | So anywhere that Firefox runs, including
Firefox Mobile, you can install this plug-in.
| | 03:19 | I don't know if there's any uber-
geeks out there but it also runs in the
| | 03:22 | SeaMonkey suite, which is a new open
source Internet suite developed by the same
| | 03:27 | people who worked on Firefox.
| | 03:29 | So it's called EPUB Reader.
| | 03:30 | It's a free extension.
| | 03:32 | And again here's the navigational table
of contents, and you can save books to
| | 03:36 | your desktop and move from page-to-page.
| | 03:37 | It's got little tips that
pop up when you want it to.
| | 03:41 | It's pretty cool.
| | 03:42 | And then on a mobile device, other than
like using the Nook Reader, or the Kindle
| | 03:47 | Reader, or something like that, or
even the iBooks Reader, the generic EPUB
| | 03:50 | Reader that most people that I know
use on any kind of iPad or iPhone or
| | 03:54 | Android device is called Stanza.
| | 03:57 | You may have heard of it.
| | 03:58 | They've been around for long time.
| | 04:00 | And it's an EPUB reader and also an
EPUB library organizer along the lines of
| | 04:05 | Ibis Reader and Calibre.
| | 04:07 | Unfortunately Stanza
Desktop has been discontinued.
| | 04:10 | So you can only really use Stanza on an
iPad or iPhone or other mobile device.
| | 04:15 | And after you've downloaded it, you
download it and install it through iTunes,
| | 04:19 | here's how you can get your EPUBs on there.
| | 04:20 | Now you can always through Stanza app,
| | 04:23 | it has access to the Feedbooks
library and some other library so you can
| | 04:27 | actually download a lot of free EPUBs
directly into Stanza, or if you have EPUBs
| | 04:32 | on your computer like in this video what
we're talking about developing your own
| | 04:35 | EPUBs, you want to see what it's going
to look like in Stanza, then you would
| | 04:38 | add it to Stanza by hooking up your device.
| | 04:41 | right now I have my iPad hooked up.
| | 04:43 | And then you select the name of your
device, click Apps at the top, and when you
| | 04:47 | scroll down you'll have a list
of apps that let you share files.
| | 04:52 | So I've selected Stanza at the bottom,
and then you click Add, and then it just adds
| | 04:56 | your EPUB, which I've already done.
| | 04:59 | So once this has been added, when you
click Sync then the EPUB is added to
| | 05:03 | your device.
| | 05:04 | Now let's take a look at this
EPUB as seen on Stanza on my iPad.
| | 05:09 | After I double-click it, here is one of
the pages and it's kind of interesting
| | 05:12 | to note the differences.
| | 05:13 | You see how the paragraphs
have lost their first line indent.
| | 05:17 | So these are the kind of things that
you would check when you create the same
| | 05:20 | EPUB that's seen in different
ereaders, so you have an idea of what your
| | 05:24 | readers are going to see.
| | 05:25 | It's kind of like testing a
website on different browsers.
| | 05:29 | And it's nice that the table of contents
still appears and the links still work.
| | 05:33 | Then I click one of the
links and jump to Early History.
| | 05:36 | And Stanza, just like other ereaders,
has its own navigational table of contents.
| | 05:41 | So if I just tap on this button down
here, the table of contents appears.
| | 05:45 | So don't think when you are working
with EPUBs that you are limited to working
| | 05:49 | with the Adobe Digital Editions. There
are a lot of choices out there and you
| | 05:53 | should be running your EPUBs
through a few of them at least.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Previewing for the iBooks app| 00:00 | So it's all well and good that there are
a number of the ereaders available that
| | 00:03 | can open up an EPUB like Adobe Digital
Editions that we're looking at right now,
| | 00:07 | or Stanza, or Ibis Reader.
| | 00:10 | But if you're creating EPUBs for
the Apple iBookstore, which has its own
| | 00:15 | ereader app called iBooks, it is crazy
that Apple has not yet come out with a
| | 00:20 | desktop version of that.
| | 00:22 | There is a desktop version of the Nook
Reader, there is a desktop version of the
| | 00:25 | Kindle Reader, but there's none for iBooks.
| | 00:28 | So if you really want to see what your
EPUB will look like in iBooks before
| | 00:32 | you upload it to the store the only way to
do that is to actually open it up in iBooks.
| | 00:36 | You need to transfer it to an iPad
or an iPhone. Well an iPad preferably
| | 00:40 | because it's larger.
| | 00:42 | So how do you get your EPUB on to an iPad so
you can look at it in iBooks? Let me show you.
| | 00:49 | You need to first hook up your iPad to
the computer, and of course it has to
| | 00:52 | have iBooks installed.
| | 00:54 | I am going to quit out of Digital
Editions. And then you start up iTunes.
| | 00:59 | And it has to be iTunes version 9.1 or later.
| | 01:02 | That's the one that comes with iBooks.
| | 01:03 | Now you have up here your Library
and we also have the iPad down here.
| | 01:08 | Now let me go back up to
my Library and go to Books.
| | 01:12 | On my computer, in my Library I have two books.
| | 01:15 | I want to add the EPUB that I just
created and we'll use that good old Brief
| | 01:20 | History of San Francisco EPUB.
| | 01:21 | So how do you add the EPUB to iTunes?
| | 01:25 | If you can see where it is on your
desktop, you can just drag-and-drop it
| | 01:28 | actually right here onto the Library.
| | 01:29 | And it'll automatically go into Books.
| | 01:32 | Or you can just go to File and
choose Add to Library and navigate to
| | 01:38 | where that file is.
| | 01:39 | There it is, SFHistory.epub,
and it'll go ahead and add it.
| | 01:43 | So there is A Brief History of San Francisco.
| | 01:44 | Now I didn't actually create a separate
cover. We'll be talking about this more
| | 01:48 | when I talk about creating your books
specifically for the iPad, but otherwise
| | 01:52 | we would see it's a little bit of graphic here.
| | 01:54 | Okay, so now you have your iPad hooked
up and you select the iPad and go over
| | 01:59 | to Books, and what you want to
do is you want to sync the Books.
| | 02:03 | So this is showing you the books
that are in your iTunes Library.
| | 02:07 | And you want to sync the selected books.
| | 02:09 | They're all selected.
| | 02:10 | So I'll click Sync.
| | 02:12 | And it is copying. I don't know if you saw that.
| | 02:14 | It appeared they are very briefly at the top.
| | 02:16 | It copied the ebook to your
iBooks Library on your iPad.
| | 02:20 | While the iPad is still hooked up to
your computer, now you can start up the
| | 02:23 | iBooks application, you'll find it
in your Library shelves there, and you can
| | 02:27 | tap it and open it and see what it looks like.
| | 02:29 | So you just tap on the Brief History of
San Francisco and it opens up to the cover.
| | 02:35 | And you can just page through it a couple
times, to the right and to the left, and
| | 02:39 | check out to see if, you know,
the contents is working and did the subheads come
| | 02:43 | out the right color.
| | 02:44 | Now likely you're going to find some
issues, like I can see for example, there's
| | 02:48 | not enough white space between
the subheads and the text below it.
| | 02:53 | So how do you then edit this to fix it?
| | 02:57 | You know well technically what you're
supposed to do is go back to your Library,
| | 03:02 | to the Books section of your
Library, right-click and choose Delete.
| | 03:07 | Delete that book, and then sync that to your
iPad again so that it deletes it off the iPad.
| | 03:13 | You can't simply delete
it off the iPad by itself.
| | 03:15 | You'd always have to sync with your computer.
| | 03:17 | And then you would create a new version of
the EPUB, and then repeat what I just did.
| | 03:23 | Add it to your library and sync it back.
| | 03:25 | Or, you could create a second version
of this book and add that to the Library
| | 03:31 | as well, and you might end
up with 50 different versions.
| | 03:34 | A little shortcut that might make it
easier while you are fiddling along with
| | 03:37 | all of the CSS and the XHTML files,
trying to get it look exactly right on your
| | 03:41 | iPad, is to bypass all that rigamarole.
| | 03:44 | First get it onto your iPad just
like I showed you with adding it to your
| | 03:48 | iTunes Library and syncing, and then get this
really neat little application called Phone Disk.
| | 03:55 | It's available for both Mac and Windows.
| | 03:56 | It's not too expensive, and what it
does is it adds this little icon up here in
| | 04:00 | your title bar or on the PC down here
in the bottom, and when you connect an
| | 04:05 | iPad or an iPhone, or an iPod touch,
it mounts it like a hard drive.
| | 04:09 | Now there are other ereader and tablet
devices that do this automatically, but
| | 04:13 | none of Apple stuff does.
| | 04:15 | This gives you access to the innards of
these devices directly from the Finder
| | 04:19 | or Windows Explorer.
| | 04:20 | Now what's interesting here is take a look.
| | 04:23 | Here is Books, and there are the
EPUBs that this iPad currently has.
| | 04:27 | They are a little obscured, because
apparently they automatically become
| | 04:32 | decompressed once they are synced to the iPad.
| | 04:34 | So you can select each of these folders
and also the names get a little bit obscured.
| | 04:39 | So here's the one that we just added and
I know because I recognize the OEBPS folder.
| | 04:45 | The other EPUBs are using some
other kind of strangely named file.
| | 04:49 | But if you're wondering which of these
weirdly named folders was the EPUB that I
| | 04:53 | just added, you can right-
click on the Books.plist.
| | 04:57 | And just open that up in anything
that'll let you take a peek at it, and you
| | 05:00 | can see that the title appears at the
top and at the bottom is what it appears
| | 05:05 | inside your Finder or Explorer window.
| | 05:08 | So if I am looking for Brief History of San
Francisco, here it is at the bottom. It's the IBFY one.
| | 05:13 | So close that. Don't save any changes.
| | 05:15 | So what you can do now is select this
and then go ahead and open up the CSS file.
| | 05:20 | Edit it, save your changes.
| | 05:23 | It's going to save it directly onto the iPad.
| | 05:25 | And then on your iPad you would just
close the book and then open it up again
| | 05:29 | and you'll see the updated changes.
| | 05:31 | So it's a little faster if you want to
make a series of successive small changes.
| | 05:35 | Now you're probably wondering, okay,
well then how do I get that back on to my
| | 05:38 | computer so I can upload it to the iBookstore?
| | 05:40 | Well then what you do is you sync the
book back to your iTunes Library on
| | 05:44 | your computer, and then you can right-
click on your computer and copy it to
| | 05:48 | the Finder or Explorer and then you have an
intact EPUB you can do something else with.
| | 05:53 | So you do have to jump through some
hoops in order to see what your EPUB is
| | 05:56 | going to look like on the iPad.
| | 05:58 | But I am really hoping that one day
soon Apple is going to come out with an
| | 06:02 | iBooks ereader that we can just
install on our computer and proof our EPUBs that way.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Validating EPUB| 00:00 | EPUB resellers like the Apple
iBookstore, the Barnes & Noble Nook store or
| | 00:07 | aggregators like Google.com, you know,
even Kindle's own servers that will take
| | 00:11 | an EPUB and convert it to Kindle format for you,
| | 00:13 | they all require that the EPUB
that you submit be validated.
| | 00:18 | Now this may seem like jumping the gun,
because we still have a lot to cover as
| | 00:22 | far as editing EPUB is concerned.
| | 00:24 | But I think it's a good idea to
validate your EPUBs as soon as it basically
| | 00:28 | looks okay, right after you export it
out of InDesign. Because that way after
| | 00:32 | you go in and you start messing around
with the EPUB code, as we'll be covering
| | 00:37 | in upcoming videos,
| | 00:38 | if the EPUB does not validate then you
know it's not something InDesign did,
| | 00:42 | it's something you did, and it
will help you narrow-down the problem.
| | 00:45 | But before we actually get into how
to validate an EPUB, let's talk about
| | 00:49 | what validation is.
| | 00:50 | Validation checks that your EPUB
conforms to the standards defined by this
| | 00:56 | organization that you see on screen,
the International Digital Publishing Forum.
| | 01:01 | This is a group of people, sort of
like the World Wide Web Consortium, who
| | 01:05 | decide on how EPUB should be constructed.
| | 01:08 | And what is acceptable
and what's not acceptable.
| | 01:11 | That makes it much easier for people
who develop EPUB readers or EPUB devices
| | 01:17 | to know what to expect, to know what
their machinery or their code should be
| | 01:21 | able to handle when it comes
to opening up your EPUB book.
| | 01:24 | So if you go to IDPF.org and you click
on Specifications, you can see the actual
| | 01:30 | specifications for all the parts of an
EPUB. Like if I just happen to click on
| | 01:34 | this link, this talks about what
should be in the OPF package and we're
| | 01:39 | actually going to know what this is
talking about in a few videos, but this
| | 01:43 | right here it has to do with the metadata.
| | 01:44 | So like for example, it's saying that
the metadata that you add inside of an EPUB
| | 01:49 | in the subject line, you can have multiple
instances of the subject elements are supported.
| | 01:53 | So you can put in multiple
subjects for your document's metadata.
| | 01:57 | When you validate an EPUB then, there is
an engine that checks to make sure that
| | 02:02 | everything inside the EPUB conforms
to the IDPF standards for EPUB 2.0.
| | 02:08 | That's where we are at right now.
| | 02:09 | EPUB 2.0, they are working on the next
spec, EPUB 3.0, but that shouldn't be
| | 02:13 | out for a few months.
| | 02:14 | And who actually came up with
that engine to check your EPUBs?
| | 02:17 | It's actually an open source
code that's hosted at the Google.
| | 02:22 | It's on of the Google checks.
| | 02:23 | It's something you could download to
your computer and run in your command line.
| | 02:26 | On a PC that would be running in
the Eun service or on a Macintosh,
| | 02:30 | that would be running in Terminal,
but you don't really need to do that.
| | 02:34 | Instead, there's a couple of easier ways to
access the Google code for the EPUB check.
| | 02:40 | One of them is by our friends
at Threepress Consulting.
| | 02:43 | I mentioned Threepress before when I
talked about the online EPUB reader
| | 02:47 | called the Ibis Reader.
| | 02:49 | Threepress Consulting is one of the
luminaries in the field of EPUBs and they
| | 02:53 | have developed a front-end to that Google
EPUB check code that's hosted at their website.
| | 02:59 | So what you can do is after EPUB is
done, go to this website, threepress.org,
| | 03:04 | click Tools, and then on the left there
is the EPUB validator. So you click the
| | 03:09 | Browse button and look for your EPUB.
| | 03:10 | As I click Browse and I'm going to go to
my desktop to the exercise files, where
| | 03:16 | I have created two EPUBs.
| | 03:19 | One then I know for sure is not going
to validate, called History sample-no
| | 03:23 | date.EPUB, and we'll click Open.
| | 03:26 | And then you click Validate. Just click
the button and it's checking it against
| | 03:30 | the code and then if there are errors,
you get this very sad looking red X.
| | 03:34 | That is something you
don't want to see normally.
| | 03:37 | And then it will give you a list of
the problems, the reason that it did
| | 03:40 | not pass validation.
| | 03:42 | The very first one what we're looking
at is saying that in the file called
| | 03:46 | content .OPF, the date
value " is not valid.
| | 03:51 | The date must be in the form Year,
Year-Month or Year-Month-Date, and then it
| | 03:57 | has a URL for more information.
| | 03:59 | So what's that about?
| | 04:01 | This is the one bit of metadata that
InDesign CS5 and CS4 do not insert into
| | 04:07 | the EPUB, and it will
always make it fail validation.
| | 04:10 | Now there is a script that you can
install in InDesign that will prompt you for
| | 04:14 | the publication year.
| | 04:16 | That's what it is asking here for is
the metadata, asking for publication year,
| | 04:20 | and we'll be talking about that in
the video where I talk about metadata.
| | 04:23 | But let's go ahead and fix this EPUB right now.
| | 04:26 | It's actually a very easy fix and
I'm going to do it here in Sigil.
| | 04:30 | I'll be talking about Sigil in another
video when I talk about EPUB editing tools.
| | 04:35 | But what I like about Sigil is that
you can open up an EPUB without having to
| | 04:38 | expand it first, and we're going to go
right here, and it's also very easy with
| | 04:43 | Sigil to access an EPUB's metadata.
| | 04:46 | So we're going to Tools > Meta Editor.
We're going to click More, Add Basic.
| | 04:55 | We want Date of publication, and then
I just added that date of publication.
| | 04:59 | You know, while we're here we'll go
ahead and enter a title and an author too,
| | 05:03 | because that's two other pieces of metadata.
| | 05:05 | Not required by EPUB check.
| | 05:06 | But I'll just say San Francisco History
by Anonymous, all right, and then we'll
| | 05:14 | close that document and save our changes.
| | 05:17 | And now we'll go ahead and
upload the corrected EPUB.
| | 05:22 | So I go back to Tools, Browse, and we
actually saved changes to that very first
| | 05:28 | one without the date, right,
so let's see if it worked.
| | 05:30 | Click Open and Validate.
| | 05:33 | It passed. I had that other one
there just in case something went wrong.
| | 05:36 | But that is a very simple explanation
of how you validate in EPUB and then how
| | 05:40 | you correct it and re-validate it.
| | 05:42 | Now there is one other way.
| | 05:44 | You don't have to go to Threepress Consulting.
| | 05:45 | There is an application called EPUB Checker.
| | 05:48 | You can download EPUB Checker.
| | 05:50 | It's a free app that runs on Mac, PCs,
and Linux computers, or you can also
| | 05:55 | just quickly grab any EPUB that you've
created and have it check the EPUB for any problems.
| | 06:03 | It checks it against the same
Google code as the Threepress web site.
| | 06:07 | So there you have it. Two easy ways to
validate your EPUBs and to find out what
| | 06:11 | the problem is if they are invalid.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. Editing EPUB Files for FunctionalityGetting inside an EPUB file| 00:01 | Successfully exporting an EPUB out of
InDesign and then having it validate is
| | 00:06 | I'm very sorry to tell you only the
very beginning of the process, because
| | 00:11 | essentially an EPUB is like a miniature website.
| | 00:14 | It's a series of XHTML files and
the formatting is from a CSS file.
| | 00:20 | If you have ever tried to create a
website out of InDesign you know how great it
| | 00:24 | does at that. In other words it's not very good.
| | 00:26 | So after you export to EPUB you are
very likely going to want to get into those
| | 00:31 | files inside the EPUB and edit those
in XHTML and CSS files, add some links,
| | 00:36 | just things like that.
| | 00:37 | Now, how can you get at
the innards of an EPUB file?
| | 00:41 | That's what I'm going to talk about in
this video. But first even before we talk
| | 00:44 | about how to get at the
innards, what are the innards?
| | 00:46 | Take a look at your Exercise Files.
| | 00:48 | I have them here opened on the screen.
| | 00:50 | Here is the SFHistory EPUB file
that we've been working with often on
| | 00:54 | throughout this video.
| | 00:55 | It should look very familiar to you, and
then above that is a folder called SFHistory.
| | 01:01 | If we twirl that open,
you can see that SFHistory,
| | 01:05 | this is the contents of the EPUB file.
| | 01:07 | It has a couple of folders.
| | 01:08 | It has some weirdo files and then
inside this folder, OEBPS, it has the guts,
| | 01:14 | really the entire book.
| | 01:15 | The XHTML files, it's got
the CSS file, and so on.
| | 01:19 | So how did I get this folder out of this?
| | 01:22 | Well, actually it's kind of neat.
