In the scale of one to ten I gave this tutorial in my InDesign BIBLIOGRAPHY FileMaker database an 11 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍, because you teach the quintessence of your practice experience without blah blah didactically commendable. Of the many TH-cam tutorials I watched you are in the very top group. Highly appreciated are the clickable TOCs of the video. What is missing for me as an InDesign beginner from Switzerland is the possibility to download the tutorial files from e.g. DropBox (tutorial e.g. with a public domain book content; before and after the showed changes; I am convinced that the subscriber count would go up rapidly). Exceptionally well done. (For people as me watching TH-cam on TV the magnification of the menus should happen every time.)
@@beckysgraphicdesign I am struggling with my image that is anchored to a Chapter title. It keeps jumping to a new page regardless of its dimensions. Is the cause buried somewhere in the "Inline Image" style sheet? Or is it related to the "Chapter Title" style sheet? HELP!
Hi! Thank you for a great video! I have a question if you have a video that goes in depth about the table of contents and the styles you have made for it? Thank you so much!
Your tutorials are so helpful! I hope you see this and respond, I can't seem to find any answers online and I'm tired of messing around with different settings. No matter what I choose or how I place my image, the image size is tiny in kindle previewer. I change the object export settings and the general export settings and nothing happens. This happens with my text flourishes as well but those I don't mind being smaller. I have text message graphics in my novel and they can't be tiny so I really need some help. (I really don't understand how Adobe managed to make this one simple thing so hard)
What is the ACTUAL pixel size of that linked image. Is it at least 1000 pixels wide? Is the placed image (and its frame) about the same width of the page? Do you have CSS assigned as "Relative to Text Flow" in your Export Settings? Are you using ePub 3.0 instead of 2.0?
Hi! Thank you for replying to comment! It helped! I do have another question. We are publishing an e-book with veterans stories and some of the text in the body has to be italicized, however it does not save the italicized text into the pub document. Do you know how to fix that?
Check to make sure the text is not "overridden" in InDesign. Also, make sure the "italic" is being applied via a Character Style. This creates a tag in the code, which is how Bold and Italic is accomplished in HTML.
Thank you for this great tutorial! Where is the "first" video? My issue is that the TOC does not show up in the actual EPUB when viewed in the Kindle Previewer with clickable links. Is it something in the paragraph style settings? Can you direct me to a video that refers to this issue, please? Thanks!
This is a video where I talk about TOCs in InDesign: th-cam.com/video/3B9uTmmNLek/w-d-xo.html And this video talks about TOCs in eBooks at 18:16: th-cam.com/video/qKU7180eLc8/w-d-xo.html
This was very helpful. I'm starting to do a lot more epubs and couldn't figure out how to get some of the things you discussed to work unitl now. I have to get use to that an epub just isn't going to look as pretty as a printed book. I don't like that everything starts at the top of the page - my printed book has the copyright info and dedication stuff centered within the middle of the page and the chapter openers are started about half way down the page. It bothers me that it doesn't look like that in the epub, but I can get use to it. Thanks.
It's honestly surprising that eBooks haven't gained the capability to look prettier, seeing how popular they are-but I guess that's the downfall of being in a format that works for every platform and device, no matter how old it is.
I always refer back to your videos when I'm stuck, they've been SO helpful! Is there a way to add white space on a page, without a page break? Example: moving copyright text down to start in the middle of the page, vs. being at the top.
Sort of. You can add a page break and then manually go in and add some lines. This creates some singular line breaks. blog.hubspot.com/website/html-line-break#:~:text=Break%20in%20HTML-,To%20do%20a%20line%20break%20in,use%20the%20tag.
For front matter vertical positioning (copyright, title, half title, dedication) I select the particular text frame, then use Object > Text frame options > General > Vertical justification > Align and select as appropriate. You can then tweak it by dragging the top/bottom of your text frame down/up a tad to fine tune it. This is all reflected when exported to ePub and shows your front matter nicely positioned as per your print book.
hi Kayla, I have used InDesign to format my ebook (Epub) and each Epub chapter is formatted correctly. I checked them through Kindle Previewer 3 and they show correctly. However, when exporting the entire book to Epub, all the paragraph styles are wiped out, including images (except for image achored). I only have paragraph styles to be bold & centered, regular & centered, and Chapter header name. There is no overwrites in the entire book (already checked). Do you have any suggestion? Thank you
Double-check that you have the correct document selected as the "style source." In your .indb file, there's a little symbol next to one of the .indd documents in the list. Whichever one has the symbol is the "source," and all the others pull their styles from it. So, make sure that you have said Paragraph Styles in the source document, and everything should be fine.
