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Originally Posted by exaltedwombat
Interesting. How do you rapidly convert from indd to epub? Do you find Export: epub useful for anything but the simplest designs? Can it cope with illustrations - I always found this a problem, though I haven't yet tried the latest versipon of InDesign?
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The epub export is close to useless as-is, but with a bit of massaging afterwards they turn out nice. We use InDesign 5.5. We have an indd template with a certain set of styles, and do a bit of formatting in advance of the export. Images, for instance, are placed inline in their own paragraph with the byline in a separate paragraph following that. I also format and style page breaks in a certain way that makes it easy to split the document in Sigil.
After exporting I import the epub to calibre, and use Modify Epub to embed metadata and cover. I have written a simple cmd script to replace the font with a non-mangled version if applicable (embedded fonts are needed for some books with special characters). I also replace the css with a hand-crafted one as the css generated by InDesign is ridiculous. Finally I run a set of replaces in Sigil, which among other things split the chapters into separate files and remove inline styling of img tags. Sigil 0.6 vastly simplifies the whole process. When the InDesign version is ready it takes me a couple of minutes to generate a new epub version, and this is also suitable for Kindle conversion.
The end result is not perfect, but IMHO better than most commercially available books. If you're interested I can see if I find the time to post the necessary files and our internal instructions, it would have to be a google-translated version. I should touch them up a little anyway, they tend to be ignored as I am basically the whole "ebook department" at our company.