An EPUB file is like a lot of modern
| | 01:26 | files actually a package.
| | 01:28 | It's like a ZIP file that contains
everything that you saw there in that folder,
| | 01:32 | except that it's been compressed
and has the extension .EPUB.
| | 01:36 | Now if I were on a PC to get at the contents
of this EPUB file would be as simple as this.
| | 01:42 | Watch!
| | 01:43 | I'm going to first of all
duplicate this file, so I don't mess it up.
| | 01:46 | We'll call this SFHistoryTest.
| | 01:50 | I'm going to select this test and change
the extension from EPUB to ZIP. Are you sure?
| | 01:58 | Yes, use .ZIP, and now
it's like a zipped folder.
| | 02:01 | So on a PC all I would need to do
would be to right-click and choose Extract
| | 02:05 | All, and it would extract
everything to a folder called SFHistory.
| | 02:10 | I could get in here, I could edit
these files with whatever tools I want, and
| | 02:13 | then when I'm done, I could right-click
on here, compress it, save it as a ZIP,
| | 02:18 | and then again go the other way and
change the ZIP extension to EPUB and it
| | 02:22 | would be perfectly valid.
| | 02:23 | I could upload it and validate it, no problem.
| | 02:25 | Unfortunately, it's not so easy on a Macintosh.
| | 02:28 | In fact, it's impossible.
| | 02:30 | You can change the extension to ZIP and you
can decompress the ZIP folder on your Macintosh.
| | 02:37 | When you recompress it and change
it back to EPUB, it won't validate.
| | 02:40 | The reason is because for some reason
the IDPF consortium, the people who
| | 02:46 | govern the EPUB file format, say that
when you zip up or compress folder into an
| | 02:52 | EPUB file, this folder and its contents
can be compressed, this folder and its
| | 02:57 | contents can be compressed,
but not the mimetype file.
| | 03:00 | Apparently, the PC is smart enough to
not compress this file, but on a Macintosh
| | 03:05 | it adds all sorts of Macintosh
something like ds_store files or resource forks,
| | 03:10 | whatever the heck those things are.
| | 03:12 | And what happens is that even though
you can end up with an SFHistory.epub,
| | 03:16 | it won't validate and the error that's
reported to you will be that this file is
| | 03:20 | compressed and it shouldn't be.
| | 03:21 | By the way if you want to try to unzip
this, if you don't see like an Extract or
| | 03:25 | Unarchive, in the very latest versions
of OS X that Archive Utility won't work,
| | 03:30 | but you could use something like say
StuffIt Expander and then that will go
| | 03:34 | ahead and expand it.
| | 03:36 | So here is that folder
and then you can get inside it.
| | 03:39 | We are not even going to use it,
because as I said if we recompress it and then
| | 03:43 | change the extension back
to EPUB, it won't validate.
| | 03:45 | Now if you've read any other kind of
EPUB documentation or seen any other
| | 03:49 | EPUB videos, you may have heard on a Macintosh
that what you're supposed to do with an EPUB--
| | 03:54 | Actually let me get rid of this before I
go on, because I'm going to get confused.
| | 03:57 | What you're supposed to do is take
this EPUB file and you're supposed to
| | 04:00 | decompress it through Terminal, which
is the OS X program that is also the
| | 04:06 | command line interface. It lets you type-
in UNIX commands and it definitely can be
| | 04:10 | done that way and I have
nothing against Terminal.
| | 04:12 | However, I discovered that there
are a couple of scripts around, free
| | 04:15 | AppleScripts that will do the same.
| | 04:18 | So I have a couple here in
your exercise file for you.
| | 04:21 | I should move these other ones out of there.
| | 04:23 | Let's just do this.
| | 04:24 | I'll rename this to old. Here we go.
| | 04:26 | All you do is you take your EPUB and
you drag-and-drop it on top of the one
| | 04:31 | that says EPUB Unzip.
| | 04:33 | So it unzipped it, and then we can
come in here and we can edit this file.
| | 04:38 | And then when we're done,
let's actually rename this guy too.
| | 04:43 | We're going to run into the same problem.
| | 04:44 | We're going to take this guy and then drag it
back onto EPUB Zip, and there is our EPUB Zip.
| | 04:53 | So it is an essential skill to be able
to completely extract the contents of an
| | 04:57 | EPUB file, so you can get at it with
various text editing programs and then be
| | 05:01 | able to zip it back up.
| | 05:03 | But there are many times when you just
need to tweak one file or just a letter
| | 05:06 | in another one, or fix a little link,
and in that case what you also might want
| | 05:10 | to check out, especially on the Mac
side, is any number of free or low-cost
| | 05:15 | utilities that will let you edit the
contents of a compressed archive without
| | 05:19 | having to decompress it first.
| | 05:21 | For example, one that I like to use
is called Springy. I have it running.
| | 05:25 | It's here in my dock.
It looks like a little a spring.
| | 05:28 | If I drag an EPUB on top of it, it
opens up as though I had decompressed it,
| | 05:33 | but it really hasn't.
| | 05:34 | So I can actually come in here and get
at any one of these files, and then if I
| | 05:39 | right-click, I can choose to extract it
or I can just choose to edit it with
| | 05:43 | some kind of program.
| | 05:45 | Then when I'm done editing, I save
it back in here and then when I close it,
| | 05:49 | it's still an EPUB.
| | 05:50 | So you can't really do any kind of
multiple Find/Changes because it needs to
| | 05:54 | extract these one at a time.
| | 05:56 | Another caution is that you need to go
to Preferences, because there's likely to
| | 06:01 | be an option here having to
do with Macintosh information.
| | 06:05 | I know that some people have got
problems with these kinds of programs.
| | 06:08 | Springy, another one is called Better Zip,
because when it re-archives, there is
| | 06:13 | an option that might be turned on by
default to preserve Macintosh information,
| | 06:17 | like those invisible DS store
files, if you've ever seen them on a PC.
| | 06:22 | Here in Springy in the third panel
under Archiving, a check box way down here
| | 06:26 | at the bottom, Preserve Macintosh
contents, you want to turn that off and
| | 06:30 | then close it before you start
working with this program or before you
| | 06:34 | archive your first archive.
| | 06:35 | So I'm going to go ahead and close this,
and then we are left back with our EPUB.
| | 06:42 | So that's how you get at the innards of
an EPUB and now we need to look at what
| | 06:46 | exactly are those files inside an EPUB.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Identifying parts of an EPUB| 00:01 | Inside an EPUB file, when expanded you'll
find a whole bunch of little separate files.
| | 00:07 | These separate files comprise to
tell the ereader about all of the
| | 00:11 | contents, all of the images, all of the links,
all of the metadata contained in this ebook.
| | 00:17 | Now some of these files you'll never
need to touch, but other ones you will
| | 00:21 | really need to get in there and start
doing some major editing too, depending on
| | 00:26 | the state of your EPUB.
| | 00:27 | And it's a good idea to get to know the
names of these different files and what
| | 00:31 | they refer to, like this mysterious toc.ncx.
| | 00:35 | First of all, whenever you validate an
EPUB, if there's a problem it's going to
| | 00:39 | tell you the name of the file that is
having the problem. Or like there might be
| | 00:44 | a bad link inside toc.ncx, or
content.opf, or something like that.
| | 00:49 | And so you'll know all those little files
that are sitting sort of inside the OEBPS folder.
| | 00:55 | And number two is that if you go to
any support forum for EPUB stuff where there
| | 00:58 | are other people working with this kind
of things, people will be tossing around
| | 01:02 | these names with abandon.
| | 01:03 | They'll assume that everyone knows what
they're talking about and so you might
| | 01:06 | as well get to know what they mean.
| | 01:08 | All right so let's go through actually
each one of these files and talk about
| | 01:11 | what its significance is and if
you would ever need to edit it.
| | 01:14 | For a text editing program I am going
to be using TextWrangler, which is a free
| | 01:19 | text editing program from Bare Bones Software.
| | 01:22 | They also make a commercial one called
BBEdit, but TextWrangler is good enough.
| | 01:26 | If you're on a PC, the program
that I recommend is called Notepad++.
| | 01:30 | We'll now be talking more
about these in another video.
| | 01:33 | But I just want to let you know that
if you want to follow along you should
| | 01:36 | use a text editor that colorcodes some of
the tags that are used inside these files.
| | 01:40 | Okay, so first let's
look at the major divisions.
| | 01:42 | We have expanded SFHistory here in this folder.
| | 01:46 | We have two folders and we have this one
weird file without an extension called a mimetype.
| | 01:51 | These three things are all
required in every EPUB and InDesign will
| | 01:54 | automatically create them for you.
| | 01:56 | The mimetype is a very simple file.
| | 01:59 | Let me open this up in TextWrangler.
| | 02:01 | All it contains is this one line of
code and it tells the ereader this is
| | 02:06 | an EPUB, all right.
| | 02:07 | That's all, just leave it alone, and
this is the file by the way that cannot be
| | 02:10 | compressed when you re-zip this folder.
| | 02:13 | Inside the META-INF folder you're
going to find at least one file called
| | 02:18 | container.xml, which is believe it or
not an XML file and it's also quite short.
| | 02:25 | It gives some information to the ereader
confirming that this is an XML file and
| | 02:29 | then it tells it the path to this
very important file that I'll get to in a
| | 02:33 | minute called content.opf.
| | 02:35 | Now InDesign will automatically create
that file for you and put it inside the
| | 02:40 | folder called OEBPS.
| | 02:43 | I am just saying this in case for
some reason you go inside that OEBPS
| | 02:47 | folder and you rename content or you
move it inside another folder for some
| | 02:51 | bizarre reason, you are going to have
to remember to come to container.xml
| | 02:55 | and change the path as well.
| | 02:57 | So normally you never want to mess
around with the name or the location of
| | 03:01 | content.opf, and that's all.
| | 03:03 | That's container.xml.
| | 03:05 | By the way if you have any kind of
digital rights management or you've encrypted
| | 03:09 | any kind of fonts in your EPUB file,
you'll probably also find a couple other
| | 03:12 | folders or files inside META-INF
that has information about those things.
| | 03:17 | But it is this folder called OEBPS
where really the meat of the entire EPUB is.
| | 03:23 | I often call this the book folder.
| | 03:25 | All of your content, your CSS, all of your
images is going to be inside this folder.
| | 03:30 | In case you're wondering what
that stands for, it's Open eBook
| | 03:34 | Publication Structure.
| | 03:35 | It's going to be on the test at the
end of the video, so make note of that.
| | 03:38 | And inside the OEBPS folder you might
find subfolders. Other programs will just
| | 03:43 | put everything flat.
| | 03:44 | But you're going to find all of the XHTML files.
| | 03:48 | This is the content for every
chapter or section of your EPUB.
| | 03:52 | You're going to find the CSS file, at least one.
| | 03:55 | You can have multiple ones that contain
the coding for all of your XHTML files.
| | 04:01 | Let's actually take a look at
each one of these really quick.
| | 04:03 | We're just going to open up one randomly.
| | 04:06 | Here is an XHTML file.
| | 04:07 | And I am going to turn on Soft
Wrap Text so we can see it better.
| | 04:11 | So you can see here's the actual content.
| | 04:13 | So if you wanted to come in here and
change something without actually having to
| | 04:16 | change the InDesign file, you could
change it here and then save your changes.
| | 04:20 | And the style, CSS file, which we
will be talking about in great detail in
| | 04:26 | another chapter is the CSS file that
governs the formatting for all of your
| | 04:30 | paragraph and character styles that
have been applied inside the XHTML files.
| | 04:36 | If you have any images in your EPUB
they are segregated into their own Images
| | 04:40 | subfolder, these are all JPEGs, and
then you have two critical files. One is
| | 04:45 | called content.opf and toc.ncx.
| | 04:48 | Let's look at this one first.
| | 04:50 | TOC is the table of contents.
| | 04:52 | This is the navigational table of contents,
| | 04:55 | the automatic one that gets generated
from InDesign that appears inside like
| | 04:59 | Adobe Digital Editions on the left-hand side.
| | 05:01 | So I am dragging that over to
TextWrangler and inside the toc.ncx file we have
| | 05:09 | a whole bunch of weird codes.
| | 05:11 | The main point of this file
starts with navMap. Do you see this here?
| | 05:15 | We're going to actually be talking bout
editing this file in a different video.
| | 05:18 | But these are the links in that
navigational table of contents on the left.
| | 05:23 | So A Brief History of San Francisco
points to where that XHTML file is.
| | 05:28 | The one called Contents points to that
XHTML file, and so on. That's that file.
| | 05:34 | And then the content.opf file.
| | 05:37 | Let's take a look at that one inside
TextWrangler and switch to Soft Wrap Text.
| | 05:42 | This stands for Open Packaging Format,
and it's the second of two files.
| | 05:48 | The first one being the toc.ncx
file that describes to the ereader the
| | 05:52 | content of this EPUB.
| | 05:54 | Okay, so the content.opf file is an XML file.
| | 05:58 | It contains three quite important and
required sections, required by the EPUB
| | 06:03 | standard, and one optional one.
| | 06:06 | So the first section is the metadata section.
| | 06:09 | So there is the title, the
publisher, the date that it was published.
| | 06:13 | We have a video talking about
editing this metadata section.
| | 06:16 | The second required section is the manifest.
| | 06:19 | The manifest is a place that lists
every single item in this EPUB folder.
| | 06:24 | All right, so all the XHTML files, all
the JPEGs, the CSS file, and I've seen
| | 06:30 | when people validate EPUBs, that a
frequent cause for the EPUB to fail
| | 06:34 | validation is that there are files inside the
EPUB folder that aren't listed in the manifest.
| | 06:40 | So just like a manifest in the real
world is supposed to list all the contents
| | 06:43 | of a shipment, that's what the manifest is for.
| | 06:45 | The manifest is
automatically generated by InDesign.
| | 06:48 | Normally it's not something
that you need to worry about.
| | 06:51 | The third required section is called
the spine, which refers to the order of
| | 06:56 | the files that appear when the
ereader starts going through them.
| | 06:58 | So when somebody has done reading this
XHTML file and they click the icon for
| | 07:03 | next page, then this XHTML file is
supposed to open up, and again this is
| | 07:07 | something that InDesign
will create automatically.
| | 07:10 | And then the last, this is an optional
section and this is not something that
| | 07:14 | InDesign creates on its own.
| | 07:16 | I actually created this for you
so you can see what it looks like.
| | 07:19 | It's called the guide section, and this
is something that Apple would like your
| | 07:24 | EPUBs to have for the iBookstore.
| | 07:26 | It basically identifies if something
is copyright page, a title page, an
| | 07:31 | acknowledgments page, and then the text
pages are the actual content of the EPUB.
| | 07:34 | We'll be talking about
that too in another video.
| | 07:37 | So now we've gone through every
single one of these files and you know the
| | 07:41 | contents of an EPUB file, and I believe
your brain is probably about 50% larger
| | 07:45 | than when we first started talking about this.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Choosing an EPUB editor| 00:01 | When you're working with the files in
your EPUB there are really so many choices
| | 00:04 | for which software program you want to
use, that I want to go over a few of the
| | 00:09 | I think more useful ones that I
know a lot of professionals are using.
| | 00:13 | And in general you want this program to
be a text editor that will let you edit
| | 00:19 | stuff and save changes, but also one
that is accustomed to working with, say
| | 00:24 | web pages, or some kind of code so that
it will color the tags differently than
| | 00:29 | the actual text, which makes life a lot
easier when you're editing these files.
| | 00:33 | You also want to make sure that it
lets you do multiple Find/Changes because
| | 00:36 | often you're going to want to deal with every
XHTML file. You might want to change a tag.
| | 00:41 | So instead of having to go one-by-one
you want to be able to select all these
| | 00:45 | files and do the same Find/
Change across all of them.
| | 00:48 | And finally you want to make
sure that this program will not
| | 00:51 | introduce additional code.
| | 00:52 | Internally that will cause an EPUB to
be invalid when you try to validate it.
| | 00:57 | So you want to do something that's
very clean and simple but powerful.
| | 01:01 | So with those requirements in mind,
let me tell you about the kind that I like to
| | 01:04 | use on the Mac side.
| | 01:06 | Now by the way some of these programs
are by platform but a really good text
| | 01:10 | editing program on the PC that's not
available on the Mac is called Notepad++,
| | 01:16 | and it's similar I believe to
TextWrangler on the Macintosh that I am going to
| | 01:20 | show you in a second.
| | 01:21 | It's a text editing program that does
color coding of tags and that lets you do
| | 01:24 | a lot of these kinds of Find/
Changes that I was talking about.
| | 01:27 | Now let's talk about TextWrangler.
| | 01:29 | This is a free program from
the people who make BBEdit.
| | 01:33 | In TextWrangler I can choose to open a
file, let's just open one of these XHTML
| | 01:39 | files, and you can see that it does the
color coding and you can Soft Wrap Text
| | 01:44 | so you can see it easier. You can
open up multiple files and if you go to
| | 01:48 | Find/Change which has its own Search menu.
| | 01:50 | It's very powerful.
| | 01:51 | You can see that you can
do multiple file search.
| | 01:54 | Well you know one other feature that I
forgot to mention is that you want to
| | 01:57 | find a text editing program that can do Grep.
| | 02:00 | So like her it says here
find with a Grep checkmark.
| | 02:03 | That stands for General Regular
Expression Parsing or it's often called Regex or
| | 02:08 | Regular Expressions in a program.
| | 02:10 | What that lets you do is
pattern-based searching.
| | 02:13 | Because there are a number of
instances where you want to search for every
| | 02:16 | instance of say a tag called h1
regardless of what it's followed by, and
| | 02:21 | replace it with something else, and
then with a little bit more information
| | 02:24 | at the very end of it.
| | 02:25 | So you want to keep some stuff
intact and change other stuff.
| | 02:28 | Those are kind of complicated Find/
Changes and that's usually done quite easily
| | 02:32 | with something called
Grep or Regular Expression.
| | 02:34 | Not every program can do that, so TextWrangler
and BBEdit, its big brother can. So can Notepad++.
| | 02:40 | I was talking with somebody just
last week who told me he likes to use
| | 02:44 | Dreamweaver, which makes a lot of
sense when you're editing contents of EPUB
| | 02:48 | files because they're
basically miniature web sites.
| | 02:50 | Let me hide others. So with
Dreamweaver if you already have it and you're
| | 02:55 | familiar with it, why not?
| | 02:56 | You can easily open up an XHTML file
and not only can you edit the code and do
| | 03:03 | searches, you know I mean
Dreamweaver is meant for this stuff.
| | 03:05 | But you can also easily see what
it looks like in the Design View.
| | 03:09 | I mean with a program like TextWrangler
or Notepad++, you keep having to preview
| | 03:14 | that in another program to see what
it's going to look like as in the results.
| | 03:18 | But Dreamweaver gives you a design view.
| | 03:20 | And of course if you're editing CSS
files, so Dreamweaver is really powerful with
| | 03:24 | CSS files and you can see the immediate
result of your changes to your cascading
| | 03:29 | style sheets directly in your XHTML files.
| | 03:31 | Now another one is, especially if
you're very familiar with XML that you might
| | 03:35 | want to use is any of the products from
oXygen, and this is <oXygen/> XML Author
| | 03:42 | is what I have open now.
| | 03:43 | They also have <oXygen/> XML Editor.
| | 03:46 | Now these products range in
cost from about $200-$700.
| | 03:51 | This is not as powerful as XML Editor.
| | 03:54 | What's great about XML Author is that it's
got a lot of the big brother features about it.
| | 03:59 | But it also let's you easily work with EPUBs
without having to expand or unzip them first.
| | 04:06 | What I've done here in Author is I've
turned off a lot of the sidebars and
| | 04:09 | panels that I don't need.
| | 04:11 | But I have opened one called the
Archive Browser. And you get to the Archive
| | 04:18 | Browser by going to the Window menu,
choosing Show View, and choosing Archive Browser.
| | 04:22 | As with InDesign, you can save the
layouts. You can save this as your layout
| | 04:27 | for working with EPUBs.
| | 04:28 | What Archive Browser lets you do is
you click the very first icon and it lets
| | 04:32 | you open the actual EPUB
and it expands it inside here.
| | 04:35 | Well it actually shows you the content
it hasn't quite expanded it yet, but if I
| | 04:39 | twirl this open and I say let
me take a look at this toc.ncx,
| | 04:44 | it expands it right here.
| | 04:45 | And I can go ahead and edit this as I want.
| | 04:48 | And now when I am done I just save it.
| | 04:50 | If you open up more than one file like this,
it opens them up as tabs like in a browser. I like that.
| | 04:56 | And it's very simple to work on
this and it shows you every single item
| | 05:00 | inside that EPUB file.
| | 05:02 | Unfortunately you can't do multiple file
Find/Changes in this way. You'd have to
| | 05:06 | expand it first, but it would be
cool if they added that feature.
| | 05:10 | When you're done working on an EPUB
archive then you click the second icon,
| | 05:13 | which is Close archive.
| | 05:15 | So they're kind of expensive.
| | 05:17 | A program that I like is a free program
called Sigil, not quite as powerful by
| | 05:21 | any means as Author, but its claim to
fame like Author is that it can open up
| | 05:27 | the EPUB file without having to expand it first.
| | 05:31 | So I can go to File > Open, select the
EPUB file that we've been working with,
| | 05:37 | and as with XML Author,
I can see the files on the left.
| | 05:41 | However, Sigil is a little different
in that we're not seeing every single one
| | 05:45 | of the files. Like notice you don't
see the toc.ncx file here in the left.
| | 05:49 | So you can't rely on this
as showing you the entire thing expanded.
| | 05:53 | The way that Sigil works is that it's
trying to hide the really geeky stuff from
| | 05:57 | you and give you a
different way to work with it.
| | 05:59 | So for example when you want to work on
the navigational table of contents you
| | 06:02 | don't have to edit the code of toc.ncx.
| | 06:05 | You come up here to the Tools
menu and you go to the TOC Editor.
| | 06:08 | And here you can choose whether or
not to include these chapter headings in
| | 06:12 | the navigational TOC and you can even select
some of this text and change the contents of it.
| | 06:18 | And Sigil will in the background
update the toc.ncx file for you.
| | 06:23 | It's got a lot of other features.
| | 06:24 | This isn't how to use Sigil program, but
I wanted to point out to you that it's a
| | 06:28 | very interesting and useful program
that I'll be using quite a bit during the
| | 06:31 | course of this video.
| | 06:33 | It's available for Mac,
Windows, and Linux computers.
| | 06:35 | And the author does really great
technical support on a forum called
| | 06:39 | mobileread.com that I'll be talking
about in the last video about resources
| | 06:44 | you should know about.
| | 06:45 | So my suggestion is to gather a few of
these tools together, because sometimes
| | 06:50 | one tool is better than the other
depending on the particular kind of job.
| | 06:53 | And having any of these tools available
to you will make it much easier to work
| | 06:56 | with EPUB files than just
a plain old text editor.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Modifying the navigational TOC| 00:00 | The navigational TOC or table of
contents is the automatic table of
| | 00:05 | contents that ereaders pick up based on the
contents of the toc.ncx file in your EPUB file.
| | 00:12 | So here we are looking at the EPUB
file called CAHistory-frombook, meaning I
| | 00:16 | created this from an InDesign book, a
compilation of five different InDesign
| | 00:21 | documents, and because I didn't use
the feature in CS5 that lets me use a TOC style,
| | 00:27 | InDesign went ahead and created
the nav TOC but it used the names of the
| | 00:30 | documents as the TOC entries.
| | 00:33 | Now here is an example of where you
might want to actually edit the EPUB file
| | 00:37 | instead of going back and re-exporting
from InDesign doing all the TOC style stuff.
| | 00:42 | So you want to be able
to edit these labels here.
| | 00:45 | Because you've watched the previous
videos, you know that all this is governed
| | 00:49 | by the file called toc.ncx, which is
inside the expanded EPUB folder, which I
| | 00:55 | have already done for you in the Exercise Files.
| | 00:57 | If you look inside the OEBPS folder or
the book folder, you'll see the toc.ncx.
| | 01:03 | Now what I'd like to do though is if I
just need to edit this one little file,
| | 01:06 | I would like to try and edit it
without having to expand the EPUB and then
| | 01:09 | have to rezip it again.
| | 01:11 | So I would turn to a program that would
open up the Archive and let me edit the
| | 01:15 | innards of the archive, and to me that
would be either Sigil or oXygen Author.
| | 01:20 | So if we go to Sigil and we
choose open this one from the book,
| | 01:27 | CAHistory-frombook-- and remember Sigil
doesn't show you the actual toc.ncx file.
| | 01:32 | It lets you edit the TOC from
the Tools panel, TOC Editor.
| | 01:36 | But this is an instance where Sigil is
not going to help you, because Sigil only
| | 01:40 | counts as a table of contents when the
table of contents has been marked off with
| | 01:44 | an h1 tag, which InDesign will
automatically do if you use the TOC style.
| | 01:50 | But because in these files, if you
look at early_history here, at the code,
| | 01:54 | these are styled with the class subhead, not h1.
| | 01:57 | It's thinking that there are no TOC entries.
| | 02:00 | Which is kind of weird. I think it
is a failing of Sigil, but it's free
| | 02:03 | program and you have to donate money to
this guy to help develop it until what
| | 02:07 | we need done with it, and maybe
there's a way to do what I want it to do but I
| | 02:10 | just don't know how.
| | 02:11 | Anyway, what I am going to do is I am
going to close this document in Sigil and
| | 02:14 | we will jump over to Author
and we will open it there.
| | 02:18 | So I'm opening up the archive.
| | 02:20 | It's the same EPUB file and here we
do have access to the toc.ncx file and
| | 02:26 | here's all of our text.
| | 02:27 | So when I went over the contents, what's
inside this toc.ncx file, in a different
| | 02:32 | video. I mentioned that all of your
Navigation links appear between these two
| | 02:36 | tags called navMap.
| | 02:38 | Here is the opening navMap and then
the closing navMap tag is at the bottom.
| | 02:43 | Every instance of a link inside the
navigational table of contents is called a navPoint.
| | 02:49 | So here is the opening of the navPoint.
