Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Design For The New Publisher
Design For The New Publisher
Design For The New Publisher
By David Bergsland
Written and published in May, 2011 David Bergsland All Rights Reserved
Mankato, Minnesota http://radiqx.com info@radiqx.com Please let us know if there is anyway we can help you in you publishing endeavors.
ePUB Design
Formatting your ePUB without coding
I need to let you know of my assumptions here. This is a book for ministers. The focus is on publishing teaching, training, and educational materials for people with a real need to demonstrate good stewardship of resources. My contention is that with a little help and InDesign this can be done by any writer/designer, by the grace of God. Coding is anathema: Again, I must assume some things. My experience is that people like us can handle simple Web coding like HTML and CSS. However, most people who do what we do really dislike coding. It is a specialized skill not found often in creative people.
Document size
At present I am using a document size that lets me use a wider column width of six inches. This seems to give me better graphics when they are exported. It also lets me know that this is not print and that I need to shift to another design model in my head.
Font changes
Even though the ePUB spec says we can embed fonts, this cannot be done at present without cracking the code. Supposedly, we can choose fonts that are available on the iPad. But, InDesign does not allow us to edit the CSS to set up our fonts to do this. The iPad supports 33 fonts
Academy Engraved LET American Typewriter AppleGothic Arial Arial Rounded MT Bold Baskerville Bodoni 72 Bodoni 72 Oldstyle Bodoni 72 Small Caps Bradley Hand Chalkduster Cochin Copperplate Courier (& New) Didot Futura Georgia Gill Sans Helvetica (& Neue) Hoefler Text Marker Felt Optima Palatino Papyrus Party LET Snell Roundhand Times New Roman Trebuchet MS Verdana Zapfino
If you are a coder: you can also use the HTML character entities which will add symbol and Zapf Dingbat characters. You can also add the Unicode# for Zapf Dingbats. Youll need to crack the ePUB and edit the copy by hand.
Remember! The reader can change fonts at will: Reflow is the goal. That trumps typography in an ebook. Also remember, that an ePUB is the typographic wonder of the ebook world. Kindle, Nook and the rest are much more restricted. According to an article on ireaderreview.com the following fonts are available on the various ereaders. You quickly see that the iPad and iPhone give us exceptional choices. So buck up, Bucky! Kindle uses PMN Caecilia: this is a very readable slab serif. From Amazon: New Font Choices. Kindle now has three font styles to choose fromour standard Caecilia font, a condensed version of Caecilia, and a sans serif option so you can change your font style along with the font size.
Nook uses Helvetica Neue (sans-serif), Amasis (serif), and Light Classic (serif): Amasis is a more humanist slab serif. Sony uses Dutch 801 and Swiss 701: A Times variant and a Helvetica variant. The Kindle, Nook and Sony choices may be easily readable on their devices. But they certainly do not provide good typographic choices for a designer. Your only real font choices are serif or sans, plus you can add italic and bold: The problem, of course, is that serif or sans is not a font choice in InDesign. Hopefully, we will be able to control things like this in CS6. However, ebooks using these limited choices are selling like crazy. Kindle has a huge majority of the market (or it did until very recently). Kindle has gone below half and iPad has grown to over a third. If you want to sell to that market, you need to make a book that fits their paradigm.
Leading changes
We have no choices here until we can edit the CSS in our ePUBs. THE NEW PUBLISHER: http://radiqx.com
Eliminate tabs
Put your tabular materials in a separate InDesign file and export it as a PDF to rasterize and place into your ePUB document. HTML/CSS does not support tabs. The resulting http://bergsland.org/blog: THE SKILLED WORKMAN
pixilated type is the same problem we have been dealing with throughout this exercise.
Eliminate tables
Put your tables in a separate InDesign file and export it as a PDF to rasterize and place into your ePUB document. InDesign 5.5 will export the tables, but they will look bad with all borders and backgrounds deleted or changed. The problem, of course, is that the resulting type is very pixilated. In reality, you need to think of a way to design around the need for either tabs or tables. They simply do not work well or translate into ebook limitations.
