Thread: Creator Indesign to Kindle Image Size
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Old 03-24-2015, 05:01 PM   #9
Hitch
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bphil00 View Post
Hitch,
can you expand on this a little?
What are some important tweaks you make to the ePub prior to running thru KindleGen?
Can you point me towards resources/information on this?
Thanks!
Hi, Bphil00:

Well...not really. I could point you, generically, to some things: INDD won't set media queries, for example, for KF8 styles versus KF7. Obviously, that has to be done for all sorts of things; text boxes, images, etc. That's all hand work.

Anything that you're doing differently, for, say, Dropcaps or Initial Caps or Raised Initials--media queries. For tables, you are likely using hidden, coupled with media queries, so that you (maybe) have an image for the KF7's, but a real table for the KF8's.

All of this--all of it--has to be redone pre-KindleGen/KP/KDP. Atop that, you have general changes to CSS, overall, if you are not using identical CSS for ePUB and MOBI, due to mobi limitations. (Or vice-versa, when that happens). If you have SVG images, you may need to make tweaks.

You have to clean-up (we just regex it) all the styles output by INDD, pre-ePUB anyway, or, rather, pre-final-ePUB. All the char-style-overrides that you can, get rid of. Get rid of all the print-spacing commands that will simply screw up the eBooks. Kerning, etc. All that's gotta go.

I don't know of a single resource, a book, that has all of this type of thing in it. (If I were smart, I'd write it, but keeping up with it would be a full-time job in and of itself, and I'm a bit busy). We're one of the few conversion houses (Indy) that accept INDD files for intake these days, because most can't handle it. (Well, let's face it--most "conversion houses" are either offshore, or using Calibre, not really coding by hand, anyway, so they wouldn't know HOW to do this work.)

Almost everything I know, and my crews know, about this, has been learnt by trial and error. That's the only real resource I know. I'm not being deliberately unhelpful; it's just...as I've said before, like fingerprints, no two books are the same, and it's hard to come up with a one-size-fits-all scenario.

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