Each one has its own unique ID and
| | 02:53 | playOrder and then each navPoint
has two things. It has a label.
| | 02:59 | This is the actual text that appears
and then it has a content source,
| | 03:03 | meaning where it links to.
| | 03:05 | By default the label is the same as the
content source except for the extension.
| | 03:10 | So all we need to do is change the label.
| | 03:12 | Let's go ahead and start
up here with the first one.
| | 03:14 | So we don't want the text
label to be 01_early_history.
| | 03:18 | We would like it to say just Early History.
| | 03:20 | So we are just going to change it
right here, Early History and then we will
| | 03:24 | save the changes that we've made,
Command+S or Ctrl+S. And now I will
| | 03:29 | double-click on that file again to
open it up and you can see that we have
| | 03:33 | made the change, Early History, and
we would go through and make the other
| | 03:36 | changes as necessary.
| | 03:38 | So that's how you can edit the navTOC in Author.
| | 03:41 | There is a time though that Sigil will
help you with navTOCs and that's if you
| | 03:46 | have created one from the TOC Style feature.
| | 03:50 | If we go to File > Open in Sigil and
choose CAHistory-fromTOCstyle.epub and
| | 03:56 | choose Open and then we go up to the
Tools panel, you can see the TOC Editor.
| | 04:01 | And here we see the actual Table Of
Contents Editor and you can choose whether
| | 04:05 | or not to include any of these,
and then you can also edit the text.
| | 04:09 | But a caution is that editing this text
here, you just double-click it to edit it,
| | 04:13 | will actually edit the text inside the file.
| | 04:16 | Unlike editing the TOC directly,
| | 04:19 | the actual XML file like we just did in
Author, but if I said Early History Of
| | 04:23 | the People and said OK and saved our
change, and then we come back to it,
| | 04:30 | you can see that it actually change that.
| | 04:32 | Now according to the Sigil instructions,
if you don't want to change the content
| | 04:35 | of the XHTML file but you just want to
change the header, what you would need to
| | 04:39 | do would be to-- let's try
another one. Go to Code View.
| | 04:43 | I am going to actually go to Split View,
so we can see both the Source and the Code,
| | 04:48 | and inside, you see how it's
marked out with an h1 that's what InDesign did.
| | 04:52 | You would have to add a title tag
and call it title=" and then what it is
| | 04:58 | that you want to say.
| | 04:58 | So I'll say SFO like the airport,
and then save those changes by pressing
| | 05:05 | Command+S and then when we look
at the TOC Editor it says SFO.
| | 05:11 | And then if you want to see the actual
EPUB, then we will come over here and
| | 05:16 | double-click this and
there you see it says SFO.
| | 05:19 | So depending on what it is that you need to
do with the TOC, you can use either Sigil's
| | 05:23 | = pretty friendly user interface or
you might need to actually get your hands
| | 05:26 | dirty editing the code in a
program like oXygen or TextWrangler.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding and editing metadata| 00:00 | What are we looking at here?
| | 00:02 | The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
| | 00:05 | What we are looking at are the types of
metadata that can be included in EPUB.
| | 00:11 | Subject, Description, Publisher.
| | 00:13 | This is the actual source for what
this metadata is suppose to represent.
| | 00:17 | Now do you remember back in InDesign
when we exported to EPUB there is a
| | 00:21 | checkbox in the first panel called
General that said Include Metadata and then
| | 00:27 | there was a field for Publisher.
| | 00:29 | This is where you would enter that
information and that is what's going to
| | 00:33 | happen in the resulting EPUB files
that there's going to be an entry called
| | 00:37 | Publisher with what you entered there.
| | 00:39 | But notice that there are many more
fields available here that you can enter in
| | 00:44 | an EPUB Metadata section then were
available in InDesign, even if you went to be
| | 00:50 | File Info panel which I showed in
another video and added information there
| | 00:54 | unlike keyword and copyright information.
| | 00:57 | So where is this metadata listed?
| | 01:00 | Let's open up Author program and we
will go ahead and open up an archive.
| | 01:05 | We have history text with metadata
information and we'll open it up and it's
| | 01:10 | inside the OEBPS folder.
| | 01:12 | It's one of the important sections of
the content.opf file, so double-click that.
| | 01:17 | Now sometimes when you open up an XML
file in Author or even TextEdit it'll open
| | 01:23 | up in one long scrolling list because
apparently there is only two lines in this
| | 01:27 | file and one of them is very-very long.
| | 01:30 | So depending on the kind of program that
you have, you should try a software app
| | 01:33 | or something like that, but what I love
about the oXygen programs is that it's
| | 01:37 | got this wonderful little icon here
called Format and Indent if you click it
| | 01:42 | just breaks it out and makes it much
easier to work with and it doesn't add any
| | 01:45 | extraneous comments or code
to the files, so it's great.
| | 01:49 | Here is the metadata section.
| | 01:50 | It starts with metadata right at the
top and ends with the closing metadata at
| | 01:54 | the bottom and here are all
the entries starting with DC.
| | 01:58 | It means Dublin Core.
| | 01:59 | The once we entered in
InDesign came through just fine.
| | 02:02 | When we set the title of the work in
InDesign's File Info dialog box, History of
| | 02:07 | San Francisco : Excerpt, I entered the
author, that was Joe Schmoe, and then
| | 02:11 | here are my keywords
according to the Dublin Core.
| | 02:13 | And according to IDPF specifications
you can enter in multiple subjects,
| | 02:17 | multiple keywords for this, but I can
tell you though that in most cases when
| | 02:22 | you are uploading EPUB to say the
Apple iBookstore or Kobo or Sony bookstore,
| | 02:27 | they have a form there that they want
you to fill out with metadata and they
| | 02:31 | want you to choose from a
standardized list of subjects.
| | 02:34 | So that it's easier for people who are
organizing say like on the iBookstore
| | 02:39 | where it says here is all of our
history books, here is all of our
| | 02:41 | science-fiction books, that
everybody has used the same term.
| | 02:44 | So you can go ahead and enter as many
subjects as you like, but you're probably
| | 02:48 | going to have to redo
some of this down the road.
| | 02:52 | Now one thing that InDesign does not
let you enter unless you Tales Dejong's
| | 02:56 | script that I mentioned earlier called
Fixed Links and add that publication year
| | 03:01 | is the publication year of the EPUB.
| | 03:03 | That's this right here which is Date.
| | 03:05 | Notice that it's empty.
| | 03:06 | And if I submitted this for validation,
it would kick it back and say that
| | 03:10 | you are missing a date.
| | 03:11 | So you can go ahead and add it
yourself by editing the content.opf file.
| | 03:16 | What I like about using a program like
oXygen Author for this rather than say a
| | 03:20 | free TextWrangler is that oXygen Author
does automatic code completion, so like
| | 03:25 | if I get rid of this closing tag and
then just start typing you see how it
| | 03:29 | automatically created an opening and a
closing tag and I can just type in 2011.
| | 03:34 | You also have the option of doing
something like February 15, can do something.
| | 03:38 | That's all optional but at least a
four digit date is what they want.
| | 03:42 | And now just that one little change
will make it go ahead and validate.
| | 03:45 | So I am going to close this and save
changes at the prompt and then close the archive.
| | 03:51 | Now if you don't have oXygen Author,
which I know is kind of expensive, Sigil
| | 03:56 | also lets you easily create and edit metadata.
| | 03:59 | So I am moving over to Sigil and I
will just go ahead and choose Open and
| | 04:06 | select the same file.
| | 04:07 | You're not able to access the
content.opf file over here on the left.
| | 04:12 | Remember Sigil tries to hide
the uber geeky stuff from you.
| | 04:15 | Instead you use something from the
Tools panel called the Meta Editor.
| | 04:20 | Any kind of metadata that you've
already entered appears here and sometimes it
| | 04:24 | will appear like this.
| | 04:25 | Like oh, what happened to it?
| | 04:26 | I'll just click More and then you
can see everything that's in here.
| | 04:30 | And if you want to add or remove
stuff you just click here, add some more
| | 04:35 | basic metadata properties, like an ISBN
number, the source, type, the rights, and so on.
| | 04:42 | Or you can also remove entries as well.
| | 04:44 | So you can edit the metadata either in
Sigil's Meta Editor or you can just go
| | 04:49 | ahead and enter the content.opf file yourself.
| | 04:52 | Just be carrel that you are opening and
closing the tags correctly and that you
| | 04:56 | only use the metadata tags that are
allowed in the specification, that are
| | 05:02 | allowed by the Dublin Core.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating guide sections for iBooks| 00:01 | Has this ever happened to you?
| | 00:02 | You are reading an EPUB and
here we are at the front of it.
| | 00:06 | It says A Brief History of San
Francisco in the NAVTOC here.
| | 00:09 | It's says we are on page 1 of 14.
| | 00:11 | Okay let's see what's in
here. Click on Contents.
| | 00:13 | But well wait a minute.
| | 00:13 | It says Page 3 of 14.
| | 00:16 | Sometimes I've opened up and EPUB and
it says that I'm on chapter 1 and I look
| | 00:20 | at it and says I am on page 8 and it
automatically skipped the first beginning
| | 00:24 | pages, so I am always obsessive about that.
| | 00:26 | I am like what did I miss?
| | 00:27 | So I am going to click back here
and I missed the title page. Ohhh.
| | 00:29 | Well this is actually an optional part
of the content.opf document in you EPUB
| | 00:36 | called the guide section and Apple
recommends that you include a guide section
| | 00:42 | for books that will be listed in the
iBookstore and I'm pretty sure that
| | 00:46 | Kindle does as well.
| | 00:47 | Because I'm pretty sure that
this has happened to me on a Kindle.
| | 00:50 | And as you can see if it has a guide
section then a lot of other ereaders like
| | 00:55 | Adobe Digital Editions will also honor it.
| | 00:57 | So what is the guide section exactly?
| | 01:00 | Let me close this and show it to you.
| | 01:03 | Here I already have this open in Author.
| | 01:05 | We are looking at the content.opf file
and at the very bottom after the spine
| | 01:11 | we have this section called Guide, if
you remember from the beginning of this
| | 01:15 | chapter when I was going through
identifying the parts of an EPUB file, I said
| | 01:19 | that this file has a fourth optional section
and that's this optional section down here.
| | 01:23 | If you don't have the guide, this EPUB
will still validate, assuming everything
| | 01:27 | else is still right.
| | 01:28 | But the guide tells the EPUB reader the
semantic meanings of the different files.
| | 01:33 | For example, text. See the type Text?
| | 01:36 | This is the actual
chapters inside the EPUB file.
| | 01:40 | But then we also have other semantic
meanings like cover, and title-page,
| | 01:44 | and table of contents.
| | 01:47 | So the guide tells the ereader what are the
meanings for the different kinds of pages.
| | 01:52 | You could have acknowledgements,
you could have a type that says index,
| | 01:55 | glossary, copyright page, dedication, and so on.
| | 01:59 | And depending on the ereader's
specifications, it will automatically make
| | 02:03 | one page appear first.
| | 02:04 | And then the user will actually have
to scroll backwards to see other pages.
| | 02:08 | So if you want to create or add a
guide to your document, InDesign will not
| | 02:12 | create this for you unfortunately.
| | 02:14 | You actually have to open up the
content.opf file and add this code yourself.
| | 02:18 | This might be one instance where I
would use Sigil instead of a text editor
| | 02:22 | because Sigil does this
very nicely. Let me show you.
| | 02:26 | I'm going to close out of this document.
| | 02:27 | We have SFHistory before.
| | 02:29 | This is after I added a guide. This is before.
| | 02:32 | And in this one, I'm going
to open up this file in Sigil.
| | 02:35 | So I'm just going to right-
click it and choose Sigil.
| | 02:40 | Remember Sigil is a free,
cross-platform EPUB editor.
| | 02:43 | It's kind of interesting how it works
in Sigil is that you locate the page that
| | 02:49 | you want to designate as
being a particular kind of page.
| | 02:53 | And then you right-click
and choose Add Semantics.
| | 02:57 | All right, and this will
build the guide for you.
| | 03:01 | So you say, this is the table of
contents page and this is the cover page and
| | 03:08 | then these, you have to do
them one by one as far as I know.
| | 03:11 | I haven't been able to do this
automatically to all of them.
| | 03:14 | But remember what's cool about Sigil is
we don't have to expand that EPUB file.
| | 03:18 | And you just here and say all these are Text.
| | 03:20 | So your actual chapters should be text.
| | 03:23 | And I probably don't even have to go right to
the page but I'm just going to do it anyway.
| | 03:27 | And now I'm obsessively finishing this
since we only have a few chapters to do.
| | 03:32 | And then this will add
the guide section for you.
| | 03:35 | And then we're going to close this
entire document and save all of our changes.
| | 03:41 | So I've moved over to XML Author and
we'll go ahead and open up that file.
| | 03:46 | That was the before one that I just edited.
| | 03:49 | And we'll go to OEBPS, to the content
file, and at the bottom, there we go.
| | 03:56 | There's our guide that we
just created with Sigil.
| | 03:59 | So this is just another little bit of
editing that in most cases you're going to
| | 04:03 | have to do by hand in whichever program
that you have and if you have Sigil, it
| | 04:07 | makes it a lot easier.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
8. Editing EPUB Files for FormattingCleaning up the XHTML files| 00:00 | The XHTML files that InDesign creates
inside the EPUB often have superfluous
| | 00:06 | code and tags and things like that,
that it would be a good idea to clean up if
| | 00:10 | you need to do any kind of editing of
the internal files of the EPUB itself.
| | 00:15 | So I'm going to show you what these
XHTML files look like and a simple
| | 00:18 | cleanup that you might want
to do right from the get go.
| | 00:21 | I've already expanded to CAHistory.
epub into its own folder here and inside
| | 00:28 | the OEBPS folder, you should remember, are where
all of the XHTML content files are located.
| | 00:34 | And I've already selected each of these
and opened them up inside TextWrangler.
| | 00:40 | TextWrangler is one of the text
editing programs that I'd like to use to edit
| | 00:43 | XHTML files. You can use any editing
program that you'd like, though what I'm
| | 00:48 | going to show you here is a multiple
file find change using GREP, a very simple
| | 00:53 | Grep. Remember that is sort of
like a pattern-based searching.
| | 00:56 | So your program should be able to do this.
| | 00:58 | We're looking at early_history.xhtml.
This is the first chapter of this EPUB
| | 01:04 | and you can see that it starts out with
some gobbledygook at the top that XTML
| | 01:09 | files always start out with, declaring
what kind of doc type it is, that it's
| | 01:12 | HTML version 1.0, the title of this document,
and which stylesheet controls its formatting.
| | 01:19 | That we'll be talking about later.
| | 01:20 | But I want you to take a look further
down. The body of the XHTML starts and
| | 01:26 | notice that InDesign will always
create a div, standing for division or
| | 01:31 | section of this web page, that is named for the
actual InDesign file and that we can ignore.
| | 01:37 | After that first div, then you will
always see another div that is actually the
| | 01:42 | text frame containing the text of the
story, and InDesign assigns it a class
| | 01:47 | called generated-style. That again is
ignored by the EPUB Reader and that you
| | 01:50 | don't have to worry about.
| | 01:52 | But what does take up a lot of room is
this little bit that CS5 adds to every
| | 01:56 | single paragraph tag.
| | 01:59 | It says that the XML language is, and
in this case it's saying English US.
| | 02:03 | Now yours might say something different
if you're from a different country, like
| | 02:07 | if you're from the UK it will say GB,
I guess for Great Britain, and sometimes
| | 02:11 | it just says en-US.
| | 02:12 | It knows both ways.
| | 02:14 | If this just takes up room and if
you have like say 30 chapters in a book
| | 02:18 | and this is happening for every
single paragraph, it does take-up a fair
| | 02:21 | amount of space.
| | 02:23 | So I'm going to show you how you can use
multiple find/change to clear this out.
| | 02:27 | It's not needed at all for this EPUB
file to validate or for EPUB readers to be
| | 02:31 | able to understand what its for.
| | 02:33 | Not quite sure why InDesign
adds it. Nobody really knows.
| | 02:37 | So in TextWrangler, if you want to
do a regular find/change, you choose
| | 02:41 | Command+F here, but if you want to
insert through multiple files, you choose
| | 02:45 | this command, Multiple File Search,
and then under Search In you're able to
| | 02:51 | choose which files you want to search in.
| | 02:52 | Since I've already opened up these
files, I can just say oh, I want it to
| | 02:57 | search through all these open text
documents, or if you just wanted to do the
| | 03:01 | find/change like a couple of these, not all
of them, you can check the ones that you want.
| | 03:06 | So I think it's pretty cool
for a free text-editing program.
| | 03:09 | Now what we want to find is we want to
find this bit here, including the space
| | 03:15 | preceding XML, and what we want to
change it to is nothing. We want the end
| | 03:20 | result to look like that, all right.
| | 03:22 | So let me Undo and with this
selected, I'm just going to copy it to the
| | 03:27 | clipboard and then find/change,
I'll paste it right inside here.
| | 03:31 | So notice that the space
came along as well.
| | 03:35 | Right now I still have GREP selected
from the last time I did a find/change, but
| | 03:39 | typically GREP or regular expression
will not be selected. You are just going to
| | 03:43 | do a regular find/change on this
string of text that you've entered up here.
| | 03:47 | What I could do is say find this
and replace with nothing, and then I
| | 03:51 | could come back and say and then find this
bit with just en and replace with nothing.
| | 03:57 | And one of the most powerful things
about GREP is that you could combine both
| | 04:01 | searches into one with a very
simple method called an OR search.
| | 04:06 | So what you do is you surround the
first thing you want to find in parentheses,
| | 04:11 | don't forget to include that space,
and then you put a little bar, which is
| | 04:16 | Shift+Backslash. That will make a little
vertical bar also known as a pipe. And then
| | 04:22 | you put in the other thing that you
wanted to find, so the other thing is this.
| | 04:26 | Right here, I'll copy that and over
here I'll put another open parens, paste,
| | 04:34 | close parens, and then remember to turn
on GREP, because if I don't, it's going to
| | 04:38 | search for this exact thing.
| | 04:39 | It's not going to find it anywhere.
| | 04:41 | But separating searches with
parentheses and the pipe, you could do like 5 or 6
| | 04:46 | in a row, if you want them all replaced
with the same thing, which is nothing.
| | 04:49 | It's a fast way to do a search and
replace, and it's a nice easy way to get used
| | 04:54 | to do a little bit of GREP.
| | 04:55 | And now I'll just click Replace All and
I'll get a little dialog box that says,
| | 05:00 | do I want to confirm before I save
these changes to the files, do you want to
| | 05:03 | see the results, should I leave
these files open or should I save them?
| | 05:07 | So I'm going to say save the changes.
