Reply To: InDesign CS5.5 for EPUB – better or worse?

I don't use footnotes, so I was unaware of the difference. I suppose there is an inconvenience to not being able to have multiple styles signify chapter breaks. But since I don't really ever need to have more than one heading for my chapters, the benefits in CS5.5 far outway the disadvantages for me.

One thing I use extensively now is the export tagging. This is what makes it all worthwhile to me. I simply design my css style sheet outside of InDesign and set up all my styles to output to the appropriate tag. This solves the problem of not having a class for your plain body text (it can just use the p tag) and allows you to use heading styles whenever appropriate (not just when there's a chapter break). It makes for a much cleaner, and therefore easier to edit, css style sheet.

Another big plus is the Articles Panel. I don't use it a lot but it can be really helpful for documents with complex layouts that need to be used for both print and epub.

And then there's just the bugs and improved support. For instance, Now you can use InDesign's TOC feature to create a linked TOC (you used to have to create hyperlinks by hand). Nested styles will output properly with the character styles applied as a span class. In CS5 the nested character styles were ignored.

If you are a member of Lynda.com, take a look at Ann-Marie's tutorial for CS5.5 epub output. It's great for an overview of the new features.