Generally ePub can be made to display nearly the same on most readers but it depends on what you call "nice." If you try and make it look exactly like the book then you are in trouble but if you realize that ePub is a format that displays the information in a book with the user in control of more of the presentation then you can be successful. iPad has lots of different readers available so it is better to specify the reader in use rather than the platform. You wouldn't say it looks bad on windows without specifying the application you are using and similarly for any general purpose hardware.
Don't feel discouraged. Perhaps you might want to try Atlantis and let it make the ePub and see how it might look without hand coding the bits and bytes. They have a demo version.
Dale
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