EXPORTING FIXED-FORMAT EPUBS FROM INDESIGN: An update

Now you see it

Now you don’t

Yesterday Adobe announced their latest round of updates to Creative Cloud apps. And they’ve fixed lots of the issues around their new fixed-format export feature that I wrote about here and added a whole lot of interactivity possibilities too.

The biggest issue I suppose is links. You can now have internal and external text hyperlinks. So you can add your website (or any website), index and cross-references. Whay-hay!

Cross references and multistage objects (That’s set up with a simple slideshow feature.).

But you can also add most of the interactive features that previously only applied to interactive PDF (and most of them wouldn’t work on iPad). I spent an hour quickly (and roughly!) animating page elements on my Sleeping Beauty sample book. Here some ‘blood’ fades in when you tap the page (draw shape, fill red and set to fade in on page click/tap). And in the pictures above the cat appears inside the cupboard (create closed-door cupboard by copying and flipping left side of cupboard, place on top of original image and set that to appear on page click/tap). When I exported the book everything worked as it should in iBooks (desktop and iPad).

And some ‘blood’ fading in on a page tap.

You can also add html animations too, but I haven’t tried that yet.

Another really useful feature is that there is now an ePub preview panel so that you can preview how things will look without having to export and load onto an iPad if you haven’t got a desktop ereader. This is brilliant, seems to work really well and is such a time-saver.

Advertisement

Exporting fixed-format ePubs from InDesign

I WANT CANDY!! – Fixed-format EPub displayed on Readium

A couple of months ago Adobe launched InDesign CC 2014. Among its new features is the ability to export your documents as fixed-format ePub 3. This is really rather exciting. Prior to this update you either had to go to a specialist conversion company or pretty much hand code files. Either way it was a palaver and often an expensive palaver at that. I’ve been using a very good conversion script (ePub Crawler) for the past year (and will continue to use it for some projects), but this is something else! I’ve just got around to having a proper look at this new capability and I’m impressed. InDesign CC 2014 can now export valid ePub 3 fixed-format ebooks as quickly and easily as exporting a PDF. Barring a few minor issues and things-to-watch-out-for, the resulting file will be identical to the InDesign book file.

What is a fixed-format ebook?
Fixed-format ebooks reproduce what is on the printed page (like a PDF). The text is live and can be selected, searched, defined and read aloud (depending on ePub-reader software capabilities). The new InDesign export places all of the page elements exactly as they are in InDesign and each word is dealt with individually, so your line endings and spacing remain intact. (It also means that if you crack open the ePub files and look at the HTML it looks like the stuff of nightmares, but that’s another story.)

Currently Apple iBooks is the only platform that really has full support for all ePub 3 has to offer, however other retailers are following (I’ve had some success with opening the resulting files in Kobo apps, for example. They will also open in Google Chrome with the free Readium extension installed and I’m pretty sure they’d be fine on Google Play.) But I have spoken to some people who are still very dismissive about fixed-format ePub – there’s just not enough support on other platforms, why would you want to, isn’t it just easier to convert to PDF? Well, yes – but Apple don’t sell PDFs (nor do any other major ebook retailers to my knowledge) so if you want to sell a PDF book you’ll have limited places to sell it. And – did I mention? – if your book is set up correctly export is no more time-consuming than exporting to PDF. So you can still export to PDF if you want to and export a version you can at least sell on Apple iBooks for very little additional outlay – probably less than the cost of getting a proof copy printed.

Fixed-format conversion is most suitable for:
✔ Children’s picture books
✔ Photo books
✔ Highly designed and illustrated non fiction and reference
✔ ‘Coffee table’ books
✔ Cookery books (and other instructional books)
✔ Any book where it is important to keep the design and layout intact
✔ Prospectuses or catalogues

So who would benefit from this?
✔ Publishers and self-publishers wanting to release backlist titles quickly and cost effectively
✔ Publishers and self-publishers creating new titles in the above fields. If new titles are designed with an eye to exporting to ePub on completion, the convertion is very quick and pain free.
✔ Photographers and artists (Photo books, portfolios and ePub albums for wedding clients, for example)
✔ Bands and other performers (tour books, blogs, programmes, etc)
✔ Organisations and retailers who would benefit from conversion of prospectuses and catalogues, internal and external training materials, etc, to ePub to allow them to be read on a wider range of apps and devices

I’ve incorporated fixed-format ePub into the range of typesetting, layout, editorial and conversion services I offer. I don’t give flat-fee prices at the moment because every project is different.
I can:
✔ Convert your final InDesign files to fixed-format ePub more cheaply and quickly than I used to be able to offer. (If your files are suitable this takes the same time as saving to PDF.)
✔ Place video and audio prior to conversion
✔ Assess your files’ suitability and make font substitutions and layout tweaks prior to conversion
✔ Re-set and layout (from old backlist, etc)
✔ Set up new titles from scratch

Sample Books
I’ve set up a couple of 30-ish-page sample books. One is the full text of The Sleeping Beauty Picture Book, illustrated by Walter Crane and the other is a section of The Candy Maker’s Guide, a recipe book first published in 1896 by a manufacturer of confectionary and baking equipment. (Both public domain texts – the photos are mine.)

