What am I just not getting about epub?

[Dave Berk]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

IIRC, no.

Thanks.

[WillAdams]

What do your stylesheets look like?

If everything is styled as Normal but dressed up w/ local formatting the local formatting will be discarded --- that seems to be what's happening.

In order to get epub to work properly _everything_ must be styled using character and paragraph styles in a suitable hierarchy.

William

[brewt]

I have noticed that when I make an Epub out of InDesign, the formatting seems to be that of the original source document, and nothing I've done (yet) in inDesign effects the epub. I probably don't have somehting set up good in InDesign.

Message #29 of this thread has an attachment that has all my source. The epub in that zip is bad - Message #39 of this thread has the latest-generation build out of Calibre that I would deem successful.

Epub generation out of InDesign with THAT as the source file group is all still wrong - just the TOC shows up, no links, no nothing.

Not willing to give up on it JUST yet, I:
A) Built an InDesign Book (which is just a container for InDesign Documents)
B) Converted my html source back to Word Docs, in order to:
C) Place the Word Docs in InDesign Documents, 1 .doc per book per document. Ended up with 4 IdCs3 documents (Toc, Philemon, 1st Peter, 2nd Peter) in the InDesign Book.
D) Hmmm. Cross-Media Exporting to Epub is not available for InDesign Books - only InDesign Documents. So if you can't get it all into 1 InDesign Document, IDcs3 cannot export it to Epub - it can only print it. (Kinda like Quark, so the "book" metaphor in both programs are print-only constructs).
E) So I exported a Postscript file of the IDcs3 book, Distilled a PDF, used Any2epub from calibre to make an epub from that pdf (attached here for a laugh) - no hyperlinks, no space between books or chapter, no working toc. The Comments/Footnotes evaporated, too.
F) The PDF doesn't have working hyperlinks either - If I think about it long enough, I might be able to get that to work there.

So, InDesign is still beyond my best understanding for making Epubs. Calibre seems to have worked (thanks to Mr. Goyal's continued efforts).


As far as styles go, I built the original documents in Microsoft Word, and used standard Styles in word - Title, Heading 1, Normal, Emphasis, etc. Saved as Html-Filtered.

Word embeds the style calls into the html itself, so it's kinda like a css, but not quite. If were truly clever, I would build a set of css's to do what I want to mimick the Word styles I'm interested in, and then try again. Thing is, I'm wanting to do tricks I'm having trouble getting Word to accomplish - and I don't feel ready to make the leap to DreamWeaver yet (just too many handy things in Word, like spell checker, grammer checker, macros, etc for me to chuck it)

-bjc

[brewt]

As if there wasn't enough dead-horse-beating going on around here.....

Ok, so I figured out how to export a multi-document epub from InDesign (it IS in the "book" part of IdCs3 - an "I-didn't-know-it-was-there" menu).

Still wrecks the Word-built sub-tocs in the individual documents - they are now referring off to the original html source. Another thing to figure out in ID.

It does create a toc - of a sort. I don't personally feel like I'm in complete control yet, but it's getting a little better. Yet another epub attached.

So, this leads me off to other obvious huntings on epub creation. I found these at Adobe:

Digital Publishing Center:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/digitalpublishing/

Creating Epubs with InDesign:
http://blogs.adobe.com/digitaleditio...sign-epub.html

Best Practices:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/digitalp...ces-1_0_3.epub

Authoring:
http://blogs.adobe.com/digitaleditions/authoring/

Of course, before I can get CS3 to work, they want me to upgrade to CS4:
http://blogs.adobe.com/digitaleditions/

The 300k chunk size limitation comes up regularly, and Adobe seems to think the limitation has to do with Sony Readers. True?

-bjc

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by brewt

As if there wasn't enough dead-horse-beating going on around here.....


The 300k chunk size limitation comes up regularly, and Adobe seems to think the limitation has to do with Sony Readers. True?

-bjc

Well sort of true. They actually say the limit is for portable devices and Sony is certainly one of those. The reader extracts the xhtml file from the container in some fashion and loads it into memory. This is so pagination can be accomplished on the file. I believe the real limit is likely the 100K or so compressed size of the file since it is likely they use it compressed. The Sony 505 has 256K of memory I believe but leaves about 190K for the user. They may be sneaking a bit of user memory for this task or using cache on a memory device but I am not sure. In any event the Sony will choke if the file is too big.

Dale

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

The Sony 505 has 256K of memory I believe but leaves about 190K for the user.

The Sony has 256 MB of flash memory for file storage, but the memory that matters here is RAM and the Sony apparently has 64MB of RAM. This is way more than the 300KB text limit, even allowing for the Operating System's use of memory. For comparison, FBReader always reads the entire ebook into memory and it tends to hang on 5-10 MB CHM files when there is only 64MB of memory, but not on any smaller files. FBReader does not handle CSS and this may make a significant difference, but 300KB is a tiny limit for modern hardware and indicates that Adobe DE is a memory hog.