Eliminate borders
Put your frames with borders in a separate InDesign file and export it as a PDF to rasterize and place into your ePUB document. You can only use borders on a graphic. The ePUB readers cannot put borders on a frame. If you have type in the frame make it clear enough to work as a Web graphic. Basically that is all ebooks allow.
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http://bergsland.org/blog: THE SKILLED WORKMAN
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You do need to set up a TOC (Layout>> Table of Contents). You will chose this Table of Contents in the ePUB Export dialog. The styles you choose for your TOC will be added to the bookmarks in the column to the right of your ePUB. You do not do leaders or page numbers as leaders do THE NEW PUBLISHER: http://radiqx.com
not work and page numbers do not exist in ebooks [more accurately the page numbers change all time as the reader changes fonts and/or type size]. A major problem: As you can see above, I have two styles I have mapped to H2 and two styles mapped to H3. I also chose No Page Number, which also turns off the leader. However, the ePUBs would not validate. I kept getting cryptic messages about TOC entries missing. I finally had to delete all the TOC entries except for H1 and H2 to get the ePUB to validate. Practicality rules in these things. You can spend time and money trying to figure out why these things are so or you can publish books. I publish.
You need to write the metadata before you export the ePUB. As you can see above, this is just partially complete. The important things here are the title, description, and http://bergsland.org/blog: THE SKILLED WORKMAN
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keywords. You find this dialog in the File menu under the Get Info command It is required to fill out the File Info description page. You open it at the bottom of the File menu.
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There are many more like this on the eBook Retail Distribution Guidelines page of the Lulu site. If you do not follow all of them precisely, they will not publish your book.
This is my first attempt at tagging for this document. I am always surprised by something. I have no idea what it is at this point. But, I will probably change this a couple more times before I finish the book. I wont know how this is going to work until I see the exported ePUB. In general, it looks pretty goodfor an ePUB. There is always a little massaging, but it is minimal for a book this complex. I have looked at the CSS file generated. From what I have seen, InDesign adds a ridiculous amount of code to do a simple job. But, it works and you dont need to worry http://bergsland.org/blog: THE SKILLED WORKMAN
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about it. In earlier versions it simply didnt workin 5.5 it does and the ePUB validates. There is certainly nothing wrong with editing the CSS by hand: it is recommendedif you can stand that sort of thing. As mentioned, I do some of it in Website design, but I really have major problems staying awake while doing so.
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Bullets & Numbers: I leave them at the defaults. As mentioned, you really need to eliminate all special indents and tabs and let the defaults carry the day. Other than that, you will need to crack the ePUB and edit the CSS file. Hopefully CS6 will give us some better options.
View after Exporting: Always check this. Always look over the exported ePUB in ADE before you validate and upload. You also need to go over the ePUB in iBooks. I am still regularly surprised by something that needs to be fixed. This is not a smooth process yet. It is really good that InDesign can now export ePUBs that can be validated. But it is not smooth yetand probably never will be uneventful. But then that is still true for the print versions also and Ive been doing that for decades. http://bergsland.org/blog: THE SKILLED WORKMAN
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Image size: Finding out this information is like trying to pull hens teeth (and no, they dont have teeth). The best I can find is that the iPad and most smart phones require 560 x 800 pixels or 600 x 900 pixels. At this point, I make my images to size, and vector if possible. I make them wide enough to fit the column of type and place them as inline graphics (unanchored). But InDesign automated conversion THE NEW PUBLISHER: http://radiqx.com