Here are some screen grabs from Sleeping Beauty:

Note the overlapping text on the headings. The text is still live.

InDesign layout sample – Sleeping Beauty

IBooks screen grab showing thumbnails

This one has a path around the image of the girl on the left. Every word is in exactly the same position as in the InDesign file. (You might have noticed the overflowing text box below. InDesign will not warn you of text overflow on export – it just assumes it’s what you want.)

InDesign layout sample – Sleeping Beauty

IPad screen grab showing thumbnails

Now here are some screen grabs from the sweets book:

Again we’ve got a clipping path around the sweet jar and I put a feather on it (the path is rough, I know – but the point is that it is exactly as it was.)

InDesign layout sample – sweets

IBooks screen grab

Here’s a spread showing a mixed single- and two-column layout and images with transparency.

Sweets spread example

You can set the ePub up so that it displays a table of contents as thumbnails like this, or if you set up a table-of-contents style, you can have it display a multi-level toc in words.

Thumbnail Table of Contents

This shows looking up ‘live’ words in the built-in dictionary.

IBooks showing definition of word

So what can’t you have?
✘ Hyperlinks in text or internal links
✘ Live text that is horizontally or vertically scaled, or kerned
✘ Live text with strokes, gradient fills, drop shadows etc.
✘ Live text on a path (text will flatten on conversion)
✘ Gradients (this can be overcome by flattening to jpg first)
✘ This conversion process is not suitable for adding audio with read-along text highlighting
✘ Postscript fonts

(Adobe are still working on enhancing the export, so some of these issues will be overcome soon.)

Backlist conversion and fonts
The major issue when converting InDesign documents is fonts. Many publishers are still using (or used to use) Postscript files. These won’t work in ebooks, so if your books contain Postscript fonts they will have to be replaced with Truetype or Opentype fonts. Many common fonts have Truetype or Opentype versions, but more obscure fonts might have to be replaced with similar fonts. It’s also important to make sure your fonts are licensed for ebook use. They often aren’t. Ideally new titles should be designed using correctly licensed Truetype or Opentype fonts.

Multimedia
You can also add video and audio if you so desire – obviously if you are converting a print book you might have to make some design tweaks to make room for the media. Video and audio can be placed directly to the InDesign file. You don’t have any choice over the video/audio controls’ appearance (but I believe you can edit the css if it really bothers you.) There is also support to link to Youtube etc if you don’t want to embed your media.

Here are a couple of screen grabs from a small test file I made.

How video looks on the page. You can’t customise the controls.

The audio controls can’t be customised.

A note about tracking

I was asked about tracking text. The screen grabs below show text tracked backwards and forwards.

InDesign showing text without tracking

InDesign showing tracked text in heading and bottom line.

EPub showing tracked text

An Alphabet of Celebrities by Oliver Herford

An Alphabet of Celebrities cover. First published 1899.

Something slightly different this week…  An Alphabet of Celebrities by Oliver Herford. I wonder what today’s ‘celebrities’ would be…?

I have been working on some out-of-copyright works to create samples in various ebook/digital formats. I laid this one out in iBooks Author, and then exported it as a PDF and used that  to convert to a mobi file.  The iBooks Author version has selectable text and you can turn the ‘speak’ feature on. The mobi version is flat artwork only, but you can zoom into the illustrations. I looked at making a KF8 panel-view version, but I think it’s only worthwhile if you have text that really is too small to be read comfortably.

This is by Oliver Herford, apparently called by some, the American Oscar Wilde. See here on Wikipedia

Here are the imprint details.

BOSTON SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY 1899
ENTERED AT STATIONERS’ HALL THE HEINTZEMANN PRESS
BOSTON U.S.A.

Some sample pages (jpegs) below:

A

D

P

U

iBooks Author experiments

Last week was a week for conversations with various individuals and companies about fixed-format epub, KF8, Adobe DPS, book apps and their various merits, capabilities, pitfalls etc. During those conversations I was reminded of iBooks Author. I downloaded it ages ago, but had only given it a cursory glance.

So over the weekend I took it for a test drive. (Please note: I’m using my own photographs and made-up or placeholder text. The ‘book’ is a test of the program’s abilities.)

On the plus side iBooks Author is free to download.
But on the minus side it only works on a Mac running Lion and above. Which leaves a lot of potential users out in the cold.

Another minus (for some people) is that if you want to sell any books you create, you must do it on the iBooks Store. But you can easily test them on your iPad, give them freely away, er, free, and you can make PDFs (although they won’t have any interactivity and I haven’t tested the quality).

