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A better ePub

Given that Smashwords will create an ePub file for us, from the Word document, why do we prefer to do this from InDesign?

The answer lies in how we create the file in InDesign. Rather than have one big file for the whole publication, we use InDesign's 'Book' feature. With this, you have a separate file for each chapter (plus, we use separate files for the title page, copyright page, etc), all managed from the book document.

When you output the ePub file, InDesign builds it in such a way that there are links created to each section. This is best explained in images. Here's the Lady Caine ePub e-book created via Smashwords, viewed in Adobe Digital Editions. Note the section on the left.

Now here's the ePub version we created via InDesign.

Note how the left-hand section has links to the separate chanpters. It's like an automatic contents page.

Formatting with Word

We need to deal with some formatting issues you might encounter with your Word document. Like the web, e-books present a challenge for designers who are used to controlling every aspect of the look and feel of a document.

E-readers are designed to give a great deal of control to the reader - how large the type is, and so on. But even if you keep formatting to a minimum, you may be in for some surprises when using a service like Smashwords, or Amazon DTP, or even when creating your own files with InDesign.

For a start, blank lines are stripped out. Gone. If you were using blank lines to separate sections of text, think again.

Our Word and InDesign templates are designed so that the text we flow into them has no blank lines at all. To provide space between text, we use paragraph styles. For example, in the following snippet from Lady Caine, the space between the chapter heading and the following text is achieved by creating a ChapterHead paragraph style with a 'space after' setting of 36pt.

Similarly, to separate sections of text, we created a TextBreak paragraph style, applied to a line of three asterisks, with 'space before' and 'space after' settings of 30pt.

That's why our Word and InDesign templates have a lot of paragraph styles.

If you try applying text centering, right-align or character attributes like bold and italics, you may find these don't work in the e-book file unless you define them as part of the paragraph or character style.

For example, let's say you have a 'BodyText' paragraph style which is normally ranged-left, roman font. If you just click the 'align right' button on Word's toolbar, it'll align right in Word, but will still be aligned left in the e-book. What you need to do is create a new paragraph style called, say, 'BodyTextRight' and apply that.

Similarly, if you highlight a word and click the button to make it bold, it won't be bold in the e-book. Instead, you'll need to create a character style in which bold is selected and apply that.

The Smashwords Style Guide advises against creating multiple paragraph styles, but we've simply ignored this and it's worked fine for us. That said, the simpler you can make your book, the easier a time you'll have during production.

OpenOffice issues

Finally, a warning: not all Word files are equal. When we started using Smashwords, we were outputting Word (.doc) files from OpenOffice, our preferred WP. This largely seemed to work except for some irritating faults. In spite of all those carefully created paragraph formats, text that we'd centered or right-aligned in the Word file were still left-aligned in the ePub document created by Smashwords. And there were other, smaller glitches.

Now, Microsoft is very secretive about the details of the .doc format, and so OpenOffice has had to reverse engineer it. It occured to me that maybe they hadn't got it quite right.

And so it seems.

The same file, loaded into Word and resaved, now works as expected. You may find similar issues with other word processing packages that claim to output Word files.

Resources:

• Smashwords Style Guide
• Amazon DTP formatting guides
• Lulu eBook FAQ

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