Hello, I'm working for a publishing house and we plan to release sook the ebooks under the ePub format. We're already selling books under Mobipocket format. Our books are made in InDesign and then usually printed. But now, we have also to start offering ePub files, and the font has to be (logically) that *.indd file.
Now the problem comes with the built-in export function of InDesign. It isn't acting properly:
- The images are put at the end of the ePub
- The Italics, bolds, etc. are lost*
- Paragraph styles are not respected (indentations, etc.)*
- Blank lines are stripped, altough I'd like them to be there: so it makes some difference between a paragraph separated from the previous one by a blank line, and a paragraph that goes just after the last one.
- I don't know how to divide chapters into several xhtml files so I can produce a "best practices" compliant epub.
So what do I have to do now is. Once I have exported the ePub, manually open the xhtml and css files and:
- xhtml: Put the html code of the images where it should go.
- css: edit font styles so that "italics" style is showed as italics, and so on.
- css: edit paragraph styles so that they're properly displayed.
- xhtml: edit by hand the blank lines with the "<p> </p>" trick.
- Totally pass of the separate xhtml files for the chapters. Instead, putting an especial paragraph style on the css that forces a page-break.
Now, that's a really huge work to do for some thoursands of books we have xD
I wouldn't maybe care if it really solved something but then I have had a very disgusting surprise (also repeated for the mobipocket books):
- I was looking the results in the ADE software, and everything was nice.
- I then proudly uploaded the file to a CyBook eReader (mobi file) and Chapter page breaks and Blank lines (shown on the mobipocket desktop reader) were no longer there!
- Ok, let's see what happens with ePub on the HanLin. Surprise, surprise: I can't really understand how many of you blame so much publishers and really let this piece of crappy rendering eReader in peace. It simply deleted or added spaces " " where it wanted (it's not really the file problem); stripped the blank lines and the page breaks; and totally messed up the paragraph and font styling.
- Oh and I can't test it on the Iliad because the screen has broken for the second time... wtf.
So, what should I do? I want to offer a competitive product, that really is liked among the readers, not a piece of crap taht anybody can produce. So, any tips, for anything?