Part 1 – Content Order of this article series on “Moving print publications to EPUB” focussed on how content order in a reflowable EPUB is handled in InDesign. Part 2 looks at managing when certain EPUB content starts on a new page when reading a publication on our EPUB Reading device.  It looks at defining content breaks in what appears to be a seemingly continuous flow of content.

InDesign document set-up

The way in which publishers set-up their publications in InDesign varies depending on their editorial workflow and the type of publication. For instance, where a publication, such as a book, is text heavy and chapters are short, one long continuous text thread (story) containing the entire publication’s content might be used. Where a publication contains more graphics and break-out boxes and chapters are a little longer, the chapters might be set-up within a single InDesign document but broken up into different sections and individual text threads for each Chapter so that moving a graphic containing text wrap in one chapter doesn’t result in text reflow in another. Extremely long chapters might also be managed as individual InDesign documents.

My personal preference would be to at least break each chapter into an individual story — with its break-outs, images, illustrated graphics separate to the text thread, so they can be easily moved around during the design process — and define an individual section for each distinguishable part of the InDesign document (title pages, prelims, chapters, back matter etc.).  This has several advantages:

• You can take advantage of the Smart Text Reflow feature (InDesign CS4+) during your page layout process and automatically add pages at the end of your chapters as you are working on the layout.
• When working with an InDesign/InCopy editorial workflow, it is easier for multiple editors to work on different parts of the publication.
• Break-up of the InDesign document into more manageable chunks of content — possibly even for EPUB export reasons — is much easier, as you avoid having to break text threads and content flow.

For publications that are heavy in illustrative and break-out text and have longer chapters, I’d be more likely to define each chapter as an individual InDesign document, especially if the content order (see Part 1 – Content order) is defined by the XML Structure. In this case InDesign’s XML Structure would only display the elements of the individual chapter, rather than that of all chapters, making it easier for an editor to check and correct the contet structure in InDesign.

Break methods

There are two methods that we can use in InDesign CS5 to control where content needs to break.

• Document based breaks, where each individual InDesign document marks the start of a content break in the EPUB.
• Table of Contents (ToC) based breaks, where each Level 1 content entry in a defined ToC (CS5 only) marks a content break.

The two methods are not mutually exclusive.

Let’s have a look at how this works in a practical book example. At the start I’m taking a look at the print publication that has been designed for the print version of the InDesign file. The cover is designed in a separate InDesign document, as that’s generally printed separate from the inside part of the book. A second InDesign document (see previous graphic) contains all of the inside content of the book. In this latter document each distinguishable part of the publication has been set-up as an individual story (text thread) within its own Section.

In this smaller publication sample I’ve included the following Sections:

• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Prelim
• Chapters 1-9.

For the EPUB, I’d like to include the following:

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Prelim
• Chapters 1-9

Notice that I’m leaving out the Half Title page and the Contents page.

I’m making my own executive decision here  to not include the Half Title page in the EPUB. I’ve also decided that I don’t need a physical content component that shows me the Table of Contents in the EPUB. Instead I’m more than happy with the EPUB reader’s built in navigational controls for the Table of Contents. For instance iBooks provides quick and easy access to a dynamic ToC and Adobe Digital Editions adds a sidebar that’s always visible (see next graphic). Such a ToC can be generated from InDesign without the need to have a physical ToC in the document.

With the knowledge that my document contains a predefined Table of Content Style (Layout > Table of Contents Style), that includes as Level 1 headers the “Prelim” titles and “Chapter Numbers”, I know I don’t really need to break this content up into separate documents to get my content breaks in the right spot.

However, things are a little different for the front matter of the publication as none of its content is called on by the Table of Contents Style and without further action all of the front matter would run-in continuously in the resulting EPUB.

So I’m breaking up my single InDesign document into a series of smaller documents, each representing a content break that I can’t handle with Level 1 ToC entries — I admit I could have kept the Preface with the Chapters document technically speaking, but my logical brain didn’t allow me to do that —.

Once the breakup into individual documents is completed InDesign’s Book feature comes in handy. This InDesign Book collates the individual documents and ensures that the EPUB export knows in which order the various content chunks needs to represented in the resulting EPUB.

Next, I’ll just double check the Table of Contents Style I created earlier for my EPUB. The screenshot that follows displays the “Prelim Title” and “Chapter Number” Paragraph Styles as Level 1 headings. The Include Book Documents option is enabled to ensure that ToC entries can be picked up from any of the InDesign documents that make up the book.

So what have we done thusfar to prepare what used to be an InDesign document designed for Print production for the upcoming EPUB export? (keep in mind I’m only focussing on the content breaks in this post)

• reviewed the way the original InDesign source file(s) were set-up
• broke-up some of the documents into smaller documents to control content break points for EPUB
• defined a Table of Contents Style for the EPUB that includes Level 1 entries.

