With Adobe^® InDesign^® CS5.5 and Typefi Publish, it is now possible to automate production of great-looking EPUBs without having to manually configure your content within InDesign or hard code your EPUB XML.

Adobe introduced the InDesign CS5.5 upgrade from CS5 specifically to release its EPUB optimisations in line with market demand, rather than wait for their full CS6 release. If you are producing or planning to produce books in EPUB format, then InDesign CS5.5 is your new best friend.

There are three main features for EPUBs in InDesign CS5.5 which have been introduced specifically to provide better control over the exported EPUB file:

1. The Articles Panel.
2. The ability to specify export tags for paragraph and character styles.
3. Object Export Options that can be applied to any object (text, graphic, image).

There are also significant changes to the options within the export panel. To put these changes in context, first we’ll provide a little (simplified) explanation of what happens when content is exported from InDesign into EPUB.

InDesign to EPUB: implications of reflowable content

The EPUB format is for reflowable text, which means the concept of the 'page' is fluid and governed by the amount of text that shows up on the screen in your e-reader device. Since e-readers allow font size to change, fonts to change, and are of different screen dimensions, the amount of text showing is never fixed. EPUB does allow for new pages, that is, you can set the start of new pages within EPUB. This is generally used for major section breaks, such as chapters, and the new 'page' is actually a new HTML file.

Reflowable content means that all the content is laid out in a single 'column', with all content elements in-line, that is, flowing one after the other. If the content being exported has been laid out for print, with content elements sitting alongside each other in a way that works for print pages, decisions need to be made about the order in which that content appears when it is placed into one long reflowable column. If this is uncontrolled, your beautifully right-aligned heading may actually follow your main story.

InDesign CS5.5’s new features overcome this problem by providing you with control over how your content is exported. As some of you will also have realised by now, in a Typefi workflow you have even more control over your content and the problem is unlikely to arise. We’ll get to that.

The Articles Panel

In the Typefi workflow, the Articles Panel isn’t needed because you are able to flow your content into an optimised EPUB template in the desired order. See Generating EPUBs in the Typefi worflow, below.

For customers new to Typefi with backlist books already fully composed in InDesign that require EPUB conversion rather than production, the Articles Panel provides an easier way to manage that process. In a finished document, the Articles Panel (found in Windows > Articles) allows you to place all your content objects into the panel, where they can be arranged and rearranged into the desired export order. See User Tips: Articles Panel for more information on using this feature.

Export tags for paragraph and character styles

EPUB is built on styles using a CSS stylesheet. Whether you use the default stylesheet or a customised stylesheet (see Exporting to EPUB in InDesign CS5.5 below), your text content will be exported and tagged as paragraph and character styles. Typefi customers are well-positioned to take advantage of this feature since they are already using best-practice workflows when it comes to paragraph and character styles in InDesign.

EPUB uses tags such as h1, h2, and h3 for headings and p for paragraphs. Unless defined, paragraph styles in InDesign are exported as class names. So your paragraph style "Chapter Title" will actually be exported as the default p with class="chapter-title" and styles of that class will use the settings you define, such as font size and style, paragraph alignment, and space before and after. However, some e-reader devices don’t support individual paragraph styling, so your carefully selected fonts and alignment won’t hold on your most important styles such as titles. The styles will, however, hold if they are tagged as EPUB headings. The export tagging option on paragraph styles make sure your chapter titles come out as h1 or h2 (depending on your book hierarchy), by allowing you to designate the style as the required export tag.

Similarly, character styles can be designated as em, strong or span. These work the same way as in HTML, that is, em is generally used for italics and strong is used for bold, while span is used for all other styles. Setting your italics character style to be tagged as em means that it will work in every e-reader device using that device’s em style (which may or may not be italics), without having to worry about whether the device supports italics in a specific font.

Object export options

An object is any frame, including text frames (such as the main story frame in a Typefi template). InDesign CS5.5 allows you to select any object and apply specific export settings to that object.

This feature is aimed at images, but you can in fact use it for other types of content within a frame, including text and tables. The settings allow you to apply alt-txt from your image file metadata, which means that images in your EPUB file will have alternative text that can be read by devices that support text-to-voice, for example, either now or in the future.

The main setting for EPUB is applying custom settings for your images, such as the rasterisation type, image size, alignment, spacing before and after, and insertion of "page" breaks before or after.

Typefi users are best placed to use this feature, because you can apply the object export settings to Typefi element prototypes, and the settings will be included on every instance of that element. (The alternative is going through your documents and specifying the settings on each individual object.) For example, you can set up a Typefi element just for photographs with custom rasterisation to jpeg, another element for art illustrations with rasterisation to png, and another for logos with rasterisation to gif.

Exporting to EPUB in InDesign CS5.5

In InDesign CS5, the file export to EPUB is from File > Export to Digital Editions, which brings up the Digital Editions Export Options window. In InDesign CS5.5, EPUB is one of a number of specific formats chosen from a drop-down menu when you select File > Export. Choosing the format as EPUB brings up the EPUB Export Options window. In both windows, there are three tabs: General, Image and Content. Some options from InDesign CS5 have not changed, such as including Document Metadata, but there are several new options in InDesign CS5.5 that provide much more control in how the content is exported.

Typefi’s new EPUB module allows you to define your export options within your template so that they are automatically applied when you run the EPUB job option in Typefi Publish. See further below for Generating EPUBs in the Typefi workflow.

New features in the General tab include:

• EPUB Cover options, so that you can include a cover image file that will display the book in an ebook "shelf", "library" or store.
• Ordering, to provide control over the order of your content.
• Book Margins, which allows you to specify in ems or pixels how much space you want to separate your text from the screen edge of the e-reading device.

New features in the Image tab include:

• Setting the image resolution globally.
• Setting images at fixed pixel dimensions or allowing them to resize proportional to the page (screen view).
• Setting global controls on image alignment and spacing.
• The ability to turn off object export settings.

New features in the Contents tab include:

• An option to set a paragraph style to determine "page" breaks.
• Footnote handling.
• An option to remove forced line break.

Generating EPUBs in the Typefi workflow

The workflow for generating EPUBs via Typefi Publish is, in principle, the same as for other formats: content is prepared in Word or XML and flowed through the Typefi Engine into an InDesign template for output to the final format. In this case, an EPUB format file is generated instead of a PDF.

Specifically, a user sets up a new EPUB job option that runs content through a template which has been optimised for EPUB output. The user then publishes book content into the different formats — print, PDF, EPUB — by selecting the correct job option.

Typefi Publish now comes with an additional module for automating the export process from InDesign into EPUB. The EPUB template includes a table configuring the user’s export options as described above, which is read and processed when the job is run.

The module brings EPUB into the range of formats offered through Typefi’s single-source publishing system. The big advantage for book publishers is that they can bring EPUB production in-house and retain the same control over quality and turn-around times that they enjoy for print and PDF publications.

More information

Some User Tips are provided here on: the Articles Panel, Embedding Metadata, Non-printing Content and Conditional Text

See also Adobe videos on creating EPUBs using InDesign CS5.5:

1. Create More Compelling Ebooks with InDesign CS5.5
2. Styles Mapped to Tags in InDesign CS5.5 for Improved EPUB Export
3. Controlling Order of Content Export from InDesign CS5.5 to EPUB Without Changing Your Layout and Without Writing Code/
4. Using Object Export Options to Customize how Objects and Images Export to Epub
5. Adding Audio and Video Content to EPUB from InDesign CS5.5
6. New Export Options for EPUB in InDesign CS5.5
7. Creating Covers and Title Pages for EPUB in InDesign CS5.5