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Welcome, everyone, to Instant InDesign®--
the Video Podcast for learning template design and high-speed production skills.
I'm your host, Gabriel Powell. [Adobe Certified Instructor InDesign®]
And this is Episode 10: Creating an eBook with InDesign (Part 1)
Over the past couple of years, the eBook industry has exploded.
Hundreds of thousands of eBooks are now available
to be instantly downloaded to your computer or favorite eBook reader.
Since more and more books are being digitally consumed,
it's now more important than ever to learn how to create eBooks.
In this episode, I'm going to show you how to use InDesign to create an eBook.
Now when I say eBook, I'm not actually referring to a PDF file.
Instead, I'm referring to an ePub file.
Although PDF files have been traditionally used as eBooks,
they aren't easily viewed on small screens, such as those found on
Smartphones and various eBook readers.
The ePub format, on the other hand, was specifically designed
to enable content to adapt to different screen sizes and resolutions.
Let me show you what I mean.
This InDesign document contains a chapter from a book,
and like a typical novel, most of the pages are text-heavy.
Notice that the margins are quite wide and each page has a page number on it.
This pages even has a graphic and a caption on it.
All right--let's take a look at the PDF version of this chapter.
This is really an exact reproduction of the InDesign file.
I could add interactive features to it,
such as navigation buttons,hyperlinks, and bookmarks--and call it an eBook.
And when viewed on a computer monitor, it would look great.
However, if I wanted to read the eBook on a small eBook reader, such as my iPhone,
it would be difficult to read because I would have to zoom in to even read the text,
and I would have to zoom out when I want to take a look at the images.
So now let's take a look at the ePub version of this same chapter.
I have it open in Adobe Digitial Editions, which is a free eBook reader from Adobe
that allows you to read both ePub files and PDF files.
With ePub files, the content is reflowable
so as I resize this window, notice that the text can reflow.
I can also modify the size of the text.
I'll increase the size of the text by clicking this button, up here--
and notice that, as I do, the text is reflowing as well.
To switch between pages, I can drag this scroll bar or I can click these navigation arrows.
And if I want to quickly jump to a specific chapter I can use this Table of Contents,
which is located at the left side of the window in Adobe Digital Editions.
In other eBook readers, this Table of Contents is often displayed in the form of a menu.
This particular eBook also contains a regular Table of Contents
that appears at the beginning of the book.
And notice these entries are underlined.
They're underlined because they're hyperlinks.
So I can click on one to quickly jump to that part of the book.
Although you're not required to include both types of Table of Contents in an eBook,
I like to include both of them, because it gives the reader more than one way to navigate.
All right--so now that you know what an ePub file is,
let me show you how to create an ePub file with InDesign.
All you have to do is go up to the File menu and choose Export for Digital Editions;
choose a location for the ePub file, and click Save;
specify all of the appropriate options in this dialogue box and then click Export.
Now, unless you'v set up your InDesign document properly,
it won't be correctly translated into an ePub file.
So before I actually export this chapter, let me first give you some best practices
for setting up an InDesign file that can be accurately converted to the ePub format.
One of the most important things you need to do is consistently apply paragraph styles
and character styles to all the text in your document
because InDesign uses the applied styles
to determine how the text is formatted in the ePub file.
I've already applied styles to most of the text in this document.
I've applied a paragraph style to the Chapter number.
I've applied one to the Chapter title,
and I've applied a paragraph style to all of the body text in this document.
The first paragraph in each chapter uses a different paragraph style, called Body First,
because the first word in the paragraph is uniquely formatted.
Notice that the first character is larger, and the rest of the first word is set in small caps.
So in order to maintain this unique formatting, I need to make sure that
character styles have been applied to these letters.
Otherwise, the formatting will be lost in the ePub file.
Now, if I select this first letter and open up the character styles panel,
I can see that no character style has been applied to it yet--
and the same thing goes for these 2 letters here.