Something to be aware off: If the paragraph styles you are  including as part of your ToC Style exist in a Style Group, the EPUB will currently not render the ToC. To alleviate this problem for the time being, move these paragraph styles out of their Style Group.

It’s now time to generate the EPUB and check if our content break points indeed work To generate an EPUB from an InDesign Book choose Export Book to EPUB from the Book panel menu.

In the Contents section of the DIgital Editions Export Options, enable the TOC Style for the EPUB and enable the First Level Entries as Chapter Breaks (CS5 only) option.

Note: I enabled Suppress Automatic Entries for Documents. However, if you’d like to include ToC entries for your front matter, e.g. Cover, Title Page, Copyright Page, then name your documents as you’d like them to appear in the EPUB ToC listing. Keep in mind, that doing so, will result in an extra ToC level in the navigational ToC that’s generated for the EPUB.

With the exported EPUB ready, all that remains is a content break check in your favorite EPUB Reader. I’m checking things on the iPad in iBooks. Looks pretty good

Wishlist

During my travels in the EPUB world, I —like others— encounter things that I’d like to see changed in future releases. So I’ve gone ahead and submitted the following two feature requests to Adobe:

• It would be super cool if there would be support for content breaks, based on InDesign Sections.
• Presently only content that resides on a Master Page is ignored by the Digital Editions Export function. I’d love to see this “ignore-content-support” extended to Nonprinting content, similar to how PDF export ignores it. This is basically because I sometimes use hidden text on chapter opening pages to generate a different looking ToC data entries. It would be nice to be able to replicate this print behaviour in EPUBs.

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Samples provided in this write-up use Adobe InDesign CS5 (7.0.2) and Digital Editions Export 3.0.0

Over the past 8 to 10 years publishers worldwide have moved to Adobe InDesign and InCopy workflows for their book production. Using InDesign for the layout and InCopy for editorial purposes. With the current trend towards ereading, it seems more then logical that publishers are looking at converting existing InDesign documents into EPUB format.
Although earlier versions of InDesign have had support for Digital Editions Export (EPUB), up until the most recent release of InDesign (CS5), we would have had to change the way in which our documents were laid out in order to best prepare them for EPUB output. This was primarily due to the fact that the content order of the EPUB would be based on the document’s Page Layout. InDesign CS5 enables content order creation based on Page Layout or XML Structure.

Page Layout

When the EPUB content order is based on the Page Layout structure of the InDesign document the following occurs:

• Text-threads — or stories as they are referred to in InDesign — are added as an uninterrupted content flow. Any non-threaded content that might decorate the document pages, such as images with captions or break-out text, is added in the content order after the story content is inserted. In other words, these objects will not be placed according to their contextual page reference.
• Secondly InDesign first of all assumes a left-to-right object order when determining the content order. After the left-to-right classification it will look at the top-to-bottom position of objects. This means that if there is an object placed at the bottom of the page that is positioned further to the left than a text frame above it, for example an image, the object will appear first in the content structure.  In the illustration below the image marked with “3″ on the graphic below is positioned further left then the caption “4″ above it. As a result the image will appear before the caption in the content order. (note: in this example the article listed as ’1′ is actually continued from the previous page text thread… hence it taking precedence over the other objects).

• Objects that are part of a group are handled as if they are individual objects. For instance if item “3″ and “4″ were grouped together, this would have no impact at all on the resulting EPUB content order. The image “3″ would still appear prior to the caption 4″.

In a nutshell using an existing InDesign page layout as the source of the content order, would require significant rework in order to generate correct the contextual content order in the published EPUB. For instance in order to define contextual placement of images, these objects need to become objects that are anchored or inline

XML Structure (InDesign CS5)

InDesign CS5, adds the ability to order the content based on the document’s XML structure.  Even when the current version of your InDesign documents doesn’t contain an XML structure, it is relatively simple to mark-up a document’s content with XML.

Building a consistent XML content structure for an InDesign document does require some preparation. Especially where a large amount of document is concerned, it will be worth spending some time and effort on defining the XML Tags and style-mapping rules — which InDesign styles are to be mapped to certain XML tags —

As the article focus is on content order, I’m going to assume that document text is consistently styled and running headers and footers are build using Master Page items.

When the original XML content order is created for an InDesign document, by initially adding untagged items, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• XML structure processes objects based on the layer they reside in. The bottom most layers are handled first.
• Positional placement — the left-to-right, top-to-bottom as seen in Page Layout order — is ignored.
• Objects originating from the same layer are added to the XML structure based on their stacking order — the objects added last to a document page will appear lower in the content structure.
• As with the page layout structure, text-threads are added as an uninterrupted content flow and non-threaded content that might decorate the document pages, such as images with captions or break-out text, are added to the XML structure story content as separate items.

This means that the structure that is created isn’t fully predictable. However, the power of the XML structure is that content order can be corrected without the need to physically make layout type changes to the InDesign document.

