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• • October 7, 2015 at 2:42 pm #78618
    Jordan

    Member

    Hey there! Quick question for the community as I’m a little confused.

    Does the new version of InDesign CC (instead of CS4) allow for a clean conversion from an EPUB to Kindle? The reason I’m asking is because I did the work a few years ago to get the book on the Ibookstore and the painstaking formatting for the EPUB came out perfectly, but when I used CS4 to convert it for the Kindle store, it messed up the formatting so much that we were unable to do it. We are revisiting now and wanted to know if anyone had any thoughts on how to take the EPUB and do a WYSIWYG conversion. Thanks so much for any input.

    J

  • October 7, 2015 at 2:45 pm #78619
    Ken Jones

    Member

    Hi Jordan

    If you are looking for InDesign or PDF conversion to fixed layout KF8 for Amazon devices then please check out our software CircularFLO at https://circularflo.com/

    Ken Jones
    Circular Software

  • October 7, 2015 at 3:15 pm #78620
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    Jordan,

    The file should convert a lot cleaner now. The conversion from ePub to KF8 (the new Amazon standard .mobi file) is a lot cleaner than going from ePub to the older Mobi7 file format. I personally export from InDesign with my own stylesheet (for reflowable ePub, both ePub2 and ePub3) and pretty much run the same InDesign exported files through KindleGen with really good results, so give it a go, it should be a lot cleaner of a conversion for you now.

    Aaron

    • October 7, 2015 at 3:57 pm #78631
      Jordan

      Member

      Thanks for the responses! Just to clarify Aaron, are you saying that you export from the newest version of InDesign CC or are you exporting from CS4 as well and getting the good results by using the latest version of KindleGen? This is looking like it may work after all.

      J

    • October 7, 2015 at 4:42 pm #78632
      Aaron Troia

      Participant

      Good question, sorry for not clarifying that. I’m exporting from CC and have had good conversion results when running it through KindleGen. I should note that I do a lot of massaging of the code that comes out of InDesign to get books how I want them and for semantic purposes, but if you are getting results you are happy with in the InDesign exported ePub, running it through KindleGen should result with fairly comparable results. But test it, drop a copy of your previous ePub file in Kindle Previewer and see how it converts it.

    • October 7, 2015 at 6:53 pm #78635
      Jordan

      Member

      Thank you so much! I’m going to try all of that tonight and see what happens. What we’re experimenting with now is opening the EPUB that we created in CS4 in Kindle previewer and it automatically converted the EPUB to a Mobi file. At first glance it looks the same, so we’re going to take a more in depth look and see what happens.

      If you have anymore thoughts, feel free to let me know.

      Again, thank you!

      J

    • October 8, 2015 at 12:53 pm #78656
      Jordan

      Member

      Hi Aaron,

      The EPUB that was created in CS4 was successfully converted to Mobi using Kindle Previewer. Originally we used a unique font for a drop cap that was not transferring over when creating an EPUB, so we created an image of that font as a drop cap and anchored them into the correct position. With nighttime viewer now available in most EPUB readers, you can see the white outline of the text box that holds the drop cap. So, what we’re trying to do is create a drop cap, but the stubborn issue as it stands now is preserving any dropcap once it’s converted either to an EPUB or Mobi file. I’ve been reading up on it all night and watching a myriad of tutorials about preserving dropcaps when converting but I’m not having any success. I’ve even downloaded the new InDesign CC to see if that would help, but still no luck.

      Do you have any thoughts? Again, greatly appreciated!

  • October 8, 2015 at 1:33 pm #78659
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    Jordan,

    Try using a PNG with a transparent background. I have a quarterly project that I have the same unique dropcap issue that you’re talking about and the transparent PNG solved my white background problem. Let me know if that works for you or if you have issues.

    • October 12, 2015 at 8:23 am #78711
      Jordan

      Member

      Hi Aaron,

      Thank you for the suggestion. Unfortunately this will not work for a Mobi file as night mode would made the type disappear. We’ve actually decided to forget about the drop caps and go a different route. But I thank you for your help. I’m now stuck on creating an inline TOC with the chapter titles as images, so I cannot set the TOC automatically.

      Thank you again for your help!

      J

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