I don't care by confirming. I've done this
| | 05:10 | before, so I know this will work.
| | 05:12 | But I do want to see the results.
| | 05:13 | I want to see how many hits it found.
| | 05:15 | So I'll say Proceed and this is the
Search Results dialog box the TextWranger
| | 05:20 | puts up. Your text editor
might put up something different.
| | 05:23 | You can see how much time it saved me.
I've only had a few very short chapters
| | 05:27 | in this, but it found all these
changes, and now it's nice and clean.
| | 05:31 | So you might find other instances
where you need to clean out some stuff in
| | 05:35 | XHTML and learning the ins and outs to
the XHTML is a little bit beyond the scope
| | 05:39 | of this particular title, but there
are plenty of other titles on lynda.com
| | 05:43 | where you can learn about editing
HTML files. But simply being able to do a
| | 05:47 | quick find and replace to give you
some of the superfluous code that InDesign
| | 05:50 | adds will make your job a lot easier.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Cleaning up the CSS file| 00:00 | Just as we did some basic cleanup to
the XHTML files that InDesign included in
| | 00:05 | its EPUB export, we are also going to
do some basic cleanup of the CSS file.
| | 00:10 | Now you may recall from previous videos
that all the styling in an EPUB comes from
| | 00:16 | the cascading style sheet, the CSS file,
and the styles in the CSS file come from
| | 00:22 | the paragraph and character styles that
you created in InDesign and applied to
| | 00:27 | the texts. And all that we
covered in previous videos.
| | 00:30 | Inside the expanded EPUB file, we already
extracted all the files from inside our
| | 00:34 | EPUB, you'll recall that inside the
OEPBS folder, also known as the Book folder,
| | 00:41 | we have the XHTML file and this is the CSS file.
| | 00:45 | I have open both of these
up inside Text Wrangler.
| | 00:49 | There's the history sample of XHTML and
template.css and with the CXHTML file showing,
| | 00:55 | I just want you to notice that toward
the top in the head section it reminds you
| | 01:01 | that the CSS formatting is coming
from this file called template.css.
| | 01:06 | So any changes that we make to this CSS file
you will be able to preview in this XHTML file.
| | 01:15 | So let's take a look at the CSS file
and I've got some typical changes that
| | 01:19 | you might want to make.
| | 01:20 | Let me drag this over to the center, here we go.
| | 01:24 | First at the top you'll usually find
some of these generated styles next to
| | 01:29 | divs and these are the ones that
InDesign automatically spits out for the name
| | 01:33 | of the InDesign document.
| | 01:35 | and for the text frame containing the
text. I briefly mentioned those in the
| | 01:39 | previous videos. These you can get rid of.
| | 01:41 | You really don't need them.
| | 01:42 | They are not going to apply anywhere.
| | 01:43 | It's okay to leave those tags in the
XHTML file. They are just going to be ignored.
| | 01:50 | Now notice that for every paragraph
style and character style in your InDesign
| | 01:55 | document we have a matching CSS style.
| | 01:59 | The subhead for h1.subhead has been
styled with all these settings and then we
| | 02:04 | have a p.headline, p.body-first and you
can see where these are applied in your
| | 02:10 | XHTML file in the opening class.
| | 02:14 | So here's p class=body-first, here's
class=headline, h1 class=subhead Early History.
| | 02:23 | All right keep scrolling. We
have a class called image-w-caption.
| | 02:29 | This was the actual paragraph style assigned to
the paragraph containing our anchored graphic.
| | 02:36 | Underneath the anchor graphic we have a
caption with the paragraph style caption.
| | 02:41 | So again let's come back to the CSS file
and hopefully this is all making sense to you.
| | 02:45 | Now I am not going to teach you how to
write CSS. There are many titles here at
| | 02:50 | lynda.com that will do much better job
of that and you really don't need to be
| | 02:54 | CSS experts in order to do
some basic editing of these files.
| | 02:59 | And actually because you are already
familiar with paragraph and character
| | 03:03 | styles in InDesign, you have a leg up on
a lot of other people in understanding
| | 03:07 | what cascading style sheets are all about.
| | 03:09 | Because one of the first problems
that you're going to see or that actually
| | 03:13 | you'll realize with the cascading
style sheets is that they have settings for
| | 03:18 | things that you really don't care
about and that could make it more difficult
| | 03:22 | for you to change the styles later on.
| | 03:25 | It's kind of like you know how
character styles work in InDesign where you can
| | 03:28 | just make a character style called Bold
and no matter what size type you apply
| | 03:32 | it to it will become bold?
| | 03:34 | Well what about if somebody who wasn't
that familiar with InDesign created a
| | 03:37 | character style but they also included
specifications for the type size and type
| | 03:42 | weight and all the other settings for
character style. That just makes it much
| | 03:46 | more inflexible right. You would have
to create multiple character styles every
| | 03:50 | time you wanted to apply the
character style bold to a different typeface
| | 03:53 | without changing the typeface.
| | 03:55 | Well this is for some reason what
InDesign does in CSS is that it automatically
| | 04:00 | assigns attributes to 11 different
settings for every style. Even though they
| | 04:05 | don't have to be set. Even though it
would be easier if you would just leave
| | 04:09 | them alone and keep them at the default
of not even declaring a special setting.
| | 04:13 | For example here under body-first we
have font family Chaparral Pro. Now we're
| | 04:19 | not even talking about assigning
fonts because you don't have that much
| | 04:22 | control at all over the typeface used.
All of the devices, or at least 90% of them,
| | 04:28 | they have their own typeface is
built-in and many of them are not shared
| | 04:31 | from device to device. So you can't
just say for example Arial like you could
| | 04:35 | with a web site and know that most
browsers will be able to open up a document
| | 04:39 | and show you that font.
| | 04:40 | I mean Apple's iPad has 30 fonts and the
Nook has 5 fonts and I don't think any
| | 04:45 | of them are the same.
| | 04:47 | You can just delete the
entire setting for body-first.
| | 04:50 | You don't need to know what the face is.
| | 04:53 | You know font-weight, that's
something like a Normal or Bold and that is
| | 04:57 | something that you don't want it be Bold.
| | 04:58 | You want it to be Normal.
| | 04:59 | You can leave it as is.
Same thing with font-style.
| | 05:02 | Font-size and line-height are fine and
notice that it uses the em measurement
| | 05:07 | system and em is an interesting
measurement system that's only used with web
| | 05:12 | design and em is a good thing.
| | 05:14 | And em, when you define a font size in
an em, it means that it is this amount of
| | 05:20 | the default font size for the ereader.
| | 05:24 | So in 1 em is the size of the default font of
the ereader and most ereaders are 16 points.
| | 05:30 | So .7 9 of an em means a
little less than 16 points.
| | 05:35 | If you want to get exactly 1em out of
InDesign you have to set your type size to 12 points.
| | 05:41 | It'll come out as 1 em.
I know it's weird. Not 16.
| | 05:44 | So in other words the default type size
in InDesign of 12 on auto leading will
| | 05:48 | give you the default font size for ereader.
| | 05:51 | And then for every other measure that
says em, it is actually a percentage of
| | 05:56 | the current font size.
| | 05:57 | So 1.42 em line height, which is leading,
means its 1.42 times the size of this font.
| | 06:06 | It's good to know that you can keep it
and you don't have these pixels or inches
| | 06:09 | or anything like that.
| | 06:11 | Text-decoration are things like dotted
underlines or backgrounds. Again this is
| | 06:16 | an example of an attribute that
InDesign set that you don't need, so you can
| | 06:19 | just completely deleted it.
| | 06:22 | When the attribute has not been set
then the ereader or the web browser will
| | 06:27 | assume it suppose to be the default of none.
| | 06:29 | Same thing for font-variant. That
would be like case. Leave that alone.
| | 06:35 | A text-indent, a first line indent, of 0.
Sometimes you might want to keep it at zero or
| | 06:41 | sometimes you might want
just delete it or leave it alone.
| | 06:44 | Text alignment, justifying. Actually
people have very little control over if text
| | 06:49 | is justified or left aligned or right
aligned, so I normally just get rid of that.
| | 06:54 | And a color of all zeros means black.
That is the default assumed in color.
| | 06:59 | so we will get rid of that and so on.
| | 07:02 | So you can go through all of your
styles and get rid of the settings that don't
| | 07:06 | need to be set, and this will
make it a lot easier for you, especially as
| | 07:09 | you get into more advanced CSS, of
being able to do like child and parent
| | 07:15 | settings. Because CSS remember stands
for cascading style sheets and in that
| | 07:21 | sense it's kind like
based on styles in InDesign.
| | 07:25 | So that if you have a parent style that
says text decoration is dotted and then
| | 07:30 | you make a child based on that one, then
its text decoration will also be dotted
| | 07:35 | unless you say something else.
| | 07:37 | That's why it's best to leave the
attribute set to none to have them completely
| | 07:42 | not even defined. So that they can be
most flexible and they can take on the
| | 07:46 | attributes of their parent, should
you decide to set up your CSS this way.
| | 07:50 | So you need to go through the CSS and
get rid of all of the specifications
| | 07:55 | that really aren't required and then
you can come back and you can fiddle around
| | 07:58 | with changing the ones that you do
and I am going to show you a few common
| | 08:02 | things that you might want to change
in this chapter, things like Spacing,
| | 08:06 | Drop Caps, stuff like that.
| | 08:08 | But I also want to encourage
you to explore more with CSS.
| | 08:12 | It's extremely powerful.
| | 08:13 | I've called a couple web sites in
Firefox that you should know about.
| | 08:18 | First of all right now we are using EPUB
specification I think its EPUB Version 2.
| | 08:22 | And EPUB version2 allows tags from CSS2,
that's the version of CSS standard, and
| | 08:31 | this is the website for CSS2 with a ton
of information about what kind of tags
| | 08:37 | are allowed with CSS2.
| | 08:38 | There might the more information that
you want but I know that there are some
| | 08:41 | gearheads out there wondering which version of
CSS does EPUB support and this is the version.
| | 08:47 | And then I also want to show you this
really cool site called EPUB Zen Garden.
| | 08:52 | It's from ThreePress consulting, the
same people who do Ibis Reader and the EPUB
| | 08:57 | check online, and it's along the same
veins as another very well-known website
| | 09:02 | called CSS Zen Garden. And basically
the producers create a set of content and
| | 09:09 | they invite people to take that same
set of content and change how it looks
| | 09:13 | purely based on CSS.
| | 09:16 | And people can come to the website and
choose among this different CSS files
| | 09:20 | that have been associated with the
same content to see how it looks, kind of
| | 09:24 | like skinning a website or skinning
a game, to see what the same content looks
| | 09:28 | like with the different cascading style sheets.
| | 09:30 | So here at EPUB Zen Garden, they only
allow CSS that is supported by the EPUB
| | 09:37 | specification and you can change
the style from his drop-down menu.
| | 09:41 | So like here is what this style looks
like, the same content. So it's a book so
| | 09:46 | there's a chapter open or a quote, a
drop cap. You can look at all the chapters
| | 09:52 | because a lot of them have different
content and section openers with all these
| | 10:00 | and what's even more cool is that when
you find one that you like, like I like
| | 10:06 | this Gibson one, isn't that elegant, you
can actually grab the CSS and use the CSS as
| | 10:12 | long as you attribute to them.
| | 10:14 | You can find out more about that
underneath the About section, but they're all
| | 10:18 | released under a Creative Comments
guidelines. And to get to the CSS you go to
| | 10:23 | View > Page Source and
then click on the CSS link.
| | 10:28 | So I've been playing around with this.
I notice some of the CSS is very well
| | 10:31 | commented and it has instructions
about like who wrote this. The comments are
| | 10:37 | all written out with the slash and the
asterisk next to it. You can see like here
| | 10:41 | h1 he is saying is used for the book
title and the font size is 3.5 em and in
| | 10:48 | parentheses, he's reminding you that
16 points, which is the default type size,
| | 10:53 | times 3.5 equal 56 points.
| | 10:56 | So the font size for the title will
be 56 points. Very well commented.
| | 11:00 | So you can just select all this copy
and paste it to a text file and try this
| | 11:04 | out with your EPUBs.
| | 11:06 | Design is design and the CSS file
in an EPUB is what drives the design.
| | 11:13 | So I recommend that any time that you
can spend learning more about CSS will
| | 11:16 | improve the quality of your EPUBs.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting spacing in the file| 00:00 | One of the things that designers will
find themselves fiddling around with in
| | 00:04 | the CSS file of an EPUB is the spacing,
the spacing between paragraphs, between
| | 00:09 | heading and subheading, between
image and caption and caption in the next
| | 00:14 | paragraph following that, because
sometimes even though you might be diligently
| | 00:18 | adding space above and space after,
in InDesign it doesn't really translate
| | 00:24 | correctly to the EPUB.
| | 00:26 | So all that is controlled in the
cascading style sheet file and let's take a
| | 00:30 | look that right now.
| | 00:31 | I have expanded SFHistory.epub to a
folder and inside the OEBPS folder we
| | 00:38 | have the CSS file and in this example, we
just have one story found, just the XHTML file.
| | 00:44 | So I am going to select them both
and open them up with TextWrangler.
| | 00:51 | So here's the CSS file and you can
see that I've already gone through and
| | 00:54 | gotten rid of a whole lot of
extraneous CSS code. This is something I talked
| | 00:59 | about in a previous video.
| | 01:00 | What controls the spacing in between
paragraphs is called the Margin setting.
| | 01:06 | Now let's take a look at what this XHTML
file looks like, as it would be viewed in EPUB.
| | 01:11 | Now here's a little tip that I
would like to use, especially for this
| | 01:15 | intermediate proofing.
| | 01:17 | We could go back to the Finder or
Windows Explorer and actually select this
| | 01:23 | folder and then recompress it and
change the extension to EPUB or use one of
| | 01:28 | those cool scripts that I
showed you for Mac OS X.
| | 01:32 | But instead what I found is that if you
preview the XHTML file in a browser then
| | 01:40 | you can get a close approximation of
what it's going to look like in an ereader.
| | 01:44 | Now a program like Dreamweaver, for
example, would be ideal for this in that you
| | 01:49 | can edit the code and then always look
at Design view to see what the XHTML file
| | 01:53 | looks like, so that would be
great if you use Dreamweaver.
| | 01:56 | Also if you use Sigil, that utility that
I showed earlier, you can edit the CSS
| | 02:02 | file without even unzipping the
EPUB file and then look at the built-in
| | 02:06 | EPUBReader to see the effects of your changes.
| | 02:09 | But right now, I am in the
groove of using TextWrangler.
| | 02:12 | So instead what I'm going to do is I am
going to take this XHTML file right here
| | 02:16 | in the Finder and I am
going to preview it in Safari.
| | 02:20 | Now why Safari and why not
Firefox, which I usually prefer?
| | 02:24 | Because both Safari and iBooks, the
Apple ereader, use the same rendering engine.
| | 02:31 | So the closest you can get to
previewing how an EPUB will look like on an iPad
| | 02:36 | without actually having to put it on
the iPad, is to preview the individual
| | 02:40 | XHTML files in Safari.
| | 02:42 | I am just going to drag this over to
Safari and it might open up like this.
| | 02:49 | There are very few ereaders that look
like this, so you might want to resize it
| | 02:53 | to be roughly what it might
look like at 600 pixels wide.
| | 02:57 | And now actually let's take a look at this.
| | 02:59 | I am going to hide the other
applications so we can focus on this.
| | 03:03 | So there's our title in blue and our
subheads in orange, which is how I designed it.
| | 03:08 | We have an image with a black stroke on
it and a small caption below it, which
| | 03:13 | is centered. That's working great.
| | 03:14 | I have some words in bold.
| | 03:17 | My drop cap isn't quite working.
| | 03:19 | We will be talking about that in
another video and we have some indents.
| | 03:22 | But you know the first thing that
strikes me is what the heck happened
| | 03:26 | between these paragraphs?
| | 03:27 | What's all this white space doing?
| | 03:30 | I don't really want that white space.
| | 03:31 | I have first line indents.
| | 03:33 | We'll see what happened was that I
became a little too vigilant in getting rid
| | 03:38 | of what I thought was superfluous code
and at the end of every body declaration
| | 03:43 | here I forgot I got rid of the margin setting.
| | 03:46 | So in CSS if you don't set a margin,
like down here or say underneath the
| | 03:51 | headline, then it's assumed that you
want extra space in between the paragraphs.
| | 03:56 | If you want no bottom margin, you have
to set a margin of zero for the bottom.
| | 04:01 | So let's go ahead and fix that right now.
| | 04:04 | The margins are set in four measures
and they start from the top, so if you
| | 04:08 | think of like the hands of the clock,
12 o'clock, 3 o'clock, 6 o'clock,
| | 04:12 | 9 o'clock, top, right, bottom, left,
and they're all in em measurements which I
| | 04:18 | talked about in previous video. This is
a percentage of the current font size.
| | 04:23 | So zero em means zero.
| | 04:25 | Let's just actually copy this entire
line to the clipboard and I'm going to
| | 04:30 | paste it after body-first and
we don't want that indent there.
| | 04:35 | I don't want any margin top, bottom,
I will leave everything at zero actually,
| | 04:40 | just like that. We want no margin anywhere.
| | 04:44 | And I'll select this whole thing again,
and I'll put it after body, here we go.
| | 04:49 | So then you save your CSS file and then
jump back to Safari for using my method
| | 04:56 | and refresh the view. Just click the
Refresh button up here. Here you go.
| | 05:01 | So it fetched the latest version of
that XHTML file, which in turn fetched the
| | 05:07 | latest version of the CSS file that
hooks into it, and that's how you change
| | 05:11 | spacing in between paragraphs.
| | 05:13 | Now the spacing that is the first line
indent is actually called text-indent and
| | 05:18 | you can see it right over here in p.body.
| | 05:21 | So any paragraph that has been tagged with
the class of body has an indent of one em.
| | 05:27 | If you want to increase that, you can
just do this. Let's say 3ems, save it,
| | 05:33 | I'm pressing Command+S or Ctrl+S here,
jump to Safari, refresh, and you see the
| | 05:39 | first line indents go in.
| | 05:41 | So there's lots of places where you
might want to play around with indents and
| | 05:45 | spacing between captions and subheads
and titles and it's very simple to do.
| | 05:50 | Just use the margin setting
and the text indent setting.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating drop caps| 00:00 | Now, even though you may have been very
careful in your InDesign file to apply
| | 00:05 | the drop cap character style to any
drop caps you may have in there, because you
| | 00:09 | watched my video about nested styles
and you know that just because it was
| | 00:13 | included in a paragraph style doesn't
mean it's going to survive in the EPUB.
| | 00:17 | You actually have to apply the
character style called Drop Cap to that
| | 00:20 | character. Even if you are that careful,
I am sorry, but I can guarantee you
| | 00:25 | that it's not going to look like a
drop cap when you export it to EPUB.
| | 00:28 | At some sort of internal bug in this
version of InDesign. The Drop Cap style
| | 00:33 | does get applied, but the styling
itself you have to do over again by hand.
| | 00:38 | Let me show you what I mean.
| | 00:39 | I have already expanded an EPUB
story called SFHistory-sample.
| | 00:43 | It's a very short story here and inside
the OEBPS folder, we have two files that
| | 00:51 | we want to work on: the
XHTML file and the CSS file.
| | 00:54 | So I've selected them both.
| | 00:56 | I'm going to right-click,
choose Open With > TextWrangler.
| | 00:59 | Now you can open up this with
any text editor that you want.
| | 01:04 | In fact, you don't even have to expand
in EPUB. You could open it up in Sigil or
| | 01:08 | XML Author and there you can also
access the CSS file without having to expand it
| | 01:14 | and then as you save your CSS changes,
you can see what the EPUB is going to
| | 01:17 | look like, but I happen to be
into TextWrangler this morning.
| | 01:20 | So I'm going to use that one.
| | 01:22 | Let me move this over to the center.
| | 01:24 | So let's see what's happening in the
XHTML file and let me soft wrap the text.
| | 01:30 | And you see up here in body-first,
because I did actually apply the character
| | 01:37 | style to the first character L,
it's surrounded by a class style called
| | 01:43 | drop-cap, which was what I created in InDesign.
| | 01:46 | Now if we preview this in a browser--
the Safari browser is the closest one to
| | 01:53 | The iPad so I like to always preview in Safari.
| | 01:57 | We can see that the color is there, but
the droppedness of that cap is not there.
| | 02:03 | So let's see what's happening in the CSS file.
| | 02:06 | I am going to switch to CSS.
| | 02:08 | All of the character styles
will be at the bottom of the list.
| | 02:11 | Paragraph styles come first and all
the character styles start with span.
| | 02:14 | So you can see that for Drop Cap,
all that maintained was the color and I've
| | 02:19 | done a bunch of these and
sometimes it doesn't even maintain that.
| | 02:22 | Sometimes it's just an empty style.
| | 02:24 | So you actually have to add this
yourself. Like if it's a drop cap that's
| | 02:28 | black sometimes it won't include that.
| | 02:30 | So the first thing that we want to do is we
want to increase the size of this drop cap.
| | 02:37 | There is no setting called Drop Cap in CSS.
| | 02:39 | You have to actually add three
or four different attributes.
| | 02:42 | So I am going to hit Return and type
font-size:, space, and we'll make it 3em.
| | 02:53 | And then we end with always a
semicolon. And you might be wondering what is 3em.
| | 02:58 | No, it's not a company.
| | 03:00 | 3em, e-m, is an em space and actually an em is
a unit of measurement for websites for HTML.
| | 03:07 | That is the size of the default font
and in a web browser or a EPUB Reader
| | 03:13 | usually the default font size is
16 pixels, equivalent to 16 points.
| | 03:18 | 3em is three times that size.
| | 03:21 | So if we want a drop cap that's like
three lines big, you know that's going to
| | 03:24 | get us close enough.
| | 03:25 | We're probably going to have to fiddle around
with this, but that's a good place to start.
| | 03:28 | Now you won't see the effect on your XHTML file
until you first save changes in your CSS file.
| | 03:35 | So I'll choose Save and then if you
are using my method of proofing in the
| | 03:42 | browser, you're going to have to click the
Refresh button in your browser. So there it is.
| | 03:47 | That's larger.
| | 03:48 | That's a good sign. And now we actually
need to move it down and get the text to
| | 03:53 | wrap around the right edge of it.
| | 03:54 | So we are going to go back to the CSS file.
| | 03:57 | Now to get text to wrap around,
you use the Float command.
| | 04:03 | I know it's strange, but it's
the closest thing to text wrap.
| | 04:05 | We are going to say float.
| | 04:08 | Now we want the drop cap to float and we
want it to float on the left, all right.
| | 04:14 | So I have float: left.