Becky not sure if you know the answer to this. I bring an image in on a layer I call "images". It is all good then if I anchor the image to the previous text paragraph to keep it in place. The image then flips from the "images layer onto the "text" layer, which is frustrating. Have you experienced this once again thanks for your excellent video tutorials.
Hm, no, I haven't. I suppose you can't lock either of the layers, either, cause they have to interact with one another. The reason this happens is because when you anchor something into the text, it is now coded as an object within that block of HTML, becoming part of the parent.
Hello Becky i really appreciate the video, it was very helpful. But my Epub has error while checking, it says{/OEBPS/toc.xhtml (line 52, col 49)}, and many more same error with different lines number. I went through many forum and did what they said, but nothing seems to work. I event remove toc and its style from the book, still the same error. And this happens when i export book as whole, event withiut toc. When exported individual chapters there is no error. If you know, could you please help out. Thank you.
UGH. I KNOW EXACTLY YOUR ISSUE. I have this in my video to-do list. It's from a new InDesign eBook export setting. Make sure you UNCHECK the little box that says "Page Navigation." This may not remove ALL the issues, but will fix a majority (if not all) of them. It tries to create a link on every single page and creates a big mess.
@beckysgraphicdesign If that doesn't fix all the problems, you can use Sigil and ePub Checker to find exactly WHICH hyperlink is not working and correct the link path to a valid one.
This was super helpful! Is there any way I can request going over fonts from InDesign for ePUB, especially fonts that transfer into Kindle? I've seen other Kindle ebooks display fancy font chapter headers, but mine never transfer, no matter what I do. I'd love to learn that. If you offer paid coaching for that, too, I'd love to discuss that.
Thanks for the kind words! We don't offer ebook coaching at the moment-just these tutorial videos! And the reasons your custom fonts don't display on a Kindle device is because only a few fonts EXIST on a Kindle device. Tahoma, Georgia, Arial, Cambria, etc. Some devices don't support ANY type of script font, unless you embed it into the ebook manually, which can be a long process. The ebook does its best to swap out your custom font for the next closest one available.
Is there any reason to go to epub 3 vs epub 2 these days, aside from accessibility? Assuming you're not doing anything fancy like a new interactive feature.
I find ePub 3 handles imagery and CSS better, however ePub 2 has better reach (AKA, more platforms will accept it). In general, most platforms will do an auto conversion on a 3 to downgrade to a 2, except on Draft2Digital.
@@beckysgraphicdesignI wonder if Apple Books has any fancy epub 3 ebooks with fixed layouts or javascript/interactive or audio, etc... Yep finding some.
Hey Kayla :) Absolutely amazing content, thank you so much for this!! I have one little question where it seems i don't find the solution, even though i watched multiple Videos on your channel. After exporting my Indesign File into "reflowable EPUB" and reviewing it in "Kindle Reviewer 3" it has a different formatting in regards of the Poems, that i've put in my novel. The normal Text of the story after my poems should begin in a new Paragraph but for some reason it begins in a new Line. I tried different things but didn't come to the solution so far - it always begins as if it would be a simple Line-break. Do you have any idea how to fix this? Greetings from Germany Yannic :)
Have you tried looking at your paragraph style in the "Space before/after" area, and telling it to "Ignore Spaces between paragraphs using the same style"?
@@beckysgraphicdesign Yes, this option is already set on "Ignore", hm... To describe it a bit different: After my poems end, i pressed 2 times "Enter" , so that i have an empty Line in-between my Poem and the upcoming text - i think you call this "New Paragraph", right? (I am new to Indesign and have it all on German) - The Indesign File looks perfect, but the exported epub looks like as if i just have pressed "1 time Enter" and there is no empty Line between the Poem and the upcoming text.