You see, initially I formatted these characters with nested styles.
So if I double click the Body First paragraph style and select the Drop Caps
and Nested Styles category, you can see that there are 2 nested styles.
ICap is being applied to the first character
and Small Caps is being applied through the first word in the paragraph.
Unfortunately, the formatting that's applied with Nested Styles is not retained in the ePub file.
So you have to apply the actual character styles to the text.
Now I could manually select these letters and apply character styles to them,
but if you have a document with a lot of nested styles, that would take way too long.
So here's how you can speed up that process.
I'll go ahead and zoom out and deselect the frame,
and I'll choose Edit, Find Change.
Here in the Find Change dialogue box,
I can automate the process of applying actual character styles
to all the text that's formatted with nested styles.
To do that, make sure that the Find what and Change to fields are empty
and then, here in the Find Format section, click on this icon, here.
If you don't see it, that's because you need to click More Options
at the bottom of the dialogue box.
So I'll go ahead and click here to specify an attribute to find.
I don't actually want to find any of these formatting attributes.
What I want do is find an actual character style--
and this time I want to look for ICap--and then click OK.
And then, in the Change Format section, I'm going to do the same thing.
I'll go ahead and move the dialogue box out of the way and click Find.
It finds that first character, and then all I have to do is click Change
or Change All, if I have multiple instances of this.
Now, nothing was actually replaced.
Instead, the character style, ICap, was applied to this character.
I'll go ahead and do the same thing for the other character style.
I can go ahead and clear these settings and start over.
This time, I'll choose Small Caps.
Click Find Next--it locates it--click Change,
and the character style Small Caps has now been applied to these 2 letters.
I'll click Done--and notice here, in the Character Styles panel,
that Small Caps is now actually applied
and ICap is now actually applied to the first character.
So nested styles are great, because they help you format a document quickly.
But when it comes to making ePub files,
you need to apply actual character styles to the text.
So this method allows you to automate that process.
It's also important to apply character styles to all the bold and italic words in your document.
So if I select this italic word here,
you can see that a character style wasn't ever applied to that.
Now imagine having an entire document full of italic-sized words that were locally formatted.
You wouldn't want to have to go and select each word and apply a character style to it.
So that's when you can use the Find Change dialogue box, like I showed you a moment ago.
You would simply choose Find Change from the Edit menu
and then make sure that the Find what and Change to fields are empty.
In the Find Format section, go over here to the Basic Character Forrmats category
and then specify the Italic font style.
I'll click OK--and notice that shows up here in the Find Format section.
And then you want to change that to an actual character style,
and I've already created one in here, so it shows up in this list.
So I'll go ahead and select the Italic character style and click OK.
And now I'd want to choose Find;
confirm that that's a word that I want to apply the character style to
and if so, click Change.
I could also click Change Find so that it changes the word and finds the next one;
confirm it, click Change Find, and keep doing that until all the words
have the italic character style applied to them.
So now that I've applied paragraphing character styles to all the text in my document,
I can be sure that my formatting will be retained in the final ePub file.
Something else that you should do when preparing an InDesign document
for the ePub forrmat is to place all the text and graphics within 1 continuous story.
And this is important because it's the easiest way to control the exact position
of all the layout elements in the ePub file.
Let me show you what I mean.
I'll go ahead and zoom out, so we can see more pages at the same time.
Notice that each page in this document contains a main text frame
and all of these text frames are linked together as 1 single, continuous story.
I'll navigate to the page that has a graphic on it and zoom in on that page,
because I'd like you to notice that this image and its caption are currently grouped together
and that text wrap has been applied to it.
So this image is essentially floating on the page.
So when I convert this document to an ePub file,
that graphic is not going to be in the right position.
I'll go ahead and export this document to an ePub file so that you can see
what'll happen to the image and the caption.
I'll just save it on the desktop.
I'll just continue using the Default options, and I'll click Export.
Now, to make this book a little bit easier to view, I'll just expand it to fit the screen.