Semicolon. Save the file.
| | 04:18 | I'm just using the keyboard shortcut to save,
switch to Safari, refresh, there you go.
| | 04:23 | It's getting closer.
| | 04:25 | Now we need to move the L down and we
can do that with a margin-top measure to
| | 04:31 | add some margin above it, so we come back here.
| | 04:34 | You've seen a bunch of different ways
described for creating a drop cap with
| | 04:37 | CSS. This is just one of them.
| | 04:39 | So we'll add a margin-top
measure of 0.25em, quarter of an em.
| | 04:48 | Let's save our change.
| | 04:49 | I'll just press Command+S or Ctrl+S,
jump to Safari, refresh, here we go.
| | 04:55 | Move down a bit and it's kind of touching
the text over here on the right, so we'll
| | 04:59 | add a little margin on the right edge as well.
| | 05:02 | So I come back over here, hit
Return, margin-right, let's try 0.05em.
| | 05:13 | Save. Safari. Refresh.
| | 05:17 | We see how it nudged over a little bit.
| | 05:20 | It's pretty cool, huh!
| | 05:20 | You can keep going.
| | 05:22 | You can change the color, you can make
this bold, you can make it italic, you
| | 05:26 | can increase the size and then you
have to fiddle around a little bit more
| | 05:29 | again with the margin-top to move it down, so if
you wanted to drop down three lines for example.
| | 05:35 | But that's how you create a drop cap
and I really don't know why InDesign can't
| | 05:39 | figure this out when it exports,
but maybe in a future version it will.
| | 05:44 | In the meantime, just remember that it's
pretty easy to create your own drop cap
| | 05:48 | and it's actually kind of fun.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating sidebars and pull quotes| 00:00 | You see this blue box right
here in the middle of the text?
| | 00:04 | For lack of a better term or as a
generic term, I am going to call this a
| | 00:07 | pull quote and it is actually quite
simple to create these kind of pull
| | 00:11 | quotes in your EPUBs.
| | 00:12 | I am previewing an XHTML file from an
EPUB in Safari because both Safari and
| | 00:19 | iBook use the same rendering engine
called WebKit and as I have mentioned before
| | 00:24 | in other videos in this chapter, it is a
good way to preview what's happening in
| | 00:27 | your XHTML and CSS code.
| | 00:29 | I am going to show you how to create
this in CSS, but before we jump over to
| | 00:33 | the CSS and XHTML files, let me tell you
that this is not how it came out of InDesign.
| | 00:39 | When it came out of
InDesign, it looked like this.
| | 00:42 | So it was using a header and it did
have a paragraph, but we didn't see any
| | 00:48 | colored background or a
box or anything like that.
| | 00:51 | And even though I created this in
InDesign by putting this text into a text frame
| | 00:58 | and then I anchored the text
frame in the text flow just like how you can
| | 01:04 | anchor a graphic or an image in a
paragraph, so that it flows with the text so
| | 01:09 | that when you export according to
layout order, remember we talked about that
| | 01:13 | earlier, that it'll appear in
the correct position in the story.
| | 01:17 | So it might have even looked exactly like this
in InDesign, but that's not how it comes out.
| | 01:22 | And again, this is sort of like how
InDesign strips out drop-cap formatting.
| | 01:26 | It strips out object styles because I
actually did create an object style for
| | 01:31 | this frame called pull quote.
| | 01:33 | Now one thing it did do though is
that it brought along the actual tags.
| | 01:38 | So all we need to do is fill it in.
| | 01:39 | So let's see how to do that.
| | 01:41 | I am going to close both of these for
now and I have opened up both files in
| | 01:47 | TextWrangler, our text editing
program, both the XHTML file and the
| | 01:52 | template.css file that governs its formatting,
from the expanded EPUB folder in the exercise file.
| | 02:00 | Take a look about fifth of
the way down the screen now.
| | 02:03 | This is where the image was of the San
Francisco Harbor in 1851 and then below
| | 02:08 | that paragraph we have this thing
called div class="quote-box" and quote-box
| | 02:14 | was actually the name of my object
style that I had applied to that blue text frame
| | 02:20 | that I then anchored in the text flow.
| | 02:23 | When you apply an object style to a
text frame in InDesign, even though the
| | 02:28 | formatting doesn't come across, the
name of that object style does come across
| | 02:32 | and your text is enclosed in this div
class of the same object style name.
| | 02:38 | So it says div class and then we have
the actual paragraphs of text with their
| | 02:43 | own paragraph styles.
| | 02:44 | So I call this quote-head, that was the
name of my paragraph style, and this was a
| | 02:49 | quote-body and then at the end
of that, the div is closed off.
| | 02:52 | So this is one div.
| | 02:54 | Now if we look at the template.css,
here is what InDesign does is that remember
| | 03:00 | how it adds all your divs at the top of
the CSS file and this is one that I've
| | 03:03 | already cleaned up somewhat.
| | 03:05 | It adds the div for your object
styles that you've included, but it doesn't
| | 03:10 | include any kind of formatting and
you have to enter it on your own.
| | 03:13 | That's actually kind of fun, if you
want to play around with CSS, and I do have
| | 03:17 | in the exercise files a finished
version, so you don't have to madly scramble
| | 03:22 | down what I am going to type right now.
| | 03:25 | But let's go ahead and enter in some formatting.
| | 03:28 | First of all, we are going to create a
box or border around those two paragraphs
| | 03:33 | that are in the pull quote and so to
do that you need to give it a style.
| | 03:36 | So I am going to call it border-style: solid,
| | 03:41 | and it can be dotted and all
sorts of fancy styles that you can do.
| | 03:46 | Then I also want to give it
a color. So border-color: grade.
| | 03:52 | Now if you are using a program that's
meant for CSS like Dreamweaver or Coda
| | 03:56 | or something like that, then you will get a big
list of choices as you enter in your CSS codes.
| | 04:01 | But right now, I am just doing it
because I have already tested these and now
| | 04:05 | you want a width for that border.
| | 04:07 | Pretty thick, the default
width, unless you specify something.
| | 04:09 | So I am going to say 1 pixel.
| | 04:12 | Then we will save these changes and
check out what it looks like so far.
| | 04:17 | So as I have done before, I am going
to preview this XHTML file in Safari.
| | 04:23 | I am going to reveal this in the Finder,
right-click, Open With > Safari, and
| | 04:31 | then refresh because I guess I had it
open before, and now we have our box.
| | 04:37 | We need to add some space around
here and then maybe a background color.
| | 04:41 | So to add some space around it,
let's go ahead and add some margins.
| | 04:45 | So I am going to go back to the CSS file
and we will add margin and we are going
| | 04:55 | to go, remember, starting from the
clock at 12, then 3, then 6, then 9, so top,
| | 04:59 | right, bottom, left.
| | 05:01 | So you want 1em and then on the right
3em worth the space, underneath 1em and on
| | 05:08 | the left 3em, and save this.
| | 05:13 | Go back to Safari. Refresh.
| | 05:15 | We have added some margin room there.
| | 05:18 | It is kind of neat how it always keeps
it at 3em, left and right, as you can see.
| | 05:22 | But the text is touching here
and so we need to do a text inset.
| | 05:27 | You would think that they had text inset
in CSS because that's what InDesign is,
| | 05:30 | but no, it's actually called padding.
| | 05:32 | So we are going to add a padding amount.
| | 05:35 | Padding, let's try 0.5em.
| | 05:40 | Remember an em is size of
the type in this element here.
| | 05:44 | So this is going to be half of the
size of whatever the type size is, and
| | 05:48 | save that, refresh.
| | 05:51 | Now that looks better and then
we want to add a background color.
| | 05:55 | So come back here and we
will say background color:, space.
| | 06:02 | There are some default colors like
you can say blue or red or gray and
| | 06:06 | those will work fine.
| | 06:08 | But they're solid colors and if you want
to get a really cool looking color,
| | 06:11 | you need to enter one of these
interesting little hex codes down here.
| | 06:15 | A fast way to find out a hex code, well
there is probably at least 5000 websites
| | 06:19 | that will give you hex codes for
various colors, but I would like to use
| | 06:22 | Photoshop because I
usually always have it open anyway.
| | 06:24 | What you do is you click the bottom-
left down here for the Photoshop Color
| | 06:28 | Picker and then you can use the Color
Picker. Notice it has a hex field right here.
| | 06:33 | So if I am looking for a light blue
color, I would come here to the blues and
| | 06:38 | then come over here and I am watching
this square where it says new color to see
| | 06:43 | the background color that I want to use.
| | 06:46 | Then as I click, notice that the hex
code is updating, so that looks good.
| | 06:50 | I think that's kind of cool.
| | 06:52 | I am going to select that and copy it
and then go to TextWrangler and we are
| | 06:57 | going to paste it in.
| | 06:58 | Now the hex code needs to be
preceded with a number symbol.
| | 07:02 | If you just type in red or gray or black,
you don't need to put the hex symbol.
| | 07:06 | Let's go ahead and save this
and try again in Safari. Refresh.
| | 07:12 | So that's how you can do a pull quote.
| | 07:13 | Now you don't have to think ahead like
how I did make an object style and embed
| | 07:17 | it and things like that.
| | 07:18 | I mean like if you want you
can just edit the XHTML directly.
| | 07:22 | You just have to add div class before
the paragraph that you want to be part
| | 07:27 | of your pull quote.
| | 07:28 | So like I can select this part here. Copy it.
| | 07:32 | Let's try this one right here.
| | 07:33 | So I am going to paste.
| | 07:37 | Then when you are done at the end of it
then you close it with the close div tag.
| | 07:43 | So at the end of this paragraph,
I am going to write </div> and then
| | 07:49 | we will save this file and go back to
Safari and refresh and there is another pull quote.
| | 07:57 | So whether you thought ahead and
created object styles and embedded them in
| | 08:02 | text flow or you decide, hey you know
what, this would look better as a pull quote,
| | 08:06 | you can do it very easily with
some simple edits to the XHTML and the
| | 08:10 | CSS files in your EPUBs.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting text wrap rules| 00:00 | Another way to create interest in your
EPUBs and to call attention to special
| | 00:04 | chunks of text or images is to set them
off with this kind of text wrap effect
| | 00:09 | that we are looking at.
| | 00:10 | Notice that as I resize this
that the text wrap maintains.
| | 00:15 | How do you make that kind of text wrap?
| | 00:17 | Well it's not something that you can do
in InDesign and expect to be supported
| | 00:22 | in the resulting EPUB
without any kind of intervention.
| | 00:25 | Unfortunately, we always hope that the
next version of InDesign will actually
| | 00:29 | convert these correctly.
| | 00:31 | When I actually created this in
InDesign and exported to EPUB, this is after I
| | 00:37 | fiddled around with the CSS.
| | 00:38 | Before I fiddled around with CSS,
it looked like this, all right?
| | 00:42 | So it wasn't too exciting.
| | 00:43 | In fact you don't need to do anything
really in InDesign. If while you're looking
| | 00:48 | at it, you are like you know what this
would look better in a little sidebar box
| | 00:52 | that the text wraps around.
| | 00:54 | You can do it yourself very easily in XHTML.
| | 00:57 | And it doesn't just have to be a
text frame that other text runs around.
| | 01:01 | It could be an image
that other text runs around.
| | 01:04 | So let's take a look at the starting files here.
| | 01:09 | In the Finder, I have in the Exercise
Files we were just looking at the final one.
| | 01:14 | This is an EPUB file that's been
expanded to its component parts and in the
| | 01:19 | beginning we are going to look at the
before version and then I will show you
| | 01:23 | how you can make that interesting runaround box.
| | 01:26 | Inside the OEBPS folder you need to
open up the XHTML file that you want to
| | 01:31 | include that runaround in and the CSS
file. That remember the CSS file has all
| | 01:37 | the formatting instructions.
| | 01:39 | So I am Shift+clicking both of these and
I am going to open them in TextWrangler
| | 01:43 | and you can actually edit these in any
one of your favorite editing programs.
| | 01:48 | I just happen to have TextWrangler open.
| | 01:50 | So first actually let's look at the
XHTML file and let me turn on Wrap Text and
| | 01:57 | we will find this guy. It's down here.
| | 02:01 | It's simply a side-box div and if
you are not into CSS I just said
| | 02:06 | gobbledygook, but this is basically you
surround the text that you want to have
| | 02:11 | in a floating sidebar with a tag called
a div and it has to have a class and then
| | 02:18 | you give the class a name.
| | 02:20 | Now if you had actually embedded a text
frame with an object style in here, as
| | 02:24 | I mentioned in the previous video when
we were talking about pull quotes, then
| | 02:29 | InDesign will automatically add these tags
for you with the same name as the object style.
| | 02:34 | But you don't have to think that much
ahead. You can actually do it right here.
| | 02:37 | You could type in div class= and
then type in anything that you like.
| | 02:42 | And then you close it with a slash
mark and a div at the end of where you
| | 02:47 | want that box to end.
| | 02:48 | There is two parts.
| | 02:49 | You have to have the tags in the
XHTML file and then you have to have the
| | 02:54 | tags in the CSS file and in the CSS file is
where you actually give it some attributes.
| | 03:00 | So that's why it looks so plain right
now, what we were just looking at in
| | 03:03 | Safari, because it has no attributes.
| | 03:05 | So we are going to go ahead and add them.
| | 03:08 | I do have, as you saw, I have the final
version of this in the Exercise Files.
| | 03:12 | So you could always go inside there
and grab that template.css, which has
| | 03:16 | everything I am about to type out here.
| | 03:17 | So you don't have to go crazy, madly
scribbling down everything you are
| | 03:20 | watching on the video as I enter it.
| | 03:23 | But the main thing is that we don't want the
box to take up the entire width of the window.
| | 03:28 | We want it to take up a percentage of
the window and because we don't know where
| | 03:33 | this EPUB is going to be read, on an
iPhone, on a Galaxy, on an iPad, whatever,
| | 03:39 | we can't really specify it in
number of pixels or even ems.
| | 03:42 | We are going to give it a percentage.
| | 03:44 | So we want the width of this box, width,
to be 50%, 30%, whatever you'd like and
| | 03:54 | then here's the magic part
that makes it actually text wrap.
| | 03:58 | It's the float command and if you watch
the video on drop caps that's how we got
| | 04:02 | the text to run around that
letter, by assigning a float to it.
| | 04:06 | So we are going to float this box on the
left. We will do left, but you could do
| | 04:11 | right if you want to.
| | 04:13 | And then we are going to go ahead
and add the same kind of things that we
| | 04:15 | added to our pull quotes.
| | 04:18 | So I am going to say we want a little
line around it because I am a big fan of
| | 04:21 | borders and we'll just say gray border.
| | 04:24 | You could put in any normal color
or you could put in a hex code here.
| | 04:27 | Don't forget your semicolons
at the end and border-style: solid
| | 04:33 | and the width of that border,
because if you forget this they come out
| | 04:38 | really thick and clunky looking. border-width:
| | 04:40 | 1px and now you need to add
some air around this thing.
| | 04:49 | margin, starting from the top of this
box and then at 12 o'clock and then I'm moving
| | 04:55 | to 3 o'clock, 6 o'clock and 9
o'clock, so top, right, bottom, left.
| | 04:59 | We are going to put that we don't need
space above it, so we will just put zero
| | 05:02 | and if it's zero, you
don't even have to write em.
| | 05:06 | Just type a space and we will put on the
right-hand side, remember because it's
| | 05:10 | floating on the left, so on the right-
hand side we want some space and let's try
| | 05:15 | .75em and then we don't need
any other space. That looks good.
| | 05:22 | We want to add some padding.
| | 05:24 | That's like the text-inset if you
remember from the pull quote video. padding,
| | 05:28 | I'll just do 0.5em and let's save our changes.
| | 05:37 | And then we are going to
preview this in the browser.
| | 05:39 | So I am going to select this and right-click
and say Open With > Safari and there it is.
| | 05:48 | I am going to make sure we have the
latest version by clicking Refresh.
| | 05:51 | There is our little floating box nickel.
| | 05:54 | And do you remember how
to make a background color?
| | 05:56 | We want to add a background color.
So if I come over here back to TextWrangler
| | 06:01 | and we want to add one ore
attribute here. Call it background-color.
| | 06:09 | Let's choose an interesting background color.
| | 06:11 | My favorite way of choosing a hex
color is just to jump into Photoshop,
| | 06:16 | assuming it's running.
| | 06:18 | And click on the Photoshop Color
Picker and then from this wonderful Color
| | 06:22 | Picker dialog box, let's try one of
these guys down here like this and then
| | 06:31 | maybe out here a bit and then here is
the little hex code that we need to copy.
| | 06:33 | So you select it, copy it, we can
cancel out of there, jump back to
| | 06:38 | TextWrangler, paste and if you are
using a hex code, you have to put a little
| | 06:42 | number sign or hash symbol in front.
| | 06:44 | Don't forget the semicolon. I can't
tell you how many times I have forgotten to
| | 06:47 | do that. And then choose Save.
| | 06:50 | If you forget the semicolon, it just
ignores what you just typed. And come back
| | 06:53 | to Safari and refresh.
| | 06:56 | So that's how you can make like a
little floating box with text inside it or of
| | 07:01 | course if you are just floating an image,
you don't need to put in any of this
| | 07:03 | border kind of stuff.
| | 07:04 | You just need a width and you need
a float: left and some sort of margin.
| | 07:09 | And it's as simple as that.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating links| 00:00 | Normally if you want somebody who's
reading your EPUB on a ereader device or
| | 00:05 | software to be able to use hyperlinks
inside that story, to be able to tap or
| | 00:11 | click or do whatever to get from on
your linked text to jump to another part of
| | 00:16 | the document or to another website even,
| | 00:19 | that's stuff that you do in
InDesign because InDesign has pretty robust
| | 00:22 | hyperlinks and cross-references features.
| | 00:25 | There are some cautions with that though,
and I talked about them in detail in an
| | 00:29 | earlier video, so make sure and watch that.
| | 00:31 | In fact, as I mentioned in that video
there are some instances especially with
| | 00:36 | cross-references into different
documents of an EPUB, like in this EPUB that I've
| | 00:42 | already expanded inside the OEBPS folder.
| | 00:46 | You can see it has multiple files.
| | 00:48 | Sometimes InDesign doesn't do the job
that it should do when it's blinking from
| | 00:53 | one document to the other and you
actually have to go in there and fix them.
| | 00:57 | Or sometimes you just, you realize, oh I
should've made this into a link. You can
| | 01:00 | do it directly in this file.
| | 01:02 | Now this has nothing to do with the
template.css file, so we are just going to
| | 01:06 | be working directly in the XHTML files.
| | 01:08 | I am going to open all these up in
TextWrangler. Though you know, I think
| | 01:13 | probably the best place to work on
linking in between documents would be a
| | 01:18 | program like Dreamweaver, because
this is just like a website where you are
| | 01:22 | trying to link in between different web pages.
| | 01:24 | But I happened to have TextWrangler
open so I'll just do it right here.
| | 01:28 | So let's say that when somebody is
reading this EPUB that when they get to the
| | 01:31 | phrase Native Americans, that we want
Native Americans to be a link and we
| | 01:37 | wanted to bring them to say the section
on Native Americans which is covered in
| | 01:41 | the arrival chapter.
| | 01:44 | So what you need to do is in front of
the phrase that you want to be a link,
| | 01:48 | you type in this code. You type <a. That
means an anchor link, and a space, then href.
| | 01:57 | That means hyperlink reference. Equals,
no spaces, quotes, and then the URL of
| | 02:03 | where they should go.
| | 02:04 | Now I happened to know that this file,
01-early-history, is at the same level in
| | 02:09 | the same folder as this one.
| | 02:10 | So all I need to do is enter the other
file's name, 03_arrival.xhtml, and if you
| | 02:19 | are using a program like Dreamweaver
you often can just drag-and-drop and point
| | 02:23 | to the destination document.