processes trash the graphics. So, I open them in Photoshop and save them as JPEGs. If I use bitmapped images, I use PSDs (Photoshops native format) at 300 dpi set to the width of the column. Ive found that I really need to save them as JPEGs. I keep the original PSDs in case I want to go back to the way the image was before the JPEG compression ruined it with all the artifacts around the edges. Of course, for a book like this one with many screen captures, it is not possible to maintain the 300 dpi. The image quality suffers, but there does not seem to much we can do about this. When I hear of a better plan, Ill post it in the blog and update this information. Preserve Appearance from Layout: I check this but I am not sure why I bother. It seems to help certain images in iBooks. However, I am continuing to experiment with it. Ill post new knowledge in The Skilled Workman. ebook graphics are ghastly: I continue to fight the good fight, but you really need to question why you are even including graphics. The iPad does a good job, but the ePUB format itself does not support graphic excellence. Maybe the eventual support of SVG (vector) graphics will solve these problems. Resolution (ppi): 300you need the highest resolution possible to look good on the better machines like the iPad and the Retina Displays of the iPhones. I imagine the other tablets wont be quite as good, but they will be getting better. Image size: The choices are Fixed and Relative to page. Ive was using fixed. I experimented with Relative to Page in 5.5. That seems to blur the images horribly. But that was just in Adobe Digital Editions. I didnt have an iPad, so I really didnt know. Now that I got my wife an iPad2 things have changed a lot. I now use Relative to Page, and this seems to make good graphics that are the width of the page. I want them the width of the page because they are basically lowres bitmap images. So that is where it is now. Image Alignment and Spacing: Because my images are all inline the alignment is controlled by the paragraph style used and that is flush left, so I dont expect any changes when I click the Left button here. It doesnt make any difference as I make all my images the width of the column. I http://bergsland.org/blog: THE SKILLED WORKMAN
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leave the spacing at the defaults and use auto leading for the special paragraph style I set up to hold my images. Image Conversion: I leave this at automatic, and set the JPEG options to High. The image quality in ePUBs is bad enough without any JPEG artifacts produced by compressing the JPEGs too far. However, for my font design book (with nearly 300 graphics) this made my ePUB nearly 20 MB. So, I changed the quality to medium and set the resolution at 150 dpi. Because the images all almost all screen captures, the new ePUB looks very good on the iPad. Ignore Object Export Settings: I leave it unchecked even though I have never set custom settings for any particular image.
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Contents
This last page is very important. Several of these options radically control how your ePUB text will look after it is exported. Format for EPUB content: I always choose XHTML. I havent seen any recommendations to use DTBook. Use InDesign TOC Style: It used to be that you had to set up the default style to work. Now you can save a named style to use. As mentioned, be careful not to use too many levels or multiple styles to the same level. That has made ePUBs that do not validate. Break Document at Paragraph style: You need to check this and use your headline style. This is working well. Generate CSS: This works. Make sure you uncheck Include Embedded Fonts. No one supports this yet. Use Existing CSS File: This requires coding. It may be the best solution but I havent tried it yet.
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For those of you who are ready, this helps a lot The problem is that even with CS5.5 the resulting CSS has some major issues. Of course, you must know CSS to do anything about it. But some of the things are relatively easy. Make sure the font choices are good: I would double-check to at least make sure that the serif and sans-serif names are correct. Then make them work for the fonts in the iPad list. Define pthe basic paragraph tag: InDesign does not do this. It defines all the classes you set up in the Export Tags dialog, but p is not defined. Do anything else you can figure out from Castros ePUB Straight to the Point: It all depends on how comfortable you are with code, HTML, and CSS. You can open the whole folder as a site in Dreamweaver. Edit carefully, and work on a copy if you are not good with the code.
Validate it
Redo the proof as often as necessary. When you have what you like, go to: www.threepress.org/document/epub-validate It should validate. If it does not, all I can do is pray you will be given information that will enable you to figure it out. The failure messages tend to be very cryptic. But both Lulu and threepress are getting much better about this and letting you know what is causing the problem. Upload to Lulu If it does validate, then you can start a new ebook project at Lulu. As Ive mentioned they are an official aggregator for iBookstore. They will give you an ISBN# and get your ePUB listed on iBookstore. Upload to PubIt! You can use the same ePUB you produced for Lulu. You cannot use Lulus ISBN (but PubIt does not require one). Youll need a cover with a different resolution.
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