@@beckysgraphicdesign Ohh thank you SO much!! How could I miss that? 😅 Anyway, thank you so much again - I truly love the content you provide here in TH-cam - simply Gold. Greetings from Germany Yannic :)
Wonderful crash course about exporting to epub. It seems still difficult to export to print and epub by the same ID document right? Just a little suggestion, as I am Italian you should pronounce PAGINA with the accent on the first A and not on the last I. So: PÀGINA 😀
Haha, thanks for the pronunciation! I like to say things the right way. And yes, typically, I don't try to export my print file and eBook file from the same InDesign document. I make a duplicate of my print file and make modifications to it.
@@beckysgraphicdesign There is a Publisher here in Italy, Mulino, that's publishing books starting from the same ID pagination. That "machine" costs around 200-300 thousands euros but it's not perfect for every book. I agree with you, better to have a copy and be free to mess everything up for the ePub version :-D. Last consideration: I'm really surprised to see you have only 2000 subscriptions and less than a 1000 views, but I'm more and more thinking this is the price of quality and expertise. Less is better on YT!
This video is worth billions. Thank you for sharing this awesome content. Still hoping you make a video on how to convert a music book with images and text to a reflowable Epub without distorted images or words. I look forward to hearing from you. Regards.
In the scale of one to ten I gave this tutorial in my InDesign BIBLIOGRAPHY FileMaker database an 11 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍, because you teach the quintessence of your practice experience without blah blah didactically commendable.
Of the many TH-cam tutorials I watched you are in the very top group.
Highly appreciated are the clickable TOCs of the video.
What is missing for me as an InDesign beginner from Switzerland is the possibility to download the tutorial files from e.g. DropBox (tutorial e.g. with a public domain book content; before and after the showed changes; I am convinced that the subscriber count would go up rapidly). Exceptionally well done. (For people as me watching TH-cam on TV the magnification of the menus should happen every time.)
Thanks so much for the exceptional kindness!
The best epub tutorial for InDesign I've ever seen. Thanks!
Glad you think so!
Aaah, thank you so much for this: unfeasibly helpful. Great, confidently competent presentation.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thanks for the tip at 13:00 ! I'm using it today doing a book with illustrations on every five pages.
Awesome!
This was great! So simple yet perfectly in-depth. A million thank you's!
Our pleasure! Glad you found it helpful!
@@beckysgraphicdesign I am struggling with my image that is anchored to a Chapter title. It keeps jumping to a new page regardless of its dimensions. Is the cause buried somewhere in the "Inline Image" style sheet? Or is it related to the "Chapter Title" style sheet? HELP!
Hi! Thank you for a great video! I have a question if you have a video that goes in depth about the table of contents and the styles you have made for it? Thank you so much!
I sure do!
th-cam.com/video/3B9uTmmNLek/w-d-xo.htmlsi=ow7CKrXahAPEFUNL
Excellent tutorial. Learned a lot.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Thank you for sharing , this was helpful. 😊
Your tutorials are so helpful! I hope you see this and respond, I can't seem to find any answers online and I'm tired of messing around with different settings. No matter what I choose or how I place my image, the image size is tiny in kindle previewer. I change the object export settings and the general export settings and nothing happens. This happens with my text flourishes as well but those I don't mind being smaller. I have text message graphics in my novel and they can't be tiny so I really need some help. (I really don't understand how Adobe managed to make this one simple thing so hard)
What is the ACTUAL pixel size of that linked image. Is it at least 1000 pixels wide? Is the placed image (and its frame) about the same width of the page? Do you have CSS assigned as "Relative to Text Flow" in your Export Settings? Are you using ePub 3.0 instead of 2.0?
Hi! Thank you for replying to comment! It helped! I do have another question. We are publishing an e-book with veterans stories and some of the text in the body has to be italicized, however it does not save the italicized text into the pub document. Do you know how to fix that?
Check to make sure the text is not "overridden" in InDesign. Also, make sure the "italic" is being applied via a Character Style. This creates a tag in the code, which is how Bold and Italic is accomplished in HTML.
