Your Script Doctor

When you want to create a high design eBook the workflow just screams “use fixed layout” format. Until now, InDesign users had to be HTML experts to get their finely crafted pages to view reliably on electronic devices. This was the only way one could get a layout where page items were “fixed” to positions on the page. Other than that, there was little in the way of options.

Face it, reflowable ePub is simply HTML styled with CSS and wrapped with some instructions to the ePub reading device. This puts your designs at the mercy of the device reader and the Adobe ePub export.

The simple answer may now be to use the new Fixed Layout format export which came with the 2014 release of Adobe InDesign (June 18). With this format, all of your page items, down to each individual word and graphic item, is viewed on the electronic page precisely as designed. How does InDesign do it? Well, except for text and text styling, everything else is exported as png or jpeg images. This includes everything from graphic lines to bullet icons (those little fancy dots you might put in front of a bulleted text item). These items are converted to an image file, given a CSS class, and positioned in the ePub document using absolute positioning (X and Y coordinates).

Each and every word of the text is also given a span class and positioned on the page using absolute positioning. With all of this code and image files, comes a beautiful layout pretty much guaranteed to look the same on whatever device it may be viewed, just reduced in size as needed. It’s more like a PDF but with a lot more capability. There are some caveats though: type fonts must be TTF or OTF (and embeddable), and text hyperlinking is out of the question (for now). Also, you just don’t want to scale your text, and stay away from complex layouts having transparency.

Should your project’s sheer amount of text or the lack of hyperlink capability dictate using the reflowable format, there are some things you can do to help control what happens when the user decides to resize the text.

Reflowable Format Do’s and Don’ts.

• Plan on breaking your book up into discrete files. You can do this two ways: (1) create your spreads so the export mechanism will create the files for you; (2) create each section (or page) as a separate file, combine the files into a book, and export the book.
• Provide for text expansion if, and when, text is enlarged.
• If you use individual text frames for text and images, the Articles panel is the only way to guarantee what will be exported and in what order.
• Long text that needs to flow from page to page requires images be anchored so they can move when text reflows.
• Don’t expect reflowable ePubs to be the same as a fixed layout. They can have much of the same features as their fixed counterparts but so much depends on the reading device. For instance, on the iPad, text can highlighted, converted to a note, defined in a dictionary, and searched. When searched, located text is listed in a popup menu. The user then clicks on its entry to jump to that location.

Hybrid Layouts

The IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum) has been working on what is called a Hybrid Layout since 2012. The idea is to support comic book and fixed layout with HTML and CSS just as we are now able to use polygons for text and image containers. The specification is looking promising but it is a work in progress.

Until hybrid layouts becomes a standard, you can create a reflowable book that looks like a fixed layout and be quite successful. But there are limitations. One is with landscape orientation. The reflowable export format assumes that your pages will be read vertically. If you create your pages with horizontal orientation, the InDesign export will divide the page into two vertical facing pages.