Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
well the basic problem is that indesign will represent things internally in a fixed layout fashion. So whe you add an image to a page, it will represent the position of the image as "10cm from the top and 3 cm from the left" instead of "indetween the sentences so and so" as would be neccessary for reflowable documents.
THis particular problem is relatively easy to fix, however, the point is that the whole of indesign probably make assumptions like that and fixing the whole thing is going to be a rather non-trivial task.
A more philosophical issue is that you often dont want the sorts of structures you create for a fixed layout in a reflowable one. This is because things that look good at a certain page size, dont, at a very different page size. As a result your design tool needs tohelp you to design and preview your document at various page sizes.
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i see your point. i still think if adobe wants to integrate epub into indesign, they should make the effort and not do it halfway, even if it is a non-trivial task (to be expected, since as you correctly point out, print and reflowable are worlds apart).
the "preview at different sizes" is valid as well, but if type sizes can be converted to proportional instead of points as part of the conversion (i know, i know, yet another diametrally opposed way of thinking, non-trivial feature implementation...
) then a lot of the things that are ok at one size could work at other sizes. i would think the hardest to manage would be floated images on small screens, but new css rules allows zoomable images so there should be a way around that somehow and below a certain screen size the text would not wrap, the image would be inserted in between 2 lines of text (like currently in mobi books). as for image placement, as i mentioned, i could imagine linking the image to a specific paragraph rather than x,y coordinates ; it could easily be a question of only one or two clicks.
i don't know. you make valid points, but i think that true indesign epub integration would really help the transition for people (publishers, or print designers who want to make ebooks but are intimidated about learning a new technique) who have no interest in or even hostility towards ebooks. and adobe should be able to do a better job than the one they did so far.