What am I just not getting about epub?

[zelda_pinwheel]

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.

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.

[kovidgoyal]

well if they can pull it off, more power to them. I just dont think it's likely.

[zelda_pinwheel]

because technically it's too difficult / impossible, or because they wouldn't want to devote the team hours to the work ? i fully agree it's a non-trivial modification, but adobe has made other really major modifications to their suite in recent versions and i have confidence they are *capable* of doing it right, IF they want to.

but perhaps that is a very big IF, and as the old saying says, "with 'if' you can put Paris in a bottle."

[kovidgoyal]

Its like trying to modify a sword so that it will be good at both fighting and digging graves.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Its like trying to modify a sword so that it will be good at both fighting and digging graves.

heh... i'll refrain from asking whether ebooks are fighting or digging graves in this analogy...

but well put.

discouraging, but well put.

i think i'll still keep a tiny, tiny flame of hope in my heart though. i have great confidence in adobe team that they could do even something as insane and difficult as a sword that can also dig graves. (IF they want to, of course !!)

[kovidgoyal]

Well if anyone can design the Gravedigger's Sword, it has to be Adobe

[zelda_pinwheel]

right !

[brewt]

At the newspaper I work at, we reflow every story on every page every night, using quark and indesign. People keep changing their mind about what to say or how to say it, etc etc. So it's not like these programs are incapable of reflow. We do it until the last possible moment - we then commit to a fixed pagination.

We re-h&j constantly, which is part of the promise of ebooks - they'll re-h&j on the fly, allowing the end reader to pick type sizes, margins, interline spacing, fonts, etc. I got Dad a Kindle so he make the type big enough that he could actually see it again. A good thing.

At the moment, the state of the art in e-book reading software seems to be around circa 1990 html processing: small-medium-large print, only limited size/resolution pictures on a separate line, very limited typographical nuance available (kerning, hyphenation, etc). Not a lot of design available - if the cohice is to read a hardbound book or a dot-matrix printout of the book which would you choose? There is, I believe, value to being able to present more than just the straight word-content of books. Design matters.

The question is can the so-called "big-league" pagination programs be used for ebooks, as they can bring a lot of things to the table.

So far, the answer is "bleah". There being no shortage of what I can't do with indesign, I'll concede early that maybe I just don't know how - it's just not obvious.

So, back to my original question (with a slight addendum): Over mobipocket format, epub will astonish me by demonstrating..........?????? (that's yer cue)........


-bjc

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by brewt

So, back to my original question (with a slight addendum): Over mobipocket format, epub will astonish me by demonstrating..........?????? (that's yer cue)........
-bjc

Mobipocket is just HTML 3.2 without even CSS1. The fact that indesign doesn't produce good epub is a limitation of indesign not epub. You can do with epub everything that is shown in the left picture on your sample.

And hyphenation shouldn't be in the file, it should be a function of the reading software.

[brewt]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Mobipocket is just HTML 3.2 without even CSS1. The fact that indesign doesn't produce good epub is a limitation of indesign not epub. You can do with epub everything that is shown in the left picture on your sample.

And hyphenation shouldn't be in the file, it should be a function of the reading software.

Uh, yeah, I'd go along with that - no matter what I do to the document once it's in indesign, when I export to epub, it reverts to the original form the text once in when imported. If it started out as plain text, the epub is plain text.

This blows.



from the Big Shop (adobe) itself:

"Still, the XHTML nature and the focus on narrative books means that certain items won't be preserved when exporting ePubs from InDesign."
"The EPUBs exported from InDesign can in some cases comply with the IDPF standards, but won't always be compliant. "


-bjc

[zelda_pinwheel]

Design matters. completely agree. and as kovid has said, you can make a beautiful book using css rules. however, apparently, you cannot (yet ?) do this with indesign. or not well, anyway.

just to test it out, try the wysiwyg interface from feedbooks.com. if you don't know the code it will simplify things for you, and i think the result will be better than indesign. it still has some limitations, and does not yet handle images at all. on the other hand, if you know html / css, you have the option of editing the code manually, just using the interface to gain time. this allows you much more freedom.

[brewt]

Ok, so I've been still trying to make this idea work out for my needs (which might include shopping for maybe one-a-them new fancy new sonys).

I've been working with MobiPocket for the last year, 'cause I can make books for my Dad's Kindle. And I found it was hard for him to find a book he wanted on the box, if there were 300+ of them. So I hit on the idea of combining bunches of them into single books - like the complete(ish) works of Zane Grey. Or Louis L'Amour. Or Mark Twain. He now has 70 books-of-books - if he feels like O Henry today, he can open it up and navigate around in the book itself to find the sub-book he want. Easilier than page after page of books.

I've been using Konrad's SiteMap Creator http://www.konradp.com/products/sitemap_creator/ to create an external TOC - each top-level file is a book in the TOC, then I generated a single-book-specific TOC inside each book (using Word). Sure, it's 3-4 clicks to get to a specific chapter in a specific book, but it's better than wading through umpteen pages of contents to find the same chapter (using automated TOC generation), and it's a little more horsing around to get it all to work for me, but that's ok.

So far, every attempt to build a similarly-structured book with the current generation of epub-making software has been less than satisfactory. At least, for my meager understanding of how to do it. It seems to require a lot more horsing around, and (gak) hand-coding of html, which I've successfully been able to avoid so far, being all lazy and all as I am. Comes from using iSilo back in the day - now THAT was easy to make a book for.

I see references here of things like "oh yes, just manipulate the OPF", but haven't grokked how to put it all together. I guess I still haven't seen the "ooh---aahhh" of Epub yet. Digital Editions doesn't impress me - if I've got hypertext linkings in a book, say for a footnote: where did they put the [ back ] button?


-bjc
Charter Member,
Deceased Equine Abuse Society

[kovidgoyal]

If you have a html file that links to all other files, just pass that file to html2epub and you're done.

[brewt]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

If you have a html file that links to all other files, just pass that file to html2epub and you're done.

Roger that - I get an epub with just the toc in it. So I've built my toc wrong? (I'll include it when I can get to where I can conjure up an example...)

[Edit] oohhh-----aaahhhhh I got it to work! Yer, the Man, Kovid! Example included, with Mobi, Isilo, and Epub output. (turned out my original toc was bad).



Still don't like DE. Is the sony epub-ification better (as in, worlds)?

Funny. When I open the epub in FbReader, all I get is the TOC, and it crashes shortly after.


-bjc

[kovidgoyal]

No you should get an epub with a TOC and all the linked files Are the links correct? i.e. say if you open that file in a browser and click the links, do they take you to the other files?