Quote:
Originally Posted by amarie0
Ideally you format your book as a well-designed web site with formatting controlled by CSS, using the tags and markup allowed by the EPUB 2.x spec.
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This is really the question. Is it faster to create a good looking website and figure out the file structure for ePub rather than bother with InDesign at all?
Clearly CS5.5 has made strides towards better ePub output but at the end of the day is Dreamweaver + an ePub structure reference and a text editor faster?
Depends, I guess, on how picky you are!
And how quickly you pick up coding + file structuring. InDesign speeds up the overall packaging of an ePub but doesn't quite nail all the details of the presentation.
This whole ePub creation process is a mirror of early enhanced CDs, early website creation, etc. We all dreamed of a product to come along that would magically do all the dirty work for us but in the end it was always easier (if you planned on doing more than one) to learn the code and do it from scratch. Perhaps ePub development can learn from these bleeding edge moments in tech history. My first thought is how far open-source CMS and blog software have come towards the magical creation of highly functioning websites. What could be a parallel for etexts?