| | 02:25 | So that's the first part of the link
and notice how our friend TextWrangler is
| | 02:30 | letting us know "Uh, you're not done yet
because you have to close off the link."
| | 02:33 | So it wants to know where does the
link end and so after Native Americans we
| | 02:37 | want to close the link.
| | 02:39 | Why is it still brown?
| | 02:41 | Oh I know why. Because I
forgot to put my closing quote mark.
| | 02:45 | So this is actually going to turn
it into a link and we can see it for
| | 02:48 | ourselves if we save this and then
preview this document in a web browser.
| | 02:57 | So I'll open this up in Safari
and there is Native Americans.
| | 03:04 | Now you can in your CSS apply
a different kind of formatting to your links by
| | 03:09 | making a CSS entry for the a
and the a visited and so on.
| | 03:14 | But most ereaders will go ahead and
give it the default blue color with the
| | 03:18 | underscore, though an iPad I think
doesn't put any kind of text decoration, is
| | 03:22 | what the underscore is, and it colors it
a tasteful of violet or something like that.
| | 03:27 | So it's up to you.
| | 03:28 | But now when somebody clicks this
then it'll automatically open the file
| | 03:32 | that you told it to.
| | 03:33 | So it opens up at the top.
| | 03:35 | Okay, now let's say that we want to
link to a specific paragraph or image in
| | 03:42 | another document or maybe
further down in this document.
| | 03:45 | That requires a two-step process.
| | 03:47 | In addition to creating the link like
we just did here for Native Americans,
| | 03:51 | we actually have to go to the destination
document and at the point where we want
| | 03:56 | this link to end up at, we have to
add something called an anchor tag.
| | 04:01 | Let's say for example, I'm going to
scroll down here a bit, that where Yerba
| | 04:05 | Buena is mentioned, that we want
somebody to be able to jump to where Yerba
| | 04:10 | Buena is discussed in
detail in another document.
| | 04:14 | So I believe that we have
that in the arrival document.
| | 04:18 | So I am actually all queued up there.
| | 04:20 | So kind of far down here we
have it right here, Yerba Buena.
| | 04:24 | So we want somebody to end up at this
location on this document, not just at the
| | 04:28 | top of the document like the link we just made.
| | 04:31 | So first go to destination and
then you want to enter an anchor ID.
| | 04:35 | So you go in front of the word or
paragraph or even an image that you want
| | 04:40 | somebody to end up at and you enter
a id=" and then give it some kind of code
| | 04:48 | word like an anchor word. We'll just
call this yerba and then close that and
| | 04:52 | then at the end where you want them to go,
| | 04:56 | it could even just be a
single space if you want,
| | 04:57 | you have to remember to close that.
| | 05:00 | So we've made our anchor id,
remember it's Yerba, and I am saving changes.
| | 05:05 | Now we are going to go back to early_
history and down here right by Yerba Buena
| | 05:10 | we are going to link to that anchor ID.
| | 05:12 | So you start out by creating a regular
link to the XHTML file, <a href=" and
| | 05:21 | then the XHTML file is 03_arrival.
xhtml and then you add the anchor tag, that
| | 05:31 | word that you just made up, after a hash symbol.
| | 05:34 | So no spaces, just append it to the
end of the URL. yerba, close the quote,
| | 05:40 | close the tag and then
close the actual link like that.
| | 05:45 | Save it and let's preview our work.
| | 05:48 | I am going to preview this in Safari.
| | 05:51 | I'll open with Safari. Let's
close or hide the other applications.
| | 05:58 | I made the window really small.
| | 06:01 | We are going to pretend we are
actually looking at it like on a Nook or
| | 06:03 | something or an ereader.
| | 06:05 | So there is our Native Americans links
and then if we go down here, there is the
| | 06:08 | Yerba Buena and when you click it, boom!
| | 06:11 | You arrive at the new chapter right
with Yerba Buena, right at the top.
| | 06:16 | So that's how anchor links work.
| | 06:18 | Finally, if you just want to make a link
to a website, that's really simple to do.
| | 06:22 | So if you said, "The Spanish found that
Lynda.com is fantastico!" Fantastico!
| | 06:34 | We want somebody when they see lynda.
com to be able to tap it or click on it
| | 06:38 | and it will bring them to the actual
web site, assuming their ereader will let
| | 06:41 | them go to a web site.
| | 06:43 | So we surround lynda.com with the
URL. <a href=" and now we don't need to
| | 06:51 | actually enter this document.
We just want the entire website address.
| | 06:55 | So lynda.com, close quotes, close that
tag, and then close the anchor itself.
| | 07:03 | We'll save it and preview this
in Safari again, there you go.
| | 07:11 | There is lynda.com and you click it and it
starts searching for lynda.com on the web.
| | 07:18 | That's how you create
links and how you fix them.
| | 07:22 | Now the problem with the cross-
reference is that InDesign doesn't do is that
| | 07:27 | often it will just have the ending part,
this little id tag, and it will drop the
| | 07:32 | actual URL for the cross-references.
| | 07:35 | So that's typically the problems that
I've seen, that you actually have to go
| | 07:38 | through here one by one and
add them yourself. What a pain.
| | 07:41 | So, hopefully if you use that Teus de
Jong's script that I mentioned in that
| | 07:45 | chapter about making cross-reference
links InDesign files, then that will
| | 07:49 | save you a ton of time.
| | 07:50 | But otherwise it's very simple to
create any kind of links in the XHTML files.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
9. Converting EPUB Files to Other ebook FormatsPreparing your EPUB file for Kindle conversion| 00:00 | Now that you have a validating
perfectly formatted EPUB, guess what?
| | 00:06 | The great news is that you are 95% of
the way done in converting this to a Kindle.
| | 00:12 | Now it's kind of strange that Amazon's Kindle
does still does not take the EPUB format.
| | 00:16 | It doesn't show it.
| | 00:17 | It's got their own proprietary format
known as the MOBI format which I have up
| | 00:22 | here in the example files and the MOBI
format is exactly equivalent to the AZW
| | 00:28 | format in case you've seen that as
well. They are all the same thing.
| | 00:30 | It's kind of funny because actually inside
each one of these files they look very similar.
| | 00:36 | Let's open up our EPUB in Springy,
which is our cool little utility that lets you
| | 00:43 | look at the insides of files without
having to actually extract them so all this
| | 00:47 | looks very familiar to you: the OEBPS
folder, the META-INF folder with the
| | 00:52 | container.xml, and so on.
| | 00:55 | Here is the same exact ebook only for the
kindle and I am going to open up that in Springy.
| | 01:03 | It looks just about the same.
| | 01:04 | There's some different organization
inside here, but that's only because I added
| | 01:08 | these folders myself or I think SQL added those.
| | 01:11 | But for example if we look inside the
MOBI format at the content.opf file.
| | 01:16 | I am going to edit that with
TextWrangler and we'll turn on Soft Wrap.
| | 01:28 | It's kind of the same.
| | 01:30 | It is an XML file. It uses a different
namespace it's called up here, but it's
| | 01:35 | got the same media type and it's got
the same kind of items and you can see
| | 01:39 | there is a manifest and there is
some metadata and there's a spine at the
| | 01:42 | bottom, there is a guide at
the bottom. It's 99% the same.
| | 01:46 | So if you go to Amazon's web site to
their Kindle Direct Publishing portal, that
| | 01:53 | is the name for the program, KDP for
publishers who want to publish to Kindle,
| | 01:59 | you'll see that a lot of their
documentation says, "Okay well what we want from
| | 02:02 | you, writer or a
publisher, is we want an HTML file."
| | 02:06 | Convert your book to HTML using these
guidelines and upload it and we will
| | 02:11 | convert it to MOBI for you. Or if you insist,
it can be a Word document or even a PDF. It's crazy.
| | 02:18 | It wasn't until very recently, maybe
in the last couple of months that they
| | 02:22 | quietly started accepting
EPUBs for conversion to MOBI.
| | 02:26 | As I said, if your EPUB is fully
validating, that's basically what a MOBI format
| | 02:33 | is and they do a very good job of converting it.
| | 02:36 | However, I would not suggest that
you upload your EPUB directly to KDP.
| | 02:41 | Even though they will take it and they
will convert it for you. Because it's
| | 02:44 | always better to preview it on your
computer, because you want to see what it's
| | 02:48 | going to look like once it's on the
Kindle, and that's what this chapter is about,
| | 02:52 | is how do you convert your EPUB to a
Kindle and what kind of things do you need
| | 02:56 | to be aware of before you even convert,
because what you don't want to happen is
| | 03:00 | to upload the EPUB and then have
Amazon kick it back and say "This is
| | 03:04 | unacceptable because there are problems."
| | 03:06 | Now once you join KDP and it's very
simple as you can see. You can just sign
| | 03:10 | in with your own Amazon account if you have
one or go ahead and create one if you don't.
| | 03:14 | It's free and they welcome independent
publishers or publishing companies with open arms.
| | 03:19 | Then you can download a whole
bunch of guidelines and PDFs.
| | 03:22 | They have a very good
forum that you can get into.
| | 03:25 | You don't even have to log in, like
you see I am guest, with lots of very busy
| | 03:29 | forums, all about like how to prep
your file and how you get paid and so on.
| | 03:34 | If you look at those guidelines,
you'll see that there are some formatting
| | 03:37 | issues having to do with the EPUB,
MOBI file, and the CSS itself that you
| | 03:43 | should be aware of.
| | 03:44 | And I kind of pulled out some of the high points.
| | 03:46 | It's definitely not comprehensive, but
things that you should be aware of when
| | 03:50 | you are formatting your EPUB for the
Kindle is first of all every EPUB has to
| | 03:56 | have a standalone cover image and it
has to be exactly 600 pixels wide by 800
| | 04:02 | pixels tall and it has to be a JPEG.
| | 04:04 | So you need to get that cover image
into its own JPEG file and this is
| | 04:10 | actually something that you also need
to do for iBooks, is that they're going
| | 04:13 | to want to know what is the cover
image, but when we talk about actually
| | 04:17 | submitting your ebook to the iBookstore,
they just want to know where is the
| | 04:21 | cover image and then they will go
ahead and write the code for you, if you
| | 04:24 | don't want to do it yourself.
| | 04:25 | But it also has to be
referenced in the content.opf file.
| | 04:30 | So they give you in this guideline
instructions about here are the three lines
| | 04:33 | of code that we want you to enter in
the metadata and then the spine, and I'm
| | 04:37 | going to show you a faster way to
actually do this in a little bit.
| | 04:41 | A navigational table of contents
that you are all familiar with right now,
| | 04:45 | toc.ncx, is required and that's not a biggie.
| | 04:48 | Your EPUB I am sure has one already,
but also they require a content TOC like
| | 04:54 | a first page or some page in the beginning of
the document that has links to the chapters.
| | 05:01 | Because in the Kindle interface there
is a button or a choice that the users
| | 05:05 | press to see that, so they
want that. Ot has to be part of it.
| | 05:08 | If you don't have one, they
are going to kick it back.
| | 05:10 | As far as formatting is concerned,
you may have noticed this if you have a
| | 05:13 | Kindle, but by default all paragraphs
get a first line indent of a quarter inch.
| | 05:18 | If you don't set anything for the text
indent, then that's what's going to happen.
| | 05:22 | So you have to remember in your CSS to
set a text indent of zero, for example, if
| | 05:26 | you don't want them indented or some
other measure, and of course if you don't
| | 05:29 | want it zero then you are going to
have to add some margin space because
| | 05:33 | otherwise you are going to
have this one big block of text.
| | 05:36 | They don't put space in
between paragraphs by default.
| | 05:39 | Also everything is fully
justified, left and right.
| | 05:41 | Now Kindle 1 users, were able to turn
that off. Kindle 2 users are not able to
| | 05:46 | turn that off and who knows
what's happening with Kindle 3.
| | 05:49 | I have heard it says in the
documentation that you can use CSS to overwrite.
| | 05:53 | So you can say the text should be left
aligned for paragraphs in your CSS, but
| | 05:58 | I've also heard that sometimes it
doesn't work. So be aware that.
| | 06:01 | That is an ongoing issue with
formatting your EPUBs for a Kindle.
| | 06:05 | Also float, they don't support float in CSS.
| | 06:09 | So in other words anything that would
use float like say a drop cap and also
| | 06:12 | runaround text wrap
sort of things doesn't work.
| | 06:15 | So let me show you how to add that cover image.
| | 06:18 | I am going to come over here to Finder
where I have a file called fix cover.
| | 06:23 | Now here is my cover.
| | 06:25 | This image is exactly 600x800
pixels and here is my coverless EPUB.
| | 06:30 | I am going to open this with our friend Sigil.
| | 06:36 | One of Sigil's greatest features is
that it saves you from having to actually
| | 06:40 | get in there and write code in those
content.opf and the toc.ncx files.
| | 06:46 | You just have the user interface.
| | 06:47 | For example if you want to add the
cover image, you click in front of the
| | 06:51 | heading of your first file, you go to
Insert > Image, choose your image,
| | 07:03 | right there, and that puts it right on top of the text.
| | 07:07 | Don't worry about it.
| | 07:09 | At this point what you want to do is in
the Images folder over here, you see how
| | 07:13 | it added it to the Images folder.
| | 07:15 | Select it, right-click, and choose
Add Semantics, this is the Cover Image.
| | 07:20 | That actually wrote all the code
that we need in our content.opf file.
| | 07:25 | Finally, with your cursor still
blinking, after this image go back up to the
| | 07:30 | Insert menu and choose Chapter Break
and it creates a new XHTML file and
| | 07:36 | again adds all the information for the
manifest and the spine to the content.opf file.
| | 07:41 | That's the end of story. Then you
can just close it. Isn't it great?
| | 07:46 | So let's see what that looks like.
| | 07:47 | I am going to open up my finished one here.
| | 07:53 | There is the cover image and there are all the
links for the navigational table of contents.
| | 07:59 | So that's very simple. Just a few
things that you need to do to add to your
| | 08:03 | EPUB before we go ahead and convert to
Kindle, which I'll be talking about in
| | 08:07 | the next few videos.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Converting with KindleGen and Kindle Previewer| 00:00 | Once you've prepped your EPUB file for
optimal conversion to Kindle, as I said in
| | 00:06 | the previous video you really shouldn't
upload it directly to the Kindle Direct
| | 00:10 | Publishing Portal, even though they'll
take it and they'll convert it for you.
| | 00:14 | It's really better to
convert it on your Desktop.
| | 00:16 | Now there is a wonderful program called
Caliber that is famous for being able to
| | 00:20 | convert formats of ebooks from one
format to the other and that can take an HTML
| | 00:25 | file or an EPUB file and convert it
to MOBI, sometimes even back again.
| | 00:29 | While that's a great program and I
have used it, Amazon themselves is really
| | 00:33 | pushing for users to use
their own conversion software.
| | 00:37 | In fact, they say that in their
publisher's guidelines that only the Kindle
| | 00:41 | converters are officially approved.
| | 00:44 | So, I figured I might as well show you
how those work and they do work very well.
| | 00:47 | If you go to the Kindle Publishing
Programs page at this URL up here, it's kind
| | 00:52 | of hard to find because you know, this
Kindle Publishing Programs there is all
| | 00:56 | different iterations around their site.
| | 00:58 | So take note of that URL because if
you scroll down, this is the hiding place
| | 01:05 | for all their software.
| | 01:07 | So what you want to do is you want
to download first of all KindleGen.
| | 01:11 | This is the actual guts
of the conversion program.
| | 01:14 | It's command line software, meaning it
runs in the CLI interface of Windows or in
| | 01:19 | Terminal of Macintosh.
| | 01:21 | But don't worry, you are not actually
going to have to run it in the command line.
| | 01:24 | But you should download this and
you have to agree to the terms of use
| | 01:28 | and then download for Windows, Linux, or Mac OS
10.5 and above, and it has to be an Intel Mac.
| | 01:36 | Read the installation instructions
because it will tell you to make sure to run
| | 01:39 | your software update.
| | 01:42 | In addition, we have the Kindle plug-
in for InDesign. While we are here.
| | 01:47 | This is a beta plug-in that
actually works quite well.
| | 01:49 | I am going to show how to
use that in the next video.
| | 01:52 | It works with either CS4 or CS5 of
InDesign, so go ahead and download that.
| | 01:57 | Then down here you want to download the
Kindle Previewer 1.5. This is fantastic.
| | 02:02 | This is something that
Apple should have for iBooks.
| | 02:06 | This is an actual previewer for the
Kindle. It converts your images to grayscale
| | 02:11 | just like current Kindles are right
now and you can see it right on your
| | 02:14 | Desktop. We are going to
take a look at that as well.
| | 02:16 | Kindle Previewer works in concert
with KindleGen, that command line stuff.
| | 02:20 | So, download all this,
install it, and then come back here.
| | 02:24 | Now in my Finder here or in Explorer if
you have downloaded the Exercise Files,
| | 02:30 | I have a few versions of the same EPUB file.
| | 02:33 | So we are going to see like you have
your final EPUB, right here we are going to
| | 02:37 | call it stage1, and we're going to
run it through the conversion software.
| | 02:42 | The way to do that is to
start up the Kindle Previewer app.
| | 02:46 | So I am going to go to
Applications, go down to Kindle Previewer,
| | 02:51 | and double-click it.
| | 02:52 | So this is actually, if you have a MOBI
file you could open it right up here and
| | 02:57 | it's going to show you it as
you're looking at it on a Kindle.
| | 02:59 | But we're going to choose Open Book and
point to our EPUB file, stage1, and open it up.
| | 03:11 | What happened?
| | 03:12 | It failed to compile the book.
| | 03:14 | I'm actually going to show you how the
different kind of messages you are going to get here.
| | 03:18 | This is always a sad thing to see, but
you have to click this downward pointing
| | 03:22 | arrow here under Compilation Details to
see if you can figure out what happened.
| | 03:27 | Look over here on the left and scroll
down. You don't have understand everything
| | 03:31 | but it's kind of understandable, but
at the very bottom you'll see Error,
| | 03:35 | The book title was not set.
| | 03:37 | Please call the set_book_title() function.
| | 03:40 | Well actually all you need to do is
open up your EPUB in Sigil or open it up in
| | 03:46 | XML Author and go ahead and add
the book title to the metadata in the
| | 03:52 | content.opf file, something that
we've talked about in a number of videos.
| | 03:56 | Do that and then try again.
| | 03:57 | So I've already done that and here in
the Exercise Files we have added the title
| | 04:05 | to stage2, so we are going to open up stage2.
| | 04:08 | From Kindle Previewer, Open Book
and come back here, stage2, open it up.
| | 04:16 | It has successfully compiled the book.
| | 04:19 | That's always good news but
there are warnings. That's not good.
| | 04:22 | You know it's interesting that it will
compile the book but it will give you
| | 04:26 | warnings that could make Amazon
reject the book after you submit it.
| | 04:29 | So never upload a book that has warnings.
| | 04:32 | Let's see what the warnings are.
| | 04:35 | Scroll down. You can see that it's
adding the metadata where it wants.
| | 04:39 | It's parsing files. Cover.
| | 04:41 | I forgot to specify the cover image!
| | 04:44 | Remember, I showed you how to do that
in the previous video under prepping your
| | 04:47 | EPUB file for Kindle conversion.
| | 04:50 | I have already done that to the
stage3 file, this guy over here.
| | 04:55 | So we are going to go ahead and
open it up and go back to KindleGen,
| | 05:01 | stage3, click Open.
| | 05:04 | It has successfully compiled
the book, nothing about warnings.
| | 05:07 | If you want to check for yourself,
everything looks pretty cool.
| | 05:11 | Just click OK and the output
file has been generated here.
| | 05:15 | It's actually pointing to this folder.
| | 05:17 | Let's actually take a look at it over
here and it opened the book, but I want to
| | 05:21 | show you what it did, is it just made a
little folder and it gives you the date
| | 05:25 | of when I created it.
| | 05:26 | So it's really nice that it gives us those
names for those versions as you're testing.
| | 05:30 | Now let's take a look over here.
| | 05:32 | So notice that it actually changes the
view to grayscale and if you page through
| | 05:37 | the document you can see what
your book looks like on a Kindle.
| | 05:43 | Now there are still a couple
of things missing in this one.
| | 05:45 | I actually made a final one down here.
| | 05:48 | Let's open Kindle Previewer.
| | 05:49 | We want to open up the one in the final folder.
| | 05:53 | So come back over here in final. In
addition to showing the cover, like if you
| | 06:05 | click up here you can see that cover,
then we also have little icons that stand
| | 06:10 | for the linked table of contents.
| | 06:12 | Remember I said that was required for
them, that you need to have a TOC page
| | 06:16 | that you've done yourself with links, and then
also here is a navigational table of contents.
| | 06:21 | So if you have a Kindle, there's a
button that you press to see the TOC and here
| | 06:25 | is navigational table of contents,
and you can click and jump over there.
| | 06:31 | Then under Devices you can say well,
let me see what this would look like if I
| | 06:34 | was looking at Kindle on the iPhone.
| | 06:36 | Aha! So you can see what your formatting is
going to look like and how it's going
| | 06:43 | to change the cover.
| | 06:45 | So it's really cool.
| | 06:46 | You need to download KindleGen and
Kindle Previewer and that's one of the best
| | 06:51 | ways to convert your files
from EPUB to the MOBI format.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the Kindle plug-ins for InDesign| 00:00 | It's pretty cool that you can use
KindleGen and the Kindle Previewer to convert
| | 00:05 | your EPUBs to MOBI file format for the Kindle.
| | 00:08 | I think it's even cooler to be able to export
directly out of InDesign to the MOBI format.
| | 00:13 | And that's what the beta plugins are for.
| | 00:16 | So if you haven't installed them or
you didn't even know they existed, high thee
| | 00:20 | over to this URL and then scroll down.
| | 00:23 | I mentioned this in the previous video,
but scroll down here to the Download
| | 00:28 | Kindle Plugin for Adobe InDesign.
| | 00:30 | So it's a beta, but it works very well.
| | 00:33 | I've been testing it for a while.
| | 00:34 | You need to agree to the terms of use.
| | 00:37 | Don't forget to click on the
PDF to get the documentation.
| | 00:40 | There's not that much information there,
but it does tell you that you have to
| | 00:44 | run it on an Intel Mac.
| | 00:46 | The Intel Mac has to be a 10.5 or 10.6.
| | 00:50 | For Windows, no problem if you're
still at XP. It works on Vista and 7 as well.
| | 00:54 | Download them and then it's got an
installer, so you go ahead and install it,
| | 00:58 | follow the installation instructions, and so on.
| | 01:00 | It doesn't take that long and it's free.
| | 01:02 | That's the best thing.
| | 01:04 | I already have it installed in InDesign.
| | 01:06 | And you can see it, if you go to the
File menu and go down to Export for Kindle.
| | 01:14 | And also I have a book file.
| | 01:16 | So if you open that up, here's the
History book in the Exercise folder.
| | 01:20 | If I double-click on the INDB
file and you want to export a book to
| | 01:25 | Kindle format, go to the History Text panel
menu and look, there is Export Book for Kindle.
| | 01:32 | But actually what I want to show
you is this just single document.
| | 01:35 | So we've worked with this many times
in this video, so it's just a single
| | 01:38 | document with some headings.