• Once the XML Structure is visible objects can be selected and moved into their appropriate contextual position.

During EPUB export, the updated XML structure can now be used to define the content order in the EPUB.

See also Part 2 – Controlling content breaks in this article series on Moving print publications to EPUB. Controlling content breaks.

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Fall of Autumn‘s Alan Lastufka is the producer of the following video on Letterpress.

Letter Press

From job case, leading, quads, coppers & brasses, guide pins, chase & furniture to inking and printing.

Deconvolution sharpening in Photoshop

Mike McHugh did this really cool & funny video on Deconvolution Sharpening. I have to admit I’d never heard of this before… you might not have either. Watching his video, I’m thinking “aaaaahhhh… so that is how they do that on NCIS, CSI etc.” the blurry and invisible become visible.

If you’re looking for some background information on deconvolution:

• Wikepedia provides additional (technical) info.

ePubs from InDesign

David and Anne-Marie recorded back in September a cool InDesign Secrets video on creating ePubs from InDesign. A nice accompanyment to Gabriel Powell’s Essential guide to making and editing eBooks published in the last edition of InDesign Magazine.

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

“Bleed ? what’s bleeding? Uuuuhhhh why can’t you print my Powerpoint designed ad in your glossy magazine? Just grab the logo of our web-site it should be good to go… What???? Colour can be illegal????”

Web-reference: From Design Into Print – blog/podcast (Sandee Cohen, 2009)

Web-reference: From Design Into Print – the book (Sandee Cohen, 2009)

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

As someone who used to carry a Dutch passport prior to swapping it for an Australian one over a decade ago, this book triggers more than an interest in fonts. It somehow takes me back to my roots Remembering how whilst attending Rotterdam’s Print Technology Trade College (Grafische School Rotterdam), we had to handdraw typefaces. We learnt about the history of some common international typefaces, serifs, sans-serifs etc. Sadly little was taught in those days on the history of Dutch Type, Jan’s book would certainly fill that gap in my opinion.

Web-reference: Dutch Type (Jan Middendorp, 2004)

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Color Management Essential Training, is an in-depth exploration of applying color theory and color management workflows in various graphics applications. Part 1 (chapters 1-9) explores color and color management theories, while part 2 (chapters 10-20) teaches actual color management techniques that can be incorporated into workflows. Beginning with definitions for such terms as hue, saturation, and metamerism, instructor Chris Murphy teaches the processes for getting consistent color in every stage – from input and edit through final output – and delves into color management principles for the web, prepress, and print. He also details specific color management workflows in Adobe Illustrator CS3, Photoshop CS3, InDesign CS3, Acrobat, and QuarkXPress 7. Exercise files accompany the tutorials.”

You can pre-order your copy now

web-reference: Colour Management Essential Training

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Web Reference: PrintingTips.com (2007, Tecstra Systems)

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

I believe that any organisation accepting digital artwork into its print production workflow (be it offset printing, label printing, screen printing, large format, sign writing etc.), would benefit from being able to handle artwork based on delivery of PDF files.. However, that is Utopianly-speaking.

Reality begs to differ… In the year 2007, a year in which technology will, without a doubt, further progress, organisations continue to request delivery of packaged native files over PDFs. Technological progression is unstoppable and I believe that in order for organisations to survive a highly competitive market, one must join-in with this progression…Microsoft’s recent Vista release, Apple’s plans for the release of Leopard, Adobe’s public release of Photoshop CS3 beta are all part of this progression…

Wouldn’t it be easier for an organisation to invest in a PDF workflow?

Oooh, and preferably one with support for Live Transparency

• Wouldn’t it be less costly to implement a workflow that only handles one file format? No need for multiple preflight applications or manual checking of files in native applications? No requirement for multiple imposition applications, or worse time-consuming manual impositioning, that could introduce output errors, that result in time consuming work-arounds as way of fixing errors that wouldn’t have been introduced otherwise? Or… recreating supplied artwork in earlier version applications so your workflow can handle the files?
• Wouldn’t it be a great service to your clients to be able to support processing of PDF files generated from the most commonly used graphics applications in the world? (Yep, I’m referring to Adobe software here). Not having to ask them to change their files so your workflow can handle them?
• Wouldn’t it be great to invest some time (and money) in teaching your clients about best practice for PDF delivery to your organisation? Your client’s will love you forever and provide you with continuous business, rather than searching for another organisation that CAN handle their native files without all the dramas. next time they created artwork for print output.

Alright… I better stop whilst I’m ahead and step off my soapbox … back to ground level

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker

Web Reference: Adobe PDF Print Engine (2006, Adobe Systems Inc.)

Web Reference: Adobe PDF Print Engine, See it in Action (2006, Adobe Systems Inc.)

Cari Jansen - Trainer, Print & E-Publishing Consultant, Technical Writer, Public Speaker