Reply To: Advice: InDesign to EBook: Stylesheets

I can’t think of a reason why either of those settings would cause problems in an EPUB. Can they give you a reason why they don’t want these settings? (Note, I don’t really work with external clients, but I’m guessing it’s not that much fun to get them to change or explain their ways….)

For 1), InDesign does export keep option settings into the CSS, but I’ve never found an EPUB reading system that pays any attention to CSS keep options. If the settings are within paragraph styles, I’d think it would be very easy to remove those from the CSS (if they’re concerned about these settings I’m assuming they’re using the InDesign generated CSS and not writing their own).

If any keep options are set as a local setting and not in a style then they’ll show up in the CSS as an override. For example, if you’ve set keep options locally on a paragraph you’ll have an additional style declaration in the CSS (meaning there could be more settings to remove than just the one in the paragraph style).

Anyway, trying to typeset a book while not using the keep options sounds like a huge pain. That seems like it would add hours to typesetting, while removing those settings from the CSS could be done with a find and replace in a few minutes.

For 2), again, I’m not sure why this would cause an issue. There’s a CSS rule for transforming text to uppercase: text-transform:uppercase. InDesign will export this CSS rule if you’ve applied all caps in a paragraph style. The only difference I can think of is that most EPUB TOCs don’t allow styles to be applied, so if you have all caps applied by CSS they’ll still appear as title case in the navigation (to me this is preferable; all cap headings in the body can look ok, but all caps in an EPUB TOC don’t).

As far as scripts go, I’m sure there are options out there. It sounds like a common issue and a simple thing for a script. Here’s a GREP based option:
https://www.kahrel.plus.com/indesign/grep_change_case.html