10-08-2016, 05:37 PM | #1 |
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InDesign Alternatives
So, after a long time of creating ePub2 files in InDesign and then scripting the living daylights out of them to make useable files for various platforms, an interesting turn of events had me using iBooks Author for the last several months.
I have to say that I'm quite pleased with iBA. It's like a simpler InDesign, and it has the strong advantage in that it was a tool designed to make eBooks. It was also made by Apple, which may be a turn-off for some, but I find their design and UX principles to be generally sound and even superior. That's not to say that the product doesn't lack; I have 3 or 4 bug reports, usability fixes and so forth filed with Apple currently. It used to be that iBA could only make a .ibooks files, so it was iPad-only, but last year Apple added ePub3 output from iBA, so you can create a regular reflowable book. Prior to that, iBA had only been suitable for creating textbooks, interactive stuff, fixed layouts, etc. Now it's...basically a legitimate eBook editor. Despite this, I'm not comfortable taking my iBA ePub3 and distributing it elsewhere than the iBookstore. Out of curiosity, I dumped my ePub3 into Readium in Chrome, and I shuddered and had to close the browser. So fine, looks like iBA for iBookstore and that's it. So now I'm going back to InDesign -> ePub2, and the more work I have to do in InDesign the more I miss iBA. When you're making a reflowable eBook, most of ID is a cumbersome, useless distraction, and you can very easily and invisibly pervert your document structure with one stray key press, only to notice an hour later when your post-export, pre-Kindlegen script is running. As valiantly as Adobe has tried to make ID relevant in the age of the ePub, it's just the wrong tool for the job. ...And yet, it does many things. Indexing, for example, which iBA lacks. It does hyperlinks pretty OK, and it has para & char styles, spacing & kerning and all that stuff which I have found to be vital in a layout program. It lets you add your own custom CSS, which iBA doesn't, and the markup it generates seems cleaner than iBA's. So I'm idly casting about for an alternative program with:
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10-08-2016, 06:53 PM | #2 |
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While it doesn't have the full power of InDesign I find Atlantis Word Processor to make very clean ePub 2 eBooks from Word or other standard formats. It is a lot cheaper than Word and InDesign.
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10-08-2016, 08:43 PM | #3 | |
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@mattmc - what about QuarkXpress, is that still around BR |
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10-09-2016, 01:50 AM | #4 |
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Thanks Dale! Unfortunately BetterRed is correct and I am on a Mac, so I can't try out Atlantis. Don't have Parallels at my fingertips...
QuarkXpress, surprisingly enough, does seem to still be around. They have a whole little ePub exporting thingie, just like InDesign, and it seems like they have a whole "reflowing view" where you can see your content in a linear fashion--one of my main gripes with ID. ...That said, it's $850. Yikes. Now, the last time I looked at Sigil it was this seemingly abandoned project with some issues (very strict markup validation & "cleaning" which I did not appreciate) but it seems like it's come a long way thanks to some hard work from some people. I mean, it checks a number of boxes...I wonder how hard it would be to implement a styles system and some other things. Too bad I'm allergic to python. But that's a bit off, so any other suggestions are welcome |
10-09-2016, 07:23 PM | #5 | |
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BR Last edited by BetterRed; 10-09-2016 at 07:25 PM. |
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10-13-2016, 12:18 AM | #6 | |||||||
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We are asked, fairly frequently, to "revamp" an iBA file, to make it usable for other platforms, and fixing that code would take longer, 10 times out of 10, than just making the book from scratch. Granted, that's pretty much true for trying to fix anyone else's eBook/HTML coding, but the iBA files are just egregiously bad. It's like looking at Pages' output into ePUB. Yikes. I assume that you've already tried using Pages-->ePUB, etc. Quote:
I'm working on developing a more streamlined and/or regulated workflow, facilitating straight-up style mapping, from word-processor to INDD to ePUB to MOBI. This doesn't have anything to do with what you're asking, EXCEPT that we're strong in the Force of Sigil, at my shop. Now, we're not Mac folks. One of my people is a Mac user, but she's mostly handling admin stuff (emails and that). So, our expectation in interfaces is decidedly different than yours. We do also use Epsilon, but, pretty much post-HTML, everything is Sigil. I expect that even with the new processes, Sigil will play a key role. Quote:
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I've seen a dozen different programs/apps, all aimed at being THIS. None of them are. I've been asked to alpha/beta test most, and while many seem somewhat promising, none do what a company like mine needs done. Not to insult your programmer-fu, have you tried Jutoh? It has ePUB2 and 3, I believe, can do fixed-layout and regular, and builds MOBIs using KG. It's not my cuppa, again, because I don't like having to redo everything into Julian's (Julian Smart, the developer) odd take on "styles." (At my last gander, you can't put your own Stylesheet in there, and when you want to use a style, you have to scroll through 500 listed styles. That irks me, BUT, I've seen some people who claim that's not true.) There's Bookalope, and another one (can't think of the name). Some people have touted Blue Griffon's ePUB editor, but it looks like the dog's breakfast, to me. Sigil's better, more powerful, and more advanced...and BG is quite expensive, for what it does. Obviously, Sigil isn't. Push come to shove, for me, it's INDD->ePUB-->Sigil, and then onward from there. If you're married to the ePUB3 idea, you can do ePUB3 now with Sigil as well. I don't know of any viable replacement for Sigil, or for INDD, for that matter. Quark's pretty badly outdated, in my experience. Hitch |
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10-13-2016, 02:40 AM | #7 |
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Jutoh seems worth looking at. It is cross-platform, supports some ePub3, updates every 2-3 months. Runs on Raspberry Pi!