All right, nothing big.
| | 01:41 | We're going to export this for Kindle.
| | 01:43 | So I am going to go to the
File menu > Export for Kindle.
| | 01:46 | Where do you want to save it?
| | 01:49 | Save it as a MOBI file. I'll
just keep it right on the Desktop.
| | 01:52 | We'll call it CAHistoryText, just one text file.
| | 01:58 | Now look at this. You want to Include
the InDesign TOC entries and so it's
| | 02:02 | wondering which TOC style you want.
| | 02:04 | And I do want it to create
a TOC out of these entries.
| | 02:09 | Then it wants to know where is the cover image?
| | 02:11 | This something that InDesign really
needs, and it's remembering the last place
| | 02:17 | that I went, but let's just go
ahead and grab the cover image here.
| | 02:21 | Remember it's going to be 600x800,
| | 02:23 | a JPEG, and it should be color.
| | 02:26 | And then what is the book title. In
case you didn't add that to the file info
| | 02:30 | for the document, you can add it right here.
| | 02:32 | And do you want to View
eBook after Exporting?
| | 02:35 | It's going to open up in your default
program for reading the MOBI file format.
| | 02:39 | So if you have the Kindle ereader
installed, it'll probably open up in that.
| | 02:44 | We'll click Export. And there it is.
| | 02:48 | Where you opened it up in Kindle for the Mac.
| | 02:50 | What I wanted to show you was that it
made this table of contents document for us
| | 02:55 | and it's just incredible that it did that.
| | 02:57 | There's our cover and it's in color,
because we're using on an app, not on the Kindle.
| | 03:02 | And it made this document.
| | 03:03 | We didn't have to make links our self.
| | 03:05 | It's really neat that they did
that out of just a one-page document.
| | 03:09 | And then we can go ahead and read
through, and scroll through, and so on.
| | 03:13 | And if you want to see what this
looks like in the Kindle, let's close out
| | 03:18 | of here and we'll go to Kindle Previewer
and open up that book that we just created.
| | 03:26 | This one right here.
| | 03:29 | So here's the cover as seen on a Kindle.
| | 03:32 | And here is the linked table of
contents that it created for us.
| | 03:38 | And here is the navigational
table of contents that would come up.
| | 03:41 | And then if you want to see what this
would look like on a different sized
| | 03:44 | device, like the big Kindle DX.
| | 03:46 | Or the little baby Kindle for iPhone.
| | 03:53 | You can see it right here
with the Kindle Previewer.
| | 03:56 | So I think it's just great that they have
plugins for Adobe InDesign, for CS4 and for CS5.
| | 04:02 | And I think in a lot of workflows it
makes a lot of sense to export directly
| | 04:06 | to the Kindle format.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Converting for other resellers| 00:00 | Just like Amazon has its own set of
publishing guidelines for the Kindle,
| | 00:05 | other ebook resellers often have their
own publishing guidelines for the EPUB.
| | 00:10 | They all start from the same
point, that it has to be a valid EPUB.
| | 00:13 | You have to go through EPUB Checker, as
I talked about it in the previous video,
| | 00:16 | and it has to pass that test.
| | 00:18 | But sometimes what's valid for the EPUB
Checker is not valid for the reseller.
| | 00:23 | So for example if you want to
resell on the iBookstore, you want to be
| | 00:27 | an iTunes publisher.
| | 00:28 | Apple publishes a very voluminous 60
or 80 page PDF with what's allowed and
| | 00:34 | what's not allowed
inside EPUB beyond validation.
| | 00:38 | For example, you have some ability
to include different font faces.
| | 00:41 | You can include some video and audio
and they have special specifications for
| | 00:46 | the cover, that kind of thing.
| | 00:48 | Now unfortunately you can not see
those publishing guidelines until you
| | 00:52 | actually join the program.
| | 00:54 | It is free for you to join the program
and then you can get and work with them,
| | 00:57 | but because you have to join the program
before you can see them, I can't really
| | 01:00 | show them to you here on the screen.
| | 01:01 | We will be talking a little bit more
about getting involved with the iBookstore
| | 01:06 | as your own publisher in the next chapter.
| | 01:09 | If you want to see publishing
guidelines for other ereaders or sellers like the
| | 01:14 | Sony reader bookstore or the Kobo bookstore,
| | 01:17 | unfortunately they really want to work
with large publishers only. If you have
| | 01:22 | say less than 25 titles then they
want you to use an aggregator and those
| | 01:27 | aggregators very seldom take EPUB files.
| | 01:30 | The only other big major vendor
that is completely open to working with
| | 01:34 | individual publishers is a Barnes &
Noble and the Nook, which is really cool little
| | 01:40 | ereader that comes in many
different sizes and form factors. And there are
| | 01:45 | just a few different kinds of things
that you want to do to you EPUB before you
| | 01:49 | upload it to the Barnes & Noble Nook store.
| | 01:52 | First of all of course you should download
and install the Nook reader for your platform.
| | 01:59 | So for example you can install it on an
iPad. You can install it on your phone.
| | 02:04 | I like this Nook for PC and other
devices, so Mac users we are other devices.
| | 02:11 | You click here, then you can download
it for the Mac and for the Blackberry.
| | 02:15 | Now it's not the same as the Kindle
Preview. You are not going to see what it
| | 02:19 | would look like exactly on the Nook.
| | 02:21 | It's just more of a way to access the
books that you purchase from the Barnes &
| | 02:26 | Noble Nook ebook store on these
devices, because most of the books they sell
| | 02:31 | have DRM, digital rights management.
| | 02:34 | So you can't just send them
around willy-nilly and share them.
| | 02:37 | But it is important that if you want to
EPUBs there, that you have some method
| | 02:42 | of seeing what it's going to look like
and a reader that at least shares some of
| | 02:45 | the same code as the actual ereader device.
| | 02:48 | If you follow the links
to their PubIt bookstore,
| | 02:52 | PubIt is their special program for
smaller publishers and authors to upload
| | 02:58 | EPUBs and they are very open, the Barnes
& Noble people. If you come down here you
| | 03:04 | don't even have to register. You can
learn more about the service, especially,
| | 03:10 | check this out, the Formatting Guide.
| | 03:14 | You could click on the EPUB Formatting
Guide and download a very nice little PDF
| | 03:18 | that gives you some information about
if you want to format your EPUB for the
| | 03:22 | Nook readers. Here's what we suggest.
| | 03:24 | Basically if you have a valid
EPUB already they're good to go.
| | 03:28 | They don't have any special
requirements for the cover but if you have a cover
| | 03:33 | that's been called out separately
like we just did for the Kindle or like you
| | 03:36 | might want to do for the iBookstore,
| | 03:37 | it will be fine with them.
| | 03:39 | They did have a little bit of
information thought that I thought was interesting.
| | 03:43 | Let me show you how we can edit an
existing EPUB to better work with the Nook.
| | 03:48 | Apparently unlike other ereaders, it
doesn't add some margin around the page
| | 03:55 | edges, so your tax will run right up to
the edge of the screen and then they want you
| | 04:00 | to add a little bit of margin around
every page, and they actually give you the
| | 04:04 | CSS code to add to your CSS file.
| | 04:06 | So I'm going to ahead and open up this
EPUB. Let's just open it up in Sigil where
| | 04:12 | we can get to the styles right here. Let me
make this type size larger. The code is this.
| | 04:24 | You hit Return and use the @ symbol
and type page and this is actually a
| | 04:30 | page selector and then we use our usual
bracket, and you want to add some margin settings.
| | 04:36 | And this will add it around the
outside edge of every "page" that the ereader
| | 04:42 | shows the person reading the book.
| | 04:44 | And they suggest margin-top 30 pixels,
not ems, margin-left, 30 pixels, margin-
| | 04:55 | right 30 pixels and then on the bottom,
a little bit less, margin-bottom 20 pixels
| | 05:06 | and movies and then we will just end it there.
| | 05:08 | As far as I can tell, I have
tested the same kind of CSS on an iPad and
| | 05:13 | converting it to a Kindle doesn't
cause any problems. It's completely
| | 05:16 | compliant with the EPUB specs.
| | 05:18 | So this should be good to go and this
will prevent the text in your EPUBs from
| | 05:23 | running up to the edge of a Nook.
| | 05:25 | We will just save it and close it.
| | 05:27 | And then this is what you would submit
to the PubIt account that you have at the
| | 05:32 | Nook bookstore, and if you want to see
what it looks like, here I have downloaded
| | 05:35 | the ereader. We will go ahead and
open it. A Brief History of San Francisco.
| | 05:43 | So you need to give this for the
major retailers that you are going to be
| | 05:49 | distributing your EPUB through. Go
to the web site and nose around and see
| | 05:53 | if they have a set of
publisher guidelines for you.
| | 05:55 | That way you won't run into any
unpleasant surprises when your EPUB looks a
| | 06:00 | little bit off on the different ereader devices.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
10. Distributing Your ebookGetting an ISBN for each edition| 00:00 | Every book that's for sale needs to
have an ISBN, and an ISBN is 13 digit
| | 00:07 | number, nowadays, that's a unique
identifier for books and even book-like
| | 00:12 | products like audio books and it
establishes and identifies one title or one
| | 00:18 | edition from one specific publisher.
| | 00:20 | So if you enhance, for example, a print
version of the book and a digital version
| | 00:26 | of the book you need two
different ISBNs. One for each one.
| | 00:30 | Now I know that those of you listening
who are in the book publishing business,
| | 00:34 | maybe you are just the InDesign people
working for a publisher, you really don't
| | 00:38 | need to worry about this, but I know
that there are a number of people watching
| | 00:41 | this title who are independent authors
or small publishers and maybe have never
| | 00:46 | actually published a book on their own
before and it is important that you
| | 00:51 | purchase your own ISBN and assign them
to your e-books. Even if it doesn't have a
| | 00:56 | print edition, you need one for your e-
book, even if you are just going to be
| | 00:59 | publishing as a PDF. There is this
whole international ISBN organization.
| | 01:05 | The one for the US is Bowker over here
at this URL, www.myidentifiers.com.
| | 01:12 | So if your company or yourself is based
in the US or one of its territories, this
| | 01:17 | is where you purchase an ISBN from
and this is actually very good site.
| | 01:20 | It has got some really good guidelines
over here in the right that you can download.
| | 01:24 | And then to actually get the ISBN you
go over here and choose Buy an ISBN.
| | 01:29 | If you just buy one at a time, it's not cheap.
| | 01:31 | Especially if you are going to be
selling your e-book for something like you
| | 01:34 | know $2.99 or even $9.99, you need to sell
quite a bit to get this. I would recommend
| | 01:40 | that you buy at least a block of 10 if
you can possibly afford it, because then
| | 01:44 | they go way down in price, and if you
create one for the Kindle and one for an
| | 01:48 | EPUB and one for PDF, that's
three different ISBNs right there.
| | 01:52 | So you are probably
going to be using them a lot.
| | 01:55 | It's not required that you buy an ISBN.
I think the only reseller that I will be
| | 02:00 | talking about this chapter they require
you to have your own ISBN is the Apple
| | 02:05 | iBookstore and even then only if you
decide to publish directly through them as
| | 02:10 | an iTunes Connect publisher.
| | 02:12 | You can also get books into the iBook
store by working with an aggregator, which
| | 02:16 | we will be talking about
in this chapter as well.
| | 02:19 | But if you publish your book say
through Amazon Kindle bookstore, it's optional.
| | 02:24 | They can assign your own ISBN number.
Same thing with the Barnes & Noble Nook.
| | 02:28 | It's optional. They can
assign their own ISBN number.
| | 02:32 | Even if you decide to publish your
ebook with the iBookstore using an
| | 02:36 | aggregator, a lot of the aggregators as
third-party companies include the cost of
| | 02:41 | an ISBN number, because they are
buying them I guess in blocks of a thousand.
| | 02:44 | So it's not the same thing as copy
right. Even if somebody assigns their own
| | 02:49 | ISBN number through your book, you
still won the copyright to the book or
| | 02:53 | however you are working at the rights.
| | 02:54 | So they are not really related that way.
| | 02:56 | It's simply a unique identifier for the book.
| | 02:59 | Now if you're not from the US you need
to go to ISBN-international.org/agency
| | 03:07 | and locate where it is the you
purchase your ISBN numbers from.
| | 03:11 | So you just choose a
country from this drop-down list.
| | 03:15 | Let's say I'm from Belgium and I speak
French, then it shows me where should go
| | 03:20 | and the email address and web site.
| | 03:23 | Ah, well I understand that perfectly.
| | 03:27 | But that's what you do to is you go
through the different individual countries.
| | 03:30 | While I was nosing around this
international ISBN website I came upon this
| | 03:35 | wonderful FAQ about guidelines for
the assignments of ISBNs to ebooks.
| | 03:40 | This is really good a really good reading.
| | 03:41 | For example if saying that if you have
published an e-book that has DRM, digital
| | 03:46 | rights management, and an exact same e-
book and exacting format that doesn't have
| | 03:50 | DRM, you need to have two
different ISBN numbers, one for each one.
| | 03:54 | Because an ISBN conveys not just the
exact edition and publisher and title of a
| | 04:01 | book but also the rights
that go along with the book.
| | 04:05 | I think that over here on the homepage
for Bowker one of these links is a PDF of
| | 04:12 | the same thing. Guideline for
the assignment of ISBN to ebooks.
| | 04:18 | So I'm hoping that ISBNs are our not
so much of a mystery anymore and I think
| | 04:22 | you should go get yourself
one. Or a dozen or a few dozen.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Getting your ebook into the Kindle Store, iBookstore, or NOOKbook Store| 00:00 | The three major ebook resellers that
currently welcome independent authors and
| | 00:06 | small-to-midsize publishers to work
directly with them are the Amazon Kindle store,
| | 00:10 | the Apple ibookstore and
the Barnes & Noble Nook store.
| | 00:16 | Now there are other ebook resellers
like the Sony Reader store which is
| | 00:21 | very large, to Kobo bookstore, but
they are more geared to working with
| | 00:26 | larger established publishers who
already have hard covers or physical
| | 00:30 | books listed with them.
| | 00:32 | If you are an independent publisher or
you have fewer than five or ten ebooks
| | 00:36 | that you want to publish and you go to
their website looking for guidelines they
| | 00:40 | have a page up that tells you which
aggregators to work with, they want you to
| | 00:45 | be managed by a third-party;
| | 00:46 | they don't want to deal with you directly.
| | 00:48 | And I'll be talking about working with
an aggregator later on in this chapter.
| | 00:51 | Let's take a look at what's required
out of becoming a direct reseller for each
| | 00:57 | one of these vendors. For example;
| | 00:59 | for the Amazon Kindle store you just
need to go to this URL kdp.amazon.com and
| | 01:07 | it's very simple to get started with,
you just sign-in with your Amazon
| | 01:10 | account if you have one already, and
if you don't, you can set one up on the
| | 01:14 | fly, and then once you get in then
you are able to just upload your books
| | 01:19 | through a very friendly portal.
| | 01:21 | Now we are not able to show what a
lot of these sites look like internally
| | 01:25 | because they're private, but I can
give you some general information.
| | 01:29 | First of all in order to set up the
account you're going to have to fill in a
| | 01:34 | tax ID, that means your Social
Security number or if you're a Corporation you
| | 01:38 | want to register as a company that
means your Employer Identification Number.
| | 01:43 | If you don't have either one of those
or say that you live outside of the US,
| | 01:46 | you can still sell your books through
the Kindle bookstore, but you are going to
| | 01:49 | need something called an
Individual Taxpayer Identification Number.
| | 01:53 | And this is something that most of the
other resellers will also require, and
| | 01:57 | it's actually very simple to get, they
have instructions, I just wanted to show
| | 02:02 | you I jumped over here really quickly,
if you go to the irs.gov and just look
| | 02:06 | for Form W7, that is the form that you
fill out, it's actually pretty simple, I
| | 02:11 | actually downloaded it here.
| | 02:13 | Kind of like the USW9 form, and what
they're going to do is they are just going
| | 02:18 | to give you a nine-digit code that you
can then enter during your applications
| | 02:22 | for the Kindle bookstore or the Apple
iTunes ibookstore, and all they really
| | 02:27 | want to know is you know where do you
live, why do you need this, and are you
| | 02:31 | who you say you are?
| | 02:31 | They are going to want a photocopy of
your passport or something like that.
| | 02:35 | There's full instructions here, but
I've talked with a number of people who
| | 02:38 | have filled this out because at first
it was very off-putting and they said
| | 02:41 | it's actually not that big of a deal and we
are able to get their ITIN number in a few days.
| | 02:46 | So let's go back to Kindle Direct Publishing.
| | 02:49 | Even if you have not yet become a
member of KDP you can go ahead and find out
| | 02:54 | more information about how it works
and you can get to the Community forums,
| | 02:58 | it's actually pretty robust.
| | 02:59 | When you do have your EPUB ready they
will take it in either EPUB or MOBI format
| | 03:05 | or actually just about any other kind
of format HTML, DOC, but of course what's
| | 03:09 | great is that they will take your EPUB format.
| | 03:11 | You're going to ask for some metadata
like the title, the description, you have
| | 03:16 | up to 4000 characters to enter description.
| | 03:19 | The author, the contributors, when it
was published, and ISBN is optional, if
| | 03:24 | you don't have an ISBN, they will
assign one for you, to use, just for the
| | 03:28 | Kindle edition, and they want to know
if it's public domain or if you have
| | 03:32 | publication rights, and it's just like
a little checkbox, so you can actually
| | 03:35 | put together something that's
public domain on the Kindle bookstore.
| | 03:39 | Then the royalty rates are pretty well
known, it's 70% to you as the publisher
| | 03:44 | and they keep 30%, they actually do
charge a little bit for downloads, so that
| | 03:49 | if you have a huge book, it might be a
few cents, it's going to be deducted.
| | 03:53 | And by the way that 70% split 70-
30 is only for ebook that you price
| | 03:59 | between $2.99 and $9.99.
| | 04:03 | If it's less than that or more than
that, then the royalty rate goes to 35%.
| | 04:08 | So all this as detailed in the Terms and
Conditions and Pricing Guidelines, I am
| | 04:12 | just sort of giving you currently as
I am recording this what the deal is.
| | 04:16 | Let's just review that really quickly.
| | 04:19 | So with the Amazon Kindle store, this
is where you go to apply, they need your
| | 04:23 | tax ID, they're going to pay you the
royalties by the way by an electronics fund
| | 04:27 | transfer or by check.
| | 04:30 | So this is actually important because I
have talked with some other publishers
| | 04:32 | who they really prefer working with
Kindle because they are the only ones who
| | 04:36 | don't require a US bank account, they
will be happy to send you check, of course
| | 04:39 | they seem to find and print,
it will cost $8 per check.
| | 04:42 | And then if you want to read the
Publishing Guidelines PDF I have seen it linked
| | 04:46 | to publicly, so here is the URL if you
want to grab it, and it's just basically
| | 04:50 | like how to set up your EPUB or your
HTML files in order to make the best
| | 04:54 | looking Kindle edition possible.
| | 04:57 | Let's talk about the Apple iBookstore.
| | 04:59 | If you want to work directly with
Apple you might want to come here first,
| | 05:03 | this is the FAQ for book publishers,
and I think I showed this page in another
| | 05:07 | video and the very first question is
how do I apply, and there is a link
| | 05:11 | directly to the application.
| | 05:12 | The application is done completely online;
| | 05:14 | it's not onerous at all.
| | 05:16 | And then it also has a link to aggregators.