And then I'm going to scroll through the book--
and notice that the image and the caption have been placed all the way
at the end of all the text in the eBook.
To fix this, I need to go back to InDesign
and place this image and its caption into the Text Flow.
I'll first ungroup it--I'll go up to the Object menu and choose Ungroup.
Now I'll anchor the image to its own paragraph.
I'll select the image and choose Cut, which is Command + X, or Ctrl + X on the PC.
I'll insert an extra paragraph return between these 2 paragraphs here,
which is where the image should be located.
And now I'll paste the image: Command + V, or Ctrl + V on the PC.
And now that the image has been anchored to this paragraph,
you can see the cursor blinking to the right of the image, here.
Now I can actually apply a paragraph style to the paragraph that the image is anchored to.
I've already made a paragraph style for it, and it's called, "Image Center."
I'll scroll down to it--there it is--and I'll just go ahead and apply that.
And notice that it centers the image within the frame.
So even if I were to resize this image--
I'll just select the image, hold Shift + Command or Shift + Ctrl on the PC.
As I resize the image from the center,
it'll move up to the next page--and it's centered within that margin.
Because I used a paragraph style to format that paragraph,
the image will actually appear centered in the ePub file.
Now I just need to insert the captions, so I'll select all of the text in this frame,
I'll cut it, and then just paste it below the image.
Now there's an extra paragraph return in there, so I'll delete that,
delete this extra frame, and I'm ready to go.
So what if your publication contains a lot of highly designed elements,
such as sidebar notes, specifically positioned images, and captions?
Well, you either have to accept that your publication will look different as an ePub file
or you have to convert it to a PDF file instead--
because the PDF format will preserve the exact appearance of your layout.
You see, not all content works well as an eBook in the ePub format.
With simple layouts, such as novels, you probably won't notice much of a difference
between the print version and the ePub version.
But highly designed layouts, such as
magazines and textbooks, will look very different.
So it's often better to convert them to a PDF file.
All right--so now that you understand how to get your images
in the right position within an ePub file, let me move on to talk about Master Items.
It's important to understand that Master Items are actually ignored
when you export to the ePub file.
So elements, such as running headers and page numbers,
won't show up in the ePub file.
You can easily identify a Master Item because it has a dotted border around its frame,
which is the case here, with this frame that contains the page number.
Since ePub files are designed to adapt to various eBook reading devices,
there is actually no way to know where pages will begin and end
until the book has been opened on a particular eBook reader.
So that's why repeating Master page elements, like page number and writing headers,
are ignored when a publication is converted to an ePub file.
Now if you ever have a particular Master Item that should be part of an ePub file,
you're going to have to override it--and then I also recommend that you anchor it
within the main text flow so that you can control its position within the ePub file.
By the way--some eBook readers will actually calculate page numbers for you
when you open an eBook--and they'll even recalculate the page numbers
after you've changed the size of the text.
All right--so now that you understand that the ePub format does not define page structure,
I should also point out that the content of an ePub file
typically flows together, in 1 continuous stream.
So even though the text in this document is laid out on separate pages,
the page breaks will not be maintained and all of the content will flow together in the ePub file.
Even if you insert forced page breaks,
InDesign ignores them when you convert the layout to an ePub file.
So how do you force certain content to start on its own page?
Well, that's exactly what I'm going to show you how to do in Part 2.
So stay tuned for Episode 11,
where I'll show you how to create page breaks, set up the Table of Contents,
insert hyperlinks and cross-references, add metadata,
and export the final ePub file.
If you would like some more in-depth information about creating ePub files,
check out my article in the October/November 2009 issue of InDesign magazine.
And if you have any questions about creating eBooks with InDesign
or any other InDesign feature, I'm happy to answer them.
To ask a question, go to InstantInDesign.com and click the Ask a Question button.
[InstantInDesign.com] [Your resource for learning template design and high-speed production skills with Adobe InDesign]