Thank you for this great tutorial! Where is the "first" video? My issue is that the TOC does not show up in the actual EPUB when viewed in the Kindle Previewer with clickable links. Is it something in the paragraph style settings? Can you direct me to a video that refers to this issue, please? Thanks!
This is a video where I talk about TOCs in InDesign:
th-cam.com/video/3B9uTmmNLek/w-d-xo.html
And this video talks about TOCs in eBooks at 18:16:
th-cam.com/video/qKU7180eLc8/w-d-xo.html
@@beckysgraphicdesign Thank you!!
This was very helpful. I'm starting to do a lot more epubs and couldn't figure out how to get some of the things you discussed to work unitl now. I have to get use to that an epub just isn't going to look as pretty as a printed book. I don't like that everything starts at the top of the page - my printed book has the copyright info and dedication stuff centered within the middle of the page and the chapter openers are started about half way down the page. It bothers me that it doesn't look like that in the epub, but I can get use to it. Thanks.
It's honestly surprising that eBooks haven't gained the capability to look prettier, seeing how popular they are-but I guess that's the downfall of being in a format that works for every platform and device, no matter how old it is.
I always refer back to your videos when I'm stuck, they've been SO helpful!
Is there a way to add white space on a page, without a page break? Example: moving copyright text down to start in the middle of the page, vs. being at the top.
Sort of. You can add a page break and then manually go in and add some lines. This creates some singular line breaks.
blog.hubspot.com/website/html-line-break#:~:text=Break%20in%20HTML-,To%20do%20a%20line%20break%20in,use%20the%20tag.
@@beckysgraphicdesign Thank you for replying so quickly! I'll try it out :)
For front matter vertical positioning (copyright, title, half title, dedication) I select the particular text frame, then use Object > Text frame options > General > Vertical justification > Align and select as appropriate. You can then tweak it by dragging the top/bottom of your text frame down/up a tad to fine tune it. This is all reflected when exported to ePub and shows your front matter nicely positioned as per your print book.
Brilliant thank you so much for this presentation
Glad you enjoyed it!
hi Kayla, I have used InDesign to format my ebook (Epub) and each Epub chapter is formatted correctly. I checked them through Kindle Previewer 3 and they show correctly.
However, when exporting the entire book to Epub, all the paragraph styles are wiped out, including images (except for image achored).
I only have paragraph styles to be bold & centered, regular & centered, and Chapter header name. There is no overwrites in the entire book (already checked).
Do you have any suggestion?
Thank you
Double-check that you have the correct document selected as the "style source." In your .indb file, there's a little symbol next to one of the .indd documents in the list. Whichever one has the symbol is the "source," and all the others pull their styles from it. So, make sure that you have said Paragraph Styles in the source document, and everything should be fine.
you are my favourite human
^-^
Becky not sure if you know the answer to this.
I bring an image in on a layer I call "images". It is all good then if I anchor the image to the previous text paragraph to keep it in place. The image then flips from the "images layer onto the "text" layer, which is frustrating. Have you experienced this once again thanks for your excellent video tutorials.
Hm, no, I haven't. I suppose you can't lock either of the layers, either, cause they have to interact with one another. The reason this happens is because when you anchor something into the text, it is now coded as an object within that block of HTML, becoming part of the parent.
Hello Becky i really appreciate the video, it was very helpful. But my Epub has error while checking, it says{/OEBPS/toc.xhtml (line 52, col 49)}, and many more same error with different lines number. I went through many forum and did what they said, but nothing seems to work. I event remove toc and its style from the book, still the same error. And this happens when i export book as whole, event withiut toc. When exported individual chapters there is no error. If you know, could you please help out. Thank you.
UGH. I KNOW EXACTLY YOUR ISSUE. I have this in my video to-do list. It's from a new InDesign eBook export setting. Make sure you UNCHECK the little box that says "Page Navigation." This may not remove ALL the issues, but will fix a majority (if not all) of them. It tries to create a link on every single page and creates a big mess.
@beckysgraphicdesign If that doesn't fix all the problems, you can use Sigil and ePub Checker to find exactly WHICH hyperlink is not working and correct the link path to a valid one.
@@beckysgraphicdesign Oh my goodness it worked..!!!! Thank you so much. You saved me from a nightmare....
You're very welcome!! So glad it fixed it.
