Export ePub from InDesign CS4
With the release of Adobe InDesign CS4 you'll find that there's a couple of interesting new features in the Export for Digital Editions plug-in. The most noticeable are the addition of DTBook support and support for "Local Formatting". There's also some subtler changes, like floating anchored images and additional semantic information in the XHTML files.
So we'll go through the major new features and what each one does:
1) DTBook DTD
The OPS spec, one of three at the heart of the ePub format, has two preferred vocabularies for textual content XHTML and DTBook. XHTML is an XML compatible vocabulary for HTML files, but what is DTBook.
DTBook is a vocabulary from the Daisy Consortium. DTBook is a format intended for ebooks, and helps in making content available for people with print disabilities. The DTBook format has taken much of it's markup from XHTML, but the DTBook format is enhanced with additional structure that better defines the parts of a book, chapter, and sections. (An h1 element in HTML identifies a title, but a 'level1' element in DTBook completely wraps the chapter or section so that there's no confusion what does, and does not belong in the chapter.)
For K-12 textbooks, DTBook content in an ePub should have all the elements required for a NIMAS submission. It also means that we support "Daisy XML".
2) Local Formatting support
With InDesign CS3, the ePub export plug-in interpreted Paragraph and Character styles when generating the CSS. With InDesign CS4 we've added the option for generating CSS from whatever formatting is applied to the text, whether through styles or through "local" or direct formatting.
Now you can apply bold to text and it will indeed be bold.
3) Floating anchored images
If you anchor an image to the left or right in the text flow, it will retain that positioning in the ePub file, and the text will flow around the image.
Images anchored in the document should look more like you intend them to when you export.
4) Additional Semantic information
When using an InDesign TOCStyle (and only when using the TOCStyle) we now convert the levels of TOC to heading levels. (So, a second level item in the TOC becomes an H2 heading.)
You actually won't see much difference, but the XHTML files may be easier to work with if you're post-processing them.
Well, that pretty much covers the new stuff.
Comments
Thanks for posting this Paul! I can't wait to put these new features to use.
Posted by: Gabriel Powell | October 9, 2008 10:29 PM
Cell Phones like Nokia, etc can read ePubs?
Posted by: Marlon Ceballos | October 14, 2008 7:21 AM
Many problems (crash, script errors, freeze...) on Win and Mac with export ePub from InDesign CS4...
I come back on CS3 :-(
Posted by: Grog | November 14, 2008 7:07 AM
@Marlon Depends on the specific device, there's the epub reading widget for Opera, but I don't know if it works with the mobile version of Opera. If not now, eventually you should be able to read epubs on some cell phones.
@Grog I'm sorry you've had so many problems, that's definitely not normal. If I could get you to either post to the InDesign User to User forum or submit a bug report against InDesign, it would be a great help. Be sure to include all the informatio you can about how to recreate the problem.
Posted by: Paul Norton | November 14, 2008 2:50 PM
In CS4, using the TOC option from InDesign CS4, the ePub is not view the text.
Please anybody help me to generate TOC for ePub from InDesign CS4
Posted by: venkan | November 17, 2008 7:57 AM
Given the the XHTML Export for Digital Editions is implemented through JavaScript, would it be possible to port some of these new features for CS4 back to CS3? Or are they dependent on scripting enhancements in CS4?
Posted by: Caleb Clauset | November 26, 2008 8:51 PM
I'm using a trial version of CS4 for many of the reasons you've outlined - trying to cut out some of the work that CS3 seemed to be creating particularly on the text formatting front. But, I'm wondering if I'm not getting something- if I apply a character style (i.e. bold) over a paragraph style it is either not recognised or makes the whole paragraph bold. I had been choosing 'local' formatting but the files seemed to be getting really large.
Posted by: Lesley | December 19, 2008 9:25 AM
Has any work been done on making books appearing in Digital Editions accessible, either as text or audio, for vision impaired readers? I can find lots of optimistic discussion about accessibility, but nothing concrete I can download or install to work with Adobe Reader and Digital Editions to make ebooks accessible. Please help.
Posted by: Rebecca | January 3, 2009 9:35 AM
Adobe Digital Editions doesn't read Polish characters in ePub ebooks correctly. Mobipocket does.
Posted by: Wimmer | January 14, 2009 4:26 PM