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10-17-2016, 03:54 PM | #8 | ||||||||||
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One cool thing is that they run the book through a word-stemming and indexing process when they export, so you have these files which are used by the Search process within iBooks. Makes for wicked-fast searches compared to the normal WebKit iBooks renderer; would be cool if Apple could contribute that functionality and stuff to the broader ecosystem. Quote:
Fortunately or unfortunately, it boils down to features. Doing the whole iBA-authored ePub3 adds some secret-sauce features that I needed, that are difficult to execute with any grace on normal ePub2 files and readers. Makes it worth rebuilding a whole separate file (quite a statement, I know). Quote:
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Epsilon...like the Eclipse/Java/XML transformation suite? o.O Quote:
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10-17-2016, 08:51 PM | #9 | ||||||||||||
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Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Quote:
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Well...you CAN use your own styles, it's just that you have to put them into Jutoh's "proprietary" format. I still, to this damn day, don't know why he did it as he did. I guess he thought that it was more word-processor-ish, to do it this way. But my attitude is, geeeze, I already map styles from Word to this to that to the next thing, and the same with all the other main formats or stops along the way, I just do NOT want to have to do that one more time. PLUS, the whole "oh, proprietary format" shtick..I dunno. Sticks in my craw, but a lot of ppl like it. Quote:
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Well, that's what we do. {shrug} Believe me, I'd do something different, IF it were out there, IF it were better. I've seen a LOT of guys go through here, all talking about how their app/program/clip was the Next Big Thing, and none, not ONE of them, has been. Sigil is simply unparalleled for Big Kids.
FWIW. Hitch |
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10-21-2016, 03:24 AM | #10 |
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That pretty much sums up Apple's HTML output in general. It is *technically* HTML and CSS, but it is so far from proper semantic markup that every time someone uses it, God kills a kitten.
There's a right way and a wrong way to construct content for HTML output. The right way is to actually edit HTML natively under the hood, or at least semantic XML. The wrong way is to do basically anything else. Guess which one Pages does? Basically, the output from Pages looks like what would happen if you started out with attributed strings—a string where each character has a set of styles—and then try to turn that into a pile of span tags, and every time you see a different combination of attributes, you create a new span class. It's what happens when you write code with the intent of emitting printed matter, and then you try to shoehorn in rudimentary HTML output that is technically correct, but utterly unreadable by humans and completely unusable as an input to any transformative process. And if you're really lucky, every tag is an h1 tag. No, I'm not kidding. I wish I were. But still, it is arguably slightly better than their previous attempts. AppleWorks didn't even try to emit balanced tags when it converted attributed strings to HTML, so you'd have <p>Blah <b>blah <i>blah</b> blah.</p><p></i>Blah.</p> At least Pages emits technically valid HTML, albeit some of the worst valid HTML I've ever seen in a product not made by Microsoft.... |
10-21-2016, 06:38 PM | #11 | |
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Dag: AMEN. It's just godawful. Have you used iAuthor, and looked at the underlying code? And to think, people bitch about INDD!! Poor beleaguered INDD is the Acme of coding, compared to that crap. Thank you for that post. Best thing I've read all day. Hell, maybe this WEEK. Hitch |
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epub2, ibooks author, indesign |
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