[brewt]

Damn wall is winning.

Ok, so now this is making even less sense to me than before.

IF we were to try to use InDesign to build an Epub (which the Adobe forums says is the right thing to do - gotta think about the deals with Sony, etc), you can.

However, one of the features of epub is Css with Xhtml. In fact, were you to rename you .epub to .zip you could extract it and see the html files and the css files and the fonts you embedded.

Except you cannot import those things onto an InDesign Document. You have to import/place a Word Document (or InCopy). So all the cool tricks you can do with Css is lost in InDesign, 'cause it don't see it so good - word strips it out when saving a a Word Doc. And I can't see where to import a css into indesign, because, well, it would ignore it any way because it's using Word Styles. So you have to build the styles into InDesign. Except, they are over-ridden when importing a Word Document by the Word styles, which are then ignored when exported as an epub because they aren't css styles.

So you get a plain epub with nothing cool in it.


Sooooo.... back to Calibre (0.4.95).....if I build an html file in Word, and convert the Word Styles to a .css file and remove the word styles from the html file, I then have to hand-relink it back in Calibre or I get a blank epub - the html is there, but it needs the .css to display.

It seems that font embedding isn't in Calibre (yet) - as the indesign seems to sometimes have (even though my font du jour SAYS it can be embedded, ID is not including it in the package today - 'nother myst'ry), but it really doesn't matter since there seems to be almost no style control in InDesign in the output epub. That at least I have any skill in exerting. It still keeps going back to the source Word doc, if you tell it to NOT export css style names only (guess that makes some sense). otherwise it strips the styles.


Is font embedment/css something to look for in calibre? Or do I just once again not know how?

-bjc


baffled-y-er and baffled-y-er




ooop - forgot the attachment. Word Document, what I'm seeing in Indesign, and the epub. 3 different critters, if you ask me.

[kovidgoyal]

font embedding is on my todo list

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by brewt

back to Calibre (0.4.95).....if I build an html file in Word, and convert the Word Styles to a .css file and remove the word styles from the html file, I then have to hand-relink it back in Calibre

I have not used it, but if you are familiar with Word then BookCreator Tool v2.0 (actually now v2.51) is worth checking out. If it is missing some features you want for making ePubs, then =X= may be able to add them for you.

[brewt]

Yes, thanks, I've whirled up Book Creator. It is very nice. I've got my own macros that do basically the same thing with regard to formatting. Using it to make output seems to limited (at least me) to single-document books, and I'm finding myself happier with multi-doc books.

Also, he has the macros locked down, so I can't modify them directly, and end up needing to re-modify the pages to what I want them to look like. Not that what he has built in is bad, it's just not what I'm working toward.

Back to css in epub: is there a mechanism to change the css used on the fly in the reader? (It doesn't look like there is). So that means that the css is really only used to consistify the appearance of what you make from book to book, not change the whole look-and-feel of the book while you are reading it. Too bad. I might feel a need to read Jane Austen in a handwriting font one day, Garamond the next.

Also: someone (Kovid?) mentioned something about page turn speed in epub. I've noticed that SOME of the epubs I've been experimenting with seem to take a bloody long time to open in DE. Is anyone seeing this on a Reader? Might be a deal-killer: if it takes for-frickin-ever to open a book and turn the page in epub, 'cause of design flaws in the book or the reading software, it becomes even closer to not desirable.

-bjc

"I want, I want, I want, me, me, me, now, now, now."
Captain Hook.

[yekim54]

Originally Posted by brewt

I've noticed that SOME of the epubs I've been experimenting with seem to take a bloody long time to open in DE. Is anyone seeing this on a Reader? Might be a deal-killer: if it takes for-frickin-ever to open a book and turn the page in epub, 'cause of design flaws in the book or the reading software, it becomes even closer to not desirable.

So far I have only tried loading one ePUB book onto my Sony Reader and I experienced the same slow page turns that you have mentioned. Page turns were normal speed for the LRF version of the same book.

[astra]

Originally Posted by yekim54

So far I have only tried loading one ePUB book onto my Sony Reader and I experienced the same slow page turns that you have mentioned. Page turns were normal speed for the LRF version of the same book.

I gave up on epub after that

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by brewt

Back to css in epub: is there a mechanism to change the css used on the fly in the reader? (It doesn't look like there is).

Also: someone (Kovid?) mentioned something about page turn speed in epub.

Adobe DE doesn't have user adjustable CSS, but the epub reader i'm developing will. Page turn speed in epub is fine within a flow (a single html file) but becomes slow when trasitioning from one HTML file to the next.

[brewt]

Kovid:
Have I said "yer d' man" often enough? I think not. Developing an epub reader? Woo Hoo!

.....If I could only convince you of a Windows Mobile 5 port......


-bjc

[kovidgoyal]

I dont do device ports, but all the code is open source, so there's nothing preventing someone from porting the reader if they want to.

See https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=30639