From the course: EPUB Accessibility Using InDesign

Marking print-equivalent page breaks - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: EPUB Accessibility Using InDesign

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Marking print-equivalent page breaks

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- [Instructor] Robust navigation is a hallmark of EPUB 3. Along with the reading system table of contents and the inside the book contents, and landmarks, as we saw earlier in this course, a page list adds value and functionality. They're simple additions that make a book more accessible and easier to use. A page list is literally a list of the pages in an E-book. Adding a print ISBN to the metadata signals that the E-book's page list syncs with that version of the print book. By marking print equivalent page breaks in the digital version of the content, a variety of readers of the content can literally always be on the same page. It is also one more way to navigate into the content. This is what a page list looks like in a novel. This is a very long, almost 500-page novel. When I roll down this page list, it takes me to literally a list of the pages, so here's the preliminary material in Roman numerals, and then a very long list of every single page in the book that syncs up with the print version of the document. When I click on one of those numbers, it takes me to the start of page 124 in the print version of the document. The page markers, the code underneath of this looks pretty simple, so here is the start of Chapter 13. This is the number that is at the top of the page in that content, and then here, this line here, span ID equals page 93, here's the aria role, role equals doc page break, a title of 93, and then back here, some epub type semantics that might look familiar to you, epub type equals page break. That is the semantics that signals that this is the marker of a page break in the content, so relatively simple but quite robust, and does quite a lot for your content. Building a page list into your E-book means that book clubs reading a novel can refer to the page number with accuracy, that students in a classroom can confidently be reading the same content. It also boosts the accessibility of an E-book by providing fuller navigational possibilities. Where a digital publication and its print counterpart derive from the same workflow, anchors can be placed directly at the location of the page break, so in the middle of a paragraph or even in the middle of a word. Adobe Digital Edition displays the page list as we've seen just now. Some reading systems use the page list markers to generate running footers as seen in iBooks. Let's switch over to iBooks and open the same novel. So what you see along the bottom is the page, and this is the page as derived from the page list. It's pulling that running footer from the information that's synced up in the page list, and this will be consistent across various reading systems. The reading systems use that page list information slightly differently, like iBooks pulls it for the running footer, Adobe Digital Editions uses it in a flyout menu in the left margin. All of them use it to some extent. At present, Amazon isn't doing much with this information, but as the Kindle slowly adopts much of EPUB 3 functionality, I expect it won't be long before a page list becomes meaningful in a MOBI context. Regardless, building a page list is an excellent way to future proof your content. It's a general best practice for E-book developers to build their E-books for the reading systems that they want, not the reading systems that they have, so build a future proof E-book that has a page list in it and has robust EPUB 3 functionality, whether or not the reading systems are using that information at the moment. Be cautious to declare the source ISBN in the OPF metadata. Let's have a look at what that looks like. I'm gonna close this chapter 13, I'm not gonna save that, and then cycle down to the content.opf. This is where the metadata in your content is. So here, this DC identifier is the print ISBN, and then this piece of information right here is the E-book ISBN. This is the main identifier, and this piece of information is the print ISBN, the DC source, so this means that the page list in this book syncs up with the print book that matches this ISBN number, that syncs up with that identifier. If you skip declaring the print ISBN in your OPF metadata, then those carefully marked print page breaks are a bit of a waste of time. In the rest of this chapter, I will show you how to create a page list in InDesign that functions nicely in your EPUB.

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