Anyway:

When you open iBooks Author you’re presented with a number of templates to choose from. They range from photo book layouts to text-heavy ‘classic’ layouts, recipes etc. You seem to have to choose a layout to start with, but they are all completely customisable. The ‘basic’ layout is probably the one to go for if you want to go it alone.

This is a screen shot of the iBooks Author with my test book in progress. Note it implies that you have to import images through iPhoto. You don’t. You can drag and drop from desktop or Bridge. There’s a pull-out drawer of styles on the right and page thumbnails on the left.

Screenshot of iBooks Author

You test your book by hooking computer to iPad with the iBooks app open and clicking Preview. The book is downloaded to iBooks and is completely functional – except it has ‘Proof’ written across the corner of the cover. (The book next to it is Animals from Miles Kelly.)

iBooks library screen

This is a chapter opener, with the thumbnail table of contents along the bottom. The table of contents is automatically generated and updated.

Chapter opener and table of contents thumbnails along the bottom

If you work with InDesign, Quark or even Pages, Word, etc it’s all very familiar territory. It’s also quite similar in a lot of ways to Blurb’s BookSmart program.

The interesting stuff is the interactivity that is possible through widgets. The program comes with a selection of these which include galleries, scrolling boxes, interactive questions, media (video and audio), inserting Keynote presentations, pop-up labels, 3-d images and HTML functionality.

Gallery. Tap the thumbnails to view

Embedded video has to be in .m4v format

Zoom-ins

Zoom-in zoomed in

You can also make HTML widgets in programs like Hype, and I found a site called Bookry which allows you to create all sorts of widgets. I made a wordsearch to go in this book.

Wordsearch widget from Bookry

Wordsearch poster image

These are multiple choice question widgets. You can have standard text or picture questions with up to 6 options or drag label or image to target questions. It will show you the correct answer and total your answers at the end of the test.

Questions widget. Drag the answer to the correct spot

Questions widget. Drag the image thumbnail to the correct spot

I’m still playing with this, but I really like it and think it could have interesting possibilities if you’re happy to be limited to Apple platforms.

Experiments with Kindle Fire HD

On Friday my Kindle Fire HD was unceremoniously shoved through my letter box.

The box

Its attractive packaging and seemed to cushion the device’s fall onto the tiled floor in my porch.

You open the box by pulling the perforated cardboard tab.

Kindle Fire HD packaging open

The Kindle Fire HD comes with an USB cord and an instruction leaflet. It switches on on the short side. The button is recessed and not easy to see, so you won’t keep turning it on by mistake.

It’s already pre-registered to your Amazon account.

Kindle Fire HD home screen

Notice it says Jill’s 2nd Kindle at the top of the screen. Items you’ve looked at appear in the carousel. I gather this is a modified Android OS – it’s certainly similar to my Sony S tablet. There’s a free app of the day at the moment. Jamie Oliver today.

Very gratifyingly, the Adobe DPS folio I experimented with in the summer loaded on to this straight away once I loaded the Adobe content viewer app.

Adobe DPS folio

The screen is lovely. These photos don’t do it justice at all. New users get, I think, 5 gig of cloud storage (and a months free Amazon Prime, incidently). This is the gallery screen for the cloud storage. You can download to the device to view offline or you can sideload photos from your desktop.

Kindle Fire HD Photos screen

Books look good. There is now a night and sepia theme (like iBooks) and a text-to-speech facility. It’s a female, American voice, though, and I haven’t found a way to change it.

Kindle Fire HD text to speech facility

 

Just need to get it a cover now, so I can chuck it in my bag of gadgets.

 

When is black not black? Kindle for iPad app

I recently upgraded to IOS 6 on my iPad and was able to download the latest version of the Kindle app. Having a muck about on it as you do, I noticed that you can now reverse out the text (night theme) like you’ve been able to do on iBooks for a while. So I pressed the ‘black’ button and the background went black and my text went … er … slightly less black. So I fiddled with it some more, I changed fonts and font sizes. I switched it on and off again. Then I opened to a self-published book I’d recently downloaded – and black with white text. Hmm. Checked a few more downloads. Black with white text. Back to another in the series I’m converting at the moment – black with slightly less black. Hmm. A test book I made a couple of months back – black with white text.

OK … check the css files. Ah! The test book css shows the text’s hex number is #000000, but the files I’m currently working on have hex #1a1818. This is the colour that InDesign CS6 generated from the ‘text black’ swatch (RGB 26,24,24) during ePub export. So once the css was changed to #000000 the file displayed properly.  It seems that the black theme setting on the Kindle app will only reverse the text out to white if it is pure black.

I don’t remember changing the css on my test file, but I could have. If I didn’t though, it seems that InDesign used to convert to #000000 in CS5.5. Incidentally night theme works just fine in iBooks3 without changing the css.

Oh it’s fun this conversion lark, isn’t it.

 

To continue this: I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s best to not specify text colour at all. I got a Kindle Fire this morning and the ‘night’ theme plays up even with the text set as #000000. It also plays up with embedded fonts, but that’s another story…