This was super helpful! Is there any way I can request going over fonts from InDesign for ePUB, especially fonts that transfer into Kindle? I've seen other Kindle ebooks display fancy font chapter headers, but mine never transfer, no matter what I do. I'd love to learn that. If you offer paid coaching for that, too, I'd love to discuss that.
Thanks for the kind words! We don't offer ebook coaching at the moment-just these tutorial videos!
And the reasons your custom fonts don't display on a Kindle device is because only a few fonts EXIST on a Kindle device. Tahoma, Georgia, Arial, Cambria, etc. Some devices don't support ANY type of script font, unless you embed it into the ebook manually, which can be a long process.
The ebook does its best to swap out your custom font for the next closest one available.
Is there any reason to go to epub 3 vs epub 2 these days, aside from accessibility? Assuming you're not doing anything fancy like a new interactive feature.
I find ePub 3 handles imagery and CSS better, however ePub 2 has better reach (AKA, more platforms will accept it). In general, most platforms will do an auto conversion on a 3 to downgrade to a 2, except on Draft2Digital.
@@beckysgraphicdesignI wonder if Apple Books has any fancy epub 3 ebooks with fixed layouts or javascript/interactive or audio, etc... Yep finding some.
Yes, Apple Books generally will accept my fancy CSS and actually display it.
Hey Kayla :) Absolutely amazing content, thank you so much for this!!
I have one little question where it seems i don't find the solution, even though i watched multiple Videos on your channel.
After exporting my Indesign File into "reflowable EPUB" and reviewing it in "Kindle Reviewer 3" it has a different formatting in regards of the Poems, that i've put in my novel.
The normal Text of the story after my poems should begin in a new Paragraph but for some reason it begins in a new Line. I tried different things but didn't come to the solution so far - it always begins as if it would be a simple Line-break.
Do you have any idea how to fix this?
Greetings from Germany
Yannic :)
Have you tried looking at your paragraph style in the "Space before/after" area, and telling it to "Ignore Spaces between paragraphs using the same style"?
@@beckysgraphicdesign Yes, this option is already set on "Ignore", hm... To describe it a bit different: After my poems end, i pressed 2 times "Enter" , so that i have an empty Line in-between my Poem and the upcoming text - i think you call this "New Paragraph", right? (I am new to Indesign and have it all on German) - The Indesign File looks perfect, but the exported epub looks like as if i just have pressed "1 time Enter" and there is no empty Line between the Poem and the upcoming text.
Ohhh! Yes, I explain how to do this in this section of this video:
th-cam.com/video/Fl-315b3xcc/w-d-xo.html
11:38 - How to Add a Manual Page Break
@@beckysgraphicdesign Ohh thank you SO much!! How could I miss that? 😅 Anyway, thank you so much again - I truly love the content you provide here in TH-cam - simply Gold.
Greetings from Germany
Yannic :)
Even though this looks very interesting, I just don't have time to watch it right now...but I know that when I *do* watch it, it's going to be great.
Wonderful crash course about exporting to epub. It seems still difficult to export to print and epub by the same ID document right? Just a little suggestion, as I am Italian you should pronounce PAGINA with the accent on the first A and not on the last I. So: PÀGINA 😀
Haha, thanks for the pronunciation! I like to say things the right way.
And yes, typically, I don't try to export my print file and eBook file from the same InDesign document. I make a duplicate of my print file and make modifications to it.
@@beckysgraphicdesign There is a Publisher here in Italy, Mulino, that's publishing books starting from the same ID pagination. That "machine" costs around 200-300 thousands euros but it's not perfect for every book. I agree with you, better to have a copy and be free to mess everything up for the ePub version :-D. Last consideration: I'm really surprised to see you have only 2000 subscriptions and less than a 1000 views, but I'm more and more thinking this is the price of quality and expertise. Less is better on YT!
Wow! That is a lot of money!!
And thank you for the kind words!!
This video is worth billions.
Thank you for sharing this awesome content. Still hoping you make a video on how to convert a music book with images and text to a reflowable
Epub without distorted images or words.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Regards.
Thanks for the kind comment!
I have an upcoming video that shows an easy way to add images into reflowable text that will work well for your eBook!