From the course: InDesign to EPUB: Creating Ebooks

Checklist for adapting InDesign layouts - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign to EPUB: Creating Ebooks

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Checklist for adapting InDesign layouts

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- [Instructor] So you're raring to go on converting your InDesign file to ePub, and you really don't want to watch this entire course. Well, let me tell you the steps that are involved, and then you can pick and choose the topics in the entire course that you need to see. But otherwise, I think you might be able to figure this out on your own. Now, here are the steps. First of all, you need to apply styles, paragraph and character styles, to all your texts. It's so important in many different ways, especially if you're trying to make an accessible ePub, especially if you're trying to use CSS intelligently. No local formatting, use styles. Those white space issues that I mentioned in the previous video, like between text frames, or runs of returns, those have to be fixed. If you have images in your manuscript, then they need to be anchored. You need to anchor them where you want them to appear in the eBooks. That's the only way that they will appear within the text. Otherwise, they'll get pushed to the end of the ePub, as in my unprepped demo in the last video. Similarly, close to this, is layout order. I'll be talking about this in a couple different videos coming up, but layout order is the order of things that are exported from your layout. They're not exported in the order that you might think as they appear on page. They're exported in a slightly different order, and some things need to be anchored. So make sure, you got to check and correct the layout order. You know, the chapters don't start at the top of a screen on their own. You have to set that up beforehand. Kind of simple, especially if you're using style sheets, but you need to set up the chapter breaks. If you have InDesign artwork that you want to retain in the ePub, remember that the ePub export process will ignore it, but you can rasterize it. There is a rasterize artwork checkbox in InDesign. Did you know that? Yes, you're going to learn how to do that. And if you have complicated tables and illustrations, especially ones with a lot of text, those, you need to simplify. Remember, some people will be reading this ePub on an iPhone, right? Or some other tiny device. So you want to simplify that as much as possible. Is that it? (laughs) No, I'm sorry, we're not finished yet, but it's just this last page. You have to add a table of contents style, which is what creates the device navigation, the device table of contents, the one that you pull from the menu in your eReader, all right? Even if you're not using a table of contents in your book, you have to create a TOC style, and you'll learn how to do that here. If you want, you should add an in-book table of contents, like my "English Cottage Gardens" book had, with just links to four chapters right in the ePub. HTML has some strict rules on what characters can be included in styles and images. You will need to run through them and make sure that they are compatible with that. For accessibility purposes, you need to add alt tags to images and semantic markup, and a lot of that can be done directly in InDesign. And finally, don't forget, you got to design a cover. You could either design it in illustrator or Photoshop if you want and export it as a jpeg, or you can design it directly in InDesign, because it will rasterize the first page for you if you turn on that checkbox, which turns it into the book cover. So that's kind of neat. Those are the steps. These are the most essential here. So let's get started on turning your InDesign document into a beautiful ePub.

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