[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by mtrahan

Between a) try to simplify the formatting by removing some styles while preserving formatting or b) create a simplified template file for ePub versions and import the text in it? If you have general advices on this part it will be much appreciated.

If a specific style isn't needed for the ePub version, you can just delete it. InDesign will ask you what to do with the elements that use that style, and you can just reassign them to another style that you'll be keeping.

If you are wanting to copy the entire text with no styles at all, you can just copy the text and then do a "Paste Without Formatting" into your new document, and then just block everything and assign it all to a single style. If, however, you are wanting to preserve some of the styles in the original, it would be way less work to just delete the styles you don't want and reassign the elements to another style than going through the entire document and selectively copying some parts of the text with formatting and some without.

One hint: if you have a style in your InDesign file and you copy text with formatting to a new document, InDesign will copy the style over to the new document unless your new document already has a style that is named exactly the same. If that's the case, then InDesign will not create a new style in your new document, but your copied text will take on the formatting of the style in the new document.

If I understand correctly, one of the most important thing here is to remove all the local formatting?

It depends on the version of InDesign you're working with. In CS4 you don't really have to worry about removing local formatting because InDesign will just ignore it. CS5 does keep the local formatting, but it makes your CSS file a mess if you have a lot of it.

To export in ePub, does the book have to be all "linked"? By that I mean that the main text is a very long text box all linked, but for example the very first pages (title, copyright, etc.) are separate are different masters (not 100% sure it is the good term though). Do I have to do something special here or I can leave them like this?

I haven't tried this with CS5. I know with CS4, the ePub export would fail miserably if you tried to export a single, long document - there was some page limit it imposed which basically required that you set up each chapter of your book as a separate .indd file and then put it all together as a .indb book file, and then export the book as an ePub. Basically, if a single .indd file was too long, you'd get an ePub with the first two or three pages and then a bunch of blanks, so it forced you to split your book up into chapters. A typical book chapter was more than short enough for the limitation unless you really had some long writing; I can't remember the actual page limit off the top of my head. Anyway, the solution sounds cumbersome, but it was actually a more organized way of doing a book and a lot of folks did their books that way anyway, so it wasn't really a problem. CS5 may have fixed this issue for all I know; I got into the habit of just doing it the CS4 way and haven't ever tried to export a single long document like that on CS5.

Finally, about fonts: there are many different fonts in the print-version, some PostScript, some TrueType, etc. I don't want to embed fonts, so I will uncheck this in ePub export from InDesign. My question is: do I need to change all the styles to an OpenType font before exporting or something (that's what the publisher thought)? Or if I choose to not embed fonts, InDesign will just ignore all fonts selection anyway so no need to change the formatting there? Not too sure I'm clear.

If you're not going to embed fonts, don't worry about it, they'll all be ignored.

Good luck!