Turning Your inDesign Print Book Into an Ebook
(This is an in-progress page, and where I am taking notes on the process as I navigate this for myself and my book, The Weeds Grow Anyway.)
Step 1: Determine your format
Do you want a fixed layout epub or reflowable epub? The complexity of your formatting needs will dictate. If your poetry is pretty straight-forward in terms of formatting, tabs, etc. then a reflowable epub should be fine. If your poetry has a lot of unique formatting, a fixed layout epub is the way to go.
Step 2: Convert Your File for Ebook Publication
First, make a copy of your final print book file. On the new file,
Edit Your Paragraph Styles So Each Poem Starts On a New Page
If you’re making a reflowable ebook, you will probably want to ensure each poem starts on a new page. To accomplish this, go to your styles pane and edit the style you used for your poem titles. Click “Export Tagging” on the right hand side and select the “Split document (EPUB only)” checkbox.
For pages where you still want a page break, but don’t have a separate heading style (such as an artist bio page, front matter, etc.), you can create a new style called split style, and select the aforementioned checkbox. Then, when you want space before a page without a heading, you can add a line, hit space a couple times, and style the spaces with the split style.
I also set the tag to H2 for my poem titles. I don’t yet know if that does anything.
Fixes for Common Problems
Centering The Title Page
In a reflowable ebook, text will start at the top of the page. This is great for most pages, but doesn’t look great for the title page. To make a centered title page, do the following:
Export Your Book as a jpg.
For the page range, input the title page number.
This will turn your title page into an image. Place that image in your ebook on the first page. Make sure it’s anchored in a text box, and that you delete the original title text.
Dealing With Poems With Non-Standard Formatting
I have a contrapuntal poem in the book that was giving me a headache. The easiest fix I found is this:
Paste the poem into its own textbox (if you’re using linked text boxes that flow into each other).
Select the textbox, and go to the Type menu, and select Create Outlines. This will turn the poem into an image. Delete the textbox, but not the image.
Copy the image, and paste it into the page after the title. Make sure it’s anchored into the textbox after the title so it flows in the correct order.
Dealing with Non-Standard Font Errors
When I uploaded the epub file to Draft2Digital, these errors arose:
INFO(CSS-007): /OEBPS/css/idGeneratedStyles.css(11,2): Font-face reference "https://c0e6de11-5e2a-4328-bfd4-b7c5124ba165.epubcheck.w3c.org/OEBPS/font/AGaramondPro-Italic.ttf" refers to non-standard font type "application/x-font-ttf".
This error occurs because the EPUB file is referencing a font in a way that's not compatible with EPUBCheck standards, which Draft2Digital uses for validation.
Instead, the proper MIME type should be: font/ttf for TrueType fonts or font/otf for OpenType fonts
To fix this, I downloaded a program called Sigil. When you open the ebook file in Sigil, you’ll see a list of files on the left-hand side. Scroll down and select the OEBPS file and use the search function to find every instance of application/x-font-ttf, and use find and replace to replace those words with font/ttf.
This should resolve the error.