| | 05:19 | So if you'd rather not go through the
hoops and it is kind of technical actually
| | 05:25 | of uploading your ebooks to the Apple
iBookstore, a little bit more difficult
| | 05:30 | than the Kindle or the Nook, then you
might want to work through an aggregator.
| | 05:34 | So if you click here you will see a
list of Apple-approved aggregators, these
| | 05:38 | are third-party companies who have been
approved by Apple to take your EPUBs and
| | 05:43 | then get them onto the iBookstore
and you can click through to here.
| | 05:46 | We are going to really talk about
aggregators in more detail later.
| | 05:49 | But let's say that you actually do
want to apply, so you click that Apply
| | 05:53 | button, you brought here to this page where it
says, what kind of thing do you want to sell?
| | 05:59 | And you choose Books, and click
Continue, and then it tells you the technical
| | 06:05 | requirements and this -- I know
it's surprising to a lot of people, but
| | 06:08 | technically you have to have a
Macintosh to publish on the iBookstore, because
| | 06:13 | in order to upload your EPUBs and
filling all the metadata, it's an Apple
| | 06:17 | Macintosh application, it's not
something you do online, which is how the Kindle
| | 06:22 | handles it and how Barnes & Noble
and lot of the aggregators handle it.
| | 06:25 | It's an actual standalone application
that requires an Intel Mac an operating
| | 06:29 | system 10.5 or later.
| | 06:31 | I have talked with some publishers
who are completely PC-based and they are
| | 06:34 | like, we have to buy a Macintosh
just to work with the iBookstore.
| | 06:38 | The iBookstore does require that you
have an ISBN for every EPUB that you upload
| | 06:43 | to them and of course they want you
to deliver it in EPUB format they will
| | 06:47 | accept no other format and it has
to pass EPUB check, this is the EPUB
| | 06:52 | validation that I talked
about in a couple of videos.
| | 06:55 | So you fill the application and give
them your tax ID number and all that stuff
| | 07:00 | and once you're accepted which should
take just a few days you're given a URL
| | 07:04 | where you can login and access
what's called the iTunes Connect portal.
| | 07:09 | It has links to report, and you can
download iBookstore EPUB templates, it has a
| | 07:13 | Publisher User Guide PDF with sample
EPUBs, it has lots of interesting EPUB and
| | 07:19 | CSS coding information to like include
fixed layouts in your EPUBs for the iBook
| | 07:25 | application, I will just announced
this past week and/or multimedia you can
| | 07:29 | actually include video and sound in your EPUBs.
| | 07:33 | But that will only work with the
Apple iBookstore with EPUBs for the
| | 07:36 | iBookstore edition.
| | 07:37 | So you get a lot of great
information once you get accepted and then
| | 07:40 | unfortunately I can't share any of these
URLs with you because they are all private.
| | 07:44 | But they do have a similar very generous
kind of revenue-sharing model as the Kindle.
| | 07:51 | It's 70% royalties for books, there is
no 70% just in this one range and then
| | 07:56 | less in other ranges, it's just like
how it is if you're selling apps for the
| | 08:00 | iPhone or something, it's 70%.
| | 08:03 | You can even set a price to zero, if
you want people to be able to download a
| | 08:06 | free EPUB that you publish.
| | 08:09 | The royalties that they payout to you
are paid by Electronic Fund Transfer only.
| | 08:13 | So it is required that
you have a US bank account.
| | 08:16 | And again so if you are an
international publisher then you might want to
| | 08:20 | just use an aggregator.
| | 08:21 | The other reseller is the Barnes & Noble
Nook store and it's really friendly and
| | 08:27 | accommodating for independent authors
and publishers, they of course have other
| | 08:31 | programs for the big publishers but
for the vast number of people who are
| | 08:36 | getting all into digital publishing
of their own books or they are small
| | 08:39 | publishers who are converting their
books to EPUB, this is very nice little
| | 08:44 | portal called PUBIT.
| | 08:46 | And all you need to do is login down
here to create an account and you have to
| | 08:51 | have a Barnes & Noble account, again
it's just like an Amazon account, if you
| | 08:54 | don't have one you can create one on the
fly, and the only thing different about
| | 08:57 | applying for the Barnes & Noble
reseller account is that they want your credit
| | 09:01 | card number, because they said if
people return ebooks then they might have to
| | 09:06 | actually charge you, but basically
it's the same as what it was for us.
| | 09:10 | It's like a combination of the iTunes
and the Amazon requirements in that, an
| | 09:15 | ISBN is optional, you don't have to
purchase an ISBN, they can assign one for
| | 09:19 | you, but you do need to have a tax ID
number and you do need to have a US bank
| | 09:24 | account because everything is just
paid by Electronic Funds Transfer.
| | 09:27 | So I have summarized this on this slide.
| | 09:31 | This is where you go to apply, you can
only upload an EPUB format again, and
| | 09:36 | they have very nice guidelines for how
to prep the EPUB for them which I talked
| | 09:40 | about in the previous video.
| | 09:41 | And then their royalty breakdown you
get 65% royalties for books that are
| | 09:46 | priced from 299 to 999, and
otherwise it's 35% for things that are more
| | 09:51 | expensive and less expensive.
| | 09:53 | All these places have pricing guidelines
that you really need to look at because
| | 09:56 | they want to make sure that the price
that you set for your digital books are
| | 10:00 | not higher than your setting for print books.
| | 10:03 | Some of them say, they have to be at
least 20% less and they have all sorts of
| | 10:07 | these breakdowns, but it's
all spelled out pretty well.
| | 10:09 | Whether you work with the Kindle store,
the Apple iBookstore or the Barnes &
| | 10:14 | Noble Nook store, it's pretty neat
being in-charge of your own destiny that way
| | 10:18 | being your own publisher.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using third-party aggregators| 00:00 | Setting up individual publisher
accounts with Apple and Amazon and Sony and
| | 00:07 | Barnes & Noble and whoever,
that's not the only way to go.
| | 00:10 | A very good option that you might
consider is working with a third party and
| | 00:13 | whatvare known as aggregators and
aggregators are, just like the name implies, they
| | 00:19 | aggregate all of the mom and pop sort
of publishers and they systemize them and
| | 00:25 | manage them as a service to the large
resellers. And they take a little cut or
| | 00:31 | they charge a little fee and
they make both people happy.
| | 00:34 | They make the independent publishers
because they take care of all the hard
| | 00:37 | behind the scenes stuff, they make it
nice and easy for people aren't really
| | 00:40 | into this, and they make it very easy
for the large publishers because the large
| | 00:46 | publishers can rely on them for
sending in quality product and taking care of
| | 00:49 | things, doing all the tech
support and that kind of stuff.
| | 00:52 | So it's an option. In fact on Apple's
website if you apply for an iTunes account
| | 00:58 | and they reject, you they will send
you to this URL or even during the
| | 01:02 | application process they are like "Yyou
know you might want to consider just
| | 01:06 | using an aggregator."
| | 01:07 | So this list here is what they'll
point you to and it shows the different
| | 01:11 | services that are approved
aggregators for the iBookstore to apply.
| | 01:16 | They can all create an EPUB, which kind of
defeats the purpose of ours right, for this title.
| | 01:21 | So we don't care about this column.
They help manage all the metadata, they can
| | 01:25 | help you create multimedia EPUBs, and so on.
| | 01:29 | You know, the thing is though that
this list of aggregators keeps changing.
| | 01:32 | Six months ago there were whole bunch of
other names on here and they're gone and it is a mystery
| | 01:38 | in the industry as to why like for
example one of the biggest ones, there was
| | 01:42 | Lulu Books and there is still a way to
use Lulu to get your books on the iPad.
| | 01:46 | I am going to show you that in a minute.
| | 01:48 | So you are not really limited to only
these Apple approved aggregators as far as
| | 01:52 | I know and unfortunately they are not
that friendly to independent publishers
| | 01:58 | who want to supply their own EPUBs.
| | 01:59 | They are more for like an
independent author, like Smashwords.
| | 02:03 | Smashwords is a very cool company.
| | 02:05 | They've been around for a while.
| | 02:07 | You come to this beautiful webpage, how
to publish e-books in the Apple iPad,
| | 02:13 | iBook store and if you scroll down
you'll find this sentence over here that
| | 02:18 | stopped me in my tracks, "Your book
must be uploaded to Smashwords as a
| | 02:22 | Microsoft Word doc file."
| | 02:24 | No, you can not upload a PDF or EPUB
or MOBI as your source file. What they do
| | 02:31 | is they give you this fantastic
Microsoft Word template and as long as you only
| | 02:35 | apply the styles in the template
and use the fonts and all of the other
| | 02:39 | instructions, then they take that Microsoft Word
file and they run it through the meat grinder.
| | 02:46 | So that is one of the aggregators, which
is really not what we're interested in.
| | 02:51 | If you go to one of the older
aggregators, which as far as I know they're still
| | 02:54 | working, like Lulu.com they were very
well known for doing print on-demand books.
| | 03:00 | So you could sent them a PDF or even
a Microsoft Word document and choose
| | 03:03 | different designs for the cover in
the interior and then send people to a
| | 03:07 | Lulu.com link. Somebody buys your book,
lulu.com will charge $20 for the book and
| | 03:13 | then give you eight, and they
only print as much as people order.
| | 03:16 | So they have gotten into the digital
publishing realm as well. In fact they can
| | 03:20 | be a big help in giving your help in
giving your books on to the iBookstore.
| | 03:23 | So this is what they offer. They include
ISBN; you don't have to get an ISBN number.
| | 03:27 | They do sales reporting, they do the
document conversion to EPUB if you want, though
| | 03:32 | they will accept an EPUB.
| | 03:34 | But down here you will find out like
as a publisher if you have your own ISBN,
| | 03:38 | you want to a little bit more control,
you have to have at least 25 titles good
| | 03:41 | to go. Otherwise you got to come
over here and use For Authors.
| | 03:44 | But whether you are an author or
publisher because it's the same. lulu.com takes
| | 03:50 | 20% of the money that
Apple gives you as royalties.
| | 03:55 | So they handle all of the stuff about
getting your book into the iBookstore and
| | 04:00 | they handle all the math and reporting
stuff with the iBookstore with Apple,
| | 04:04 | then your account is with lulu.com and
you find out how much money the royalties
| | 04:09 | were coming in from the iBookstore.
lulu.com icon takes 20% automatically and
| | 04:14 | then sends you a check or does an
electronic file transfer and so on.
| | 04:17 | But it's kind of neat because your
content is there and should you decide to
| | 04:21 | actually publish a print book, they're
good to go to help you out with that.
| | 04:24 | So it's actually a pretty cool company.
I just wanted to point out that there
| | 04:27 | are many e-book aggregators and I
think it's worth it to you investigate this
| | 04:32 | for a little while and
check out what they offer.
| | 04:35 | Like this company Bibliocore.
| | 04:37 | These people are so nice. They are right upfront.
| | 04:40 | I like the plain English language on
their webpage about how does it work,
| | 04:44 | how much does it cost.
| | 04:46 | If you want to send them an e-book to
get on the iBookstore, it would have to
| | 04:49 | be on EPUB, have no unmanifested files,
and that means-- I am sure you all know
| | 04:54 | what the manifest is.
| | 04:55 | It's part of the content.OPF page.
It lists all files that are in the EPUB.
| | 05:01 | So don't want to have any extra images, for
example, that are not listed in the manifest.
| | 05:05 | It has to have an ISBN
number and it has to be valid.
| | 05:09 | It has to pass EPUB checks and so on.
| | 05:11 | Now these people they don't charge or
cut of the profits What they do is they
| | 05:15 | charge so much per year and then
less than that for successive years.
| | 05:19 | Unfortunately they don't say on their
website, they are not upfront with exactly
| | 05:23 | how much they charge. They want you to
submit the application but I did talk with
| | 05:28 | them and it's pretty decent.
| | 05:31 | One of similar to them is called
BookBaby and these people do say exactly how
| | 05:34 | much they charge right upfront.
| | 05:35 | Right now they have reduced the price
to $99 a year. That's for the first year.
| | 05:40 | That's per book and then after that
if you want to keep the book going with them,
| | 05:43 | then it's like $19 year or nine
dollars year and you can find out more here but
| | 05:48 | what I like is that you can upload an EPUB
but they will also make it available for
| | 05:53 | the Kindle and the Nook and Sony Reader.
| | 05:55 | So they are an aggregator for the
Sony Reader bookstore and they have a
| | 05:59 | very nice e-publishing guide that you might
want to download and learn some things from.
| | 06:03 | So if you are considering going with
an aggregator, I think it's worth your
| | 06:06 | time to investigate at least two or
three of these companies. You want to make
| | 06:10 | sure that they can take your EPUB file
and that they have a good track record
| | 06:14 | of being honest and upfront with all
the authors and publishers that they work with,
| | 06:18 | that they are responsive to
your enquiries, and that they have been
| | 06:21 | around for a while.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Selling from your own web site or ecommerce site| 00:00 | There is nothing forcing you to sell
your EPUBs or your ebooks on a reseller
| | 00:06 | site or having to be exclusive on that
site, unless their terms and conditions
| | 00:10 | say that it has to be exclusive.
| | 00:12 | You can always sell it on your own website.
| | 00:14 | So create your EPUBs and write up some
instructions for people about how to read
| | 00:18 | the EPUB, point them to some ereaders, or to
Ibis Reader or something like that. Sell it yourself.
| | 00:25 | You don't even have to be a programmer.
| | 00:27 | You can use a service like eSellerate
that we're looking at right now on screen.
| | 00:32 | eSellerate is a website where a lot of
small independent software developers
| | 00:36 | will sell their plug-ins, and extensions,
and scripts and things, because it is
| | 00:40 | very easy for an independent
user to get started with them.
| | 00:43 | You upload your files to them. They
have pretty good user interface for
| | 00:46 | assigning an SKU and
assigning discount codes and so on.
| | 00:50 | And then you just link to the
eSellerate site and create your own store.
| | 00:54 | I'll show you a couple of examples in a bit.
| | 00:56 | A competitor of the eSellerate that
you may have already used is Kagi.
| | 01:00 | Kagi is often used to sell software, but
both these places can sell anything digital.
| | 01:05 | So either use eSellerate or Kagi or
another solution provider, any kind of
| | 01:10 | ecommerce provider that has the
ability to store digital media, so that when
| | 01:16 | people purchase it, they can
download it from that site.
| | 01:18 | That's what you're looking for.
| | 01:20 | I did a search on Kagi and I found
that here is an example of somebody who is
| | 01:23 | selling EPUBs using the Kagi store.
| | 01:27 | The system lets you modify what the
store looks like quite a bit and really
| | 01:31 | customize it or you can even integrate
it into your own website if you'd like,
| | 01:35 | rather than sending
somebody to an outside service.
| | 01:38 | Here is another publisher that's using
eSellerate, Take Control, and here's
| | 01:42 | their catalog. So they're just starting
to move to from PDF to also offer EPUBs.
| | 01:49 | But if I click here, Take Control of
Working with Your iPad, to the actual
| | 01:54 | book page where we have lots of great
information and if we want to buy this,
| | 01:59 | you click Buy eBook.
| | 02:00 | And it brings you to the eSellerate
store page, where the purchaser can enter in
| | 02:06 | their name and their credit card
number and then download the ebook.
| | 02:10 | In fact, on their blog that I co-host,
indesignsecrets.com, we have a store here
| | 02:15 | where we're reselling PDF
ebooks in our eSellerate store.
| | 02:19 | So if you want to purchase this book
than you just find the link to purchase it,
| | 02:25 | and it brings you right to our
eSellerate store with a full description and
| | 02:29 | buttons to buy it and so on.
| | 02:30 | So once you have your EPUB ready,
you're not beholding to these resellers.
| | 02:35 | You can go ahead and start
selling it immediately on your own.
| | 02:37 | Kagi and eSellerate, they normally
don't charge any kind of fee to get started with.
| | 02:41 | They just take a percentage or
a few cents from every transaction.
| | 02:45 | So it's a really great way to set up
your own ebook store on your own web site.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
11. Keeping Up with the FieldNext Steps| 00:00 | Well thank you so much
for sticking through this.
| | 00:03 | We tried to cover everything about
EPUBs and Kindle publishing as of today.
| | 00:09 | We are at the very beginning of this
digital publishing revolution and I'm sure
| | 00:15 | that five months from now there's going
to be all sorts of new things that we can do
| | 00:18 | with CSS and EPUBs and new tags
they support and ways to sell it.
| | 00:23 | So let me tell you about more resources that
will help you keep up to date with his field.
| | 00:27 | First of all on lynda.com there are some
really great video titles on CSS and as
| | 00:33 | you have learned, CSS is a big part
of EPUB and Kindle format publishing.
| | 00:38 | So there is a good one called creating
a CSS Style Guide: Hands-on Training and
| | 00:43 | id you're working with Dreamweaver
it will apply to any kind of CSS that you
| | 00:48 | are doing, not just Dreamweaver CSS.
| | 00:50 | There's another one called CSS Crash
Course by SitePoint and though it's a little old,
| | 00:55 | I think this looks like a very
accessible course for people who are not
| | 00:57 | familiar with CSS at all.
| | 00:58 | How to format text, what is a
selector, what's inheritance, all that
| | 01:03 | stuff applies to EPUBs.
| | 01:05 | Another video on lynda.com is from my
friend Jim Maivald who do this great
| | 01:10 | video on publishing workflows with XML and XML
is very closely associated with the EPUB format.
| | 01:19 | All those files were XML files and then
of course we were dealing with XHTML files.
| | 01:23 | So if you want to go a little bit
further in setting up some sort of automated
| | 01:27 | production that would result in EPUB
you would definitely want to start with
| | 01:31 | learning about XML and InDesign right here.
| | 01:34 | Outside of lynda.com, here are some
other places where you can keep up to date
| | 01:38 | in this quickly changing field of ours.
| | 01:41 | One of my favorite ones is on twitter.com.
| | 01:43 | Now even if you don't tweet, even if
you don't have an account, you can go to
| | 01:48 | search.twitter.com and do a search
for this hash tag EPRDCTN. It stands for
| | 01:55 | eproduction and this is what
everybody's posting links and asking questions
| | 02:01 | about creating ebooks and Kindle
books and EPUBs and all sorts of stuff from
| | 02:07 | the very geekiest to just selling or
working for a publishing company, and
| | 02:11 | you're in charge of this a lot of stuff,
about metadata, a lot of talk about ISBN
| | 02:16 | numbers and resellers.
| | 02:18 | So this is a wonderful place to get
more information to ask questions.
| | 02:23 | And a resource is that I've mentioned a few
times during the course of this title is
| | 02:27 | mobileread.com. I have talked
about their forms and also their wiki.
| | 02:32 | Their wiki if you remember was the place
where it had listed every single ereader
| | 02:36 | device and their pixels and their resolution.
| | 02:38 | This is like a volunteer organization
that people just post all the information
| | 02:43 | they can and also the forms themselves
are a fantastic places, whether you are
| | 02:48 | simply a consumer or an author or
especially though, if you keep going down here,
| | 02:55 | you want to learn about ebook software.
| | 02:57 | So for example, Caliber a fantastic
program for converting from one format to
| | 03:01 | another and that's also an ebook
library manager, they do all their support here.
| | 03:06 | And so does Sigil, which I used many
times during the course of this title.
| | 03:10 | EPUBReader is a Firefox add-on that
I demoed and then there's this whole
| | 03:14 | section called ebook formats with all
these different informants that we been
| | 03:18 | talking about and a place to ask your
questions among other colleagues who are
| | 03:22 | dealing with the same issues as you
are and they may have already learned how to
| | 03:25 | solve those problems.
| | 03:26 | This is a fantastic resource and I
hope to see you there. mobileread.com.
| | 03:32 | I know that I mentioned a number of
times Three Press Consulting. These are the
| | 03:36 | people who have the website where you
can upload your ebook for validation and
| | 03:40 | they also came up with the
Ibis Reader, online ebook reader.
| | 03:43 | They have a great blog. Liza Daly is one
of the owners of Three Press consulting.
| | 03:48 | She's a luminary in her field and
this is the blog that I check daily.
| | 03:52 | I want to see daily what Daly is writing about.
| | 03:56 | Another blog that I always
check is Pigs, Gourds and Wikis.
| | 03:59 | Don't ask me why Liz called at that, but
this is another. Liz Castro wrote a book
| | 04:05 | called EPUB Straight to the Point,
which is all about how to create EPUBs from
| | 04:09 | Adobe InDesign and Microsoft Word.
| | 04:11 | And she's a coder through and through.
| | 04:13 | She's well known for writing the
HTML, XHTML, and CSS Visual QuickStart
| | 04:18 | Guides for Peachpit Press.
| | 04:20 | She has got a really great blog where
when she discovers something new, then
| | 04:23 | she will write about it with really
good captions and sample files. She's a huge
| | 04:28 | help and a huge asset to our industry.
Liz Castro's blog, pigsgourdsandwikis.com.
| | 04:34 | Finally don't forget to keep up with
me on indesignsecrets.com where I try to
| | 04:39 | write posts having to do with EPUB and
everything else having to do with InDesign.
| | 04:43 | If you come to indesignsecrets.com and
you go to blog posts, you will see we have
| | 04:46 | a section just for EPUBs,
so check that out as well.
| | 04:50 | So thanks again everybody and
I hope to see you again soon!
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
