Using animations in fixed-layout EPUBs

- The ability to add InDesign's Animations to fixed-layout EPUB is a really exciting development. Fixed-layout EPUBs are relatively new in the EPUB world. But I think they're going to become more and more widely used. Right now, fixed-layout EPUBs exported from InDesign are supported by Apple's iBooks, Kobo Readers on various devices, including Andriod devices, and the Readium Extension for the Chrome browser. They are not currently supported on Amazon's Kindle readers. But I'm not going to talk about the ins and outs of creating fixed-layout EPUBs from InDesign because there's a fantastic course here on lynda.com.

Anne-Marie Concepción's Creating Fixed-Layout EPUBs with InDesign CC. Be sure and check that out if you want to learn more about fixed-layout EPUBs. I just want to mention a few things specific to working with animations in fixed-layout EPUBs. Throughout this course we've been previewing animations in InDesign's Interactivity Preview Panel which uses HTML5, just like fixed-layout EPUBs do. But as is always the case, you need to check you project early and often. Either in iBooks on the desktop or if you're running a Mac OS earlier than Mavericks, you can use Adobe Digital Editions.

For Windows users, the Readium Extension in the Chrome browser is probably the best bet. So these animations look fine in the preview panel in InDesign but it's really important to preview them outside of InDesign. The basic animations will almost always be okay but once in a while, we've seen problems with timing come up. Sometimes just doesn't show up in the InDesign Preview panel. If you're going to publish in the iBook store, you need to be sure and preview your files on an iPad itself. That's always a good practice.

The basic export process for fixed-layout EPUBs is the same whether your file includes animations or not. I have a sample here that we've been viewing in the EPUB Interactivity Preview panel that's a collection of some of the animations that we've used throughout this course. We export the file using the File, Export command. And we want to choose the format Fixed Layout EPUB. I'm going to leave all of the default settings here and the viewing app that we have set is iBooks.

That's the desktop version of iBooks. So there's nothing special that we do here for animations themselves. I'll click OK and export the EPUB. So as we go through, the thing want to look for is timing. These animations are relatively simple. So we're unlikely to encounter any problems. In fact, they look really good.

Even the pages with multiple parts seem to have their timing working really well in iBooks. Now, if you do have a timing problem you have to go to InDesign and tweak the timing using the timing panel or changing the duration. And then you have to test it again in your final reader. These adjustments may even make it go a little off of timing in InDesign's Preview panel. It's kind of a tweaky process but fortunately it doesn't come up too often. Mostly, using Animations in fixed-layout EPUBs opens up some really interesting possibilities.

And I think we're going to see them used in fixed-layout EPUBs more and more. It's just too much fun.