277 Fix fraction problems in EPUBs

- [Instructor] Sometimes a feature that works superbly with one kind of output, like print or PDF, fails miserably with another kind of output, like say, Publish Online or EPUB. This is an example of when a beautiful feature, OpenType fractions, fails miserably when you export to a fixed-layout EPUB. A fixed-layout EPUB is an eBook that looks exactly like how it does in InDesign. Well, sort of like that, but it is an eBook that you can purchase from the Apple Apps bookstore and read in iBooks or other programs.

In fact, I have a title here, couple titles, all about creating fixed-layout EPUBs from InDesign. But the problem has to do, as I said, with OpenType fraction formatting, and if you are creating a cookbook that has a lot of fractions, then probably you're trying to create nice-looking fractions. Like you wouldn't want the fractions to look like that, that's kind of amateurish, right? You'd want it to be a beautifully formatted fraction, like this. Now, if you're using CC 2015, you have this wonderful feature of the glyph alternates appearing as a pop-up, so I could automatically choose the nicely formatted 2/4ths just like that.

And all that does is saves me a trip up here to the control panel menu, OpenType, and enabling Fractions for that selection. And I've already done that for these other fractions, and let's go ahead and do that for 5/7ths as well. And now we're going to export this to EPUB. I'll press Command or Control + E to export, choose EPUB (Fixed Layout) from the format dropdown menu, click Save, make sure that it opens in iBooks, and we'll see what it looks like.

Yikes! What happened here? Well, HTML, which is what is inside of an eBook, does not understand OpenType formatting, it can't convert that, and this is not a graphic, so it's trying to convert this into actual text. What it does is it ignores the formatting and resets it as regularly sized numbers, as I think you can see here. But that collides with how InDesign exports a fixed-layout EPUB, where every single letter and word and spacing between the letters is fixed in the layout, its position is fixed.

Right now, InDesign is not smart enough to know that the OpenType formatting will not be supported, and so the letters end up colliding on each other. What is the answer? You have to not use OpenType formatting! Instead, you have to format text the old fashioned way, which is by selecting, let's see, let's select this, and bring it back, this to here, selecting the 2, making it superscript, selecting the 4, reducing the size, and so on. I'm going to undo.

Luckily, there is a free script, and a commercial version of that script, that will help you with this kind of work. I'm going to jump over to Chrome to show you Proper Fraction. Just search for "proper fraction InDesign" in Google, or go to danrodney.com, who's the developer. He's a really great guy, he's a trainer in New York, and he also does these scripts. You can download the lite version for free, or you can purchase the pro version. I've already done so, and I've already installed them in my Scripts panel. He has instructions on how to do that, it's very simple.

And I've opened up my Scripts panel, which is usually in Utilities, and added it to my dock here. Okay, so we have the Proper Fraction Lite and Proper Fraction Pro. What Proper Fraction Lite will do, will be to take this kind of formatting, plain formatting, and it will automatically do all that manual work. So I'm going to double-click it, and you can see that it did it for me. So what you'd need to do would be to select all the OpenType formatted fractions that you have in your document, and I'm just doing it this way.

If you have it as a default in your paragraph style, you'd need to turn that off in the paragraph style. And then one by one, convert them. Now if you have the paid version, you get a couple great features, let's look at that. Let me make this a little bit larger so you can see, first of all, you get Preferences, and in Preferences, I can say, I don't want you to convert fractions to OpenType fractions, which is normally the reason why you buy the script, so that it'll automatically apply OpenType fraction formatting.

You can just turn that off. And what this will do will be to take all of your OpenType fraction formatted text and change them to manually formatted text, and the other feature is that it can do a whole bunch at once, so I'll double-click this, say please change all of the fractions in my story, and it's done. Now let's go ahead and export this to fixed-layout EPUB, again, we'll replace the old one, and check it out in iBooks.

Here you go, it did a pretty good job. This one looks like it could use a little kerning, which we can do back in the book, but you can see now all of the text is readable and it's not colliding with each other, and it's still text, so whether you do this manually or you go ahead and use the script, you need to remember not to use OpenType fractions if you're exporting to a fixed-layout EPUB.