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• • March 31, 2011 at 6:30 am #59126
    Julie Gallagher

    Member

    I'm converting the files of a printed book to epub format for the first time, have studied Anne-Marie's course on Lynda.com and Liz Castro's book. The first pass through, everything worked as expected with lots of files and indb export with CS4 to epub. But I wanted to tweak some of the design elements and make the graphics relatively larger, so I went back to ID. Since that point, I've spent days making and remaking ID files but can't export anything because the “export for digital editions” button is greyed out both in the individual files and in the book (also recreated numerous times). The same thing happens on both my computers. I find no reference to this anywhere, know it's probably something incredibly simple, but can't figure it out. Any suggestions?

    I did attempt to clean up the epub files with Springy and BBEdit. But Springy crashed several times when I was working on multiple files, so I gave up on that approach. I add this detail for completeness, don't think it would have caused my problem. I ran Disk Utility and rebooted after the crashes.

    I have CS5 but have been too busy to install it. If that will get rid of the problem, let me know. I'm running Mac OSX6.6.

    A side question: When I viewed my epub in ADE, my graphics were quite small and did not change size when I adjusted the viewing screen. (Source images are line charts and graphs converted to GIFs, sized to full text width in ID files.) The images in Liz's “EPUB Straight to the Point” scaled when the screen was adjusted. Is there a magic formula for that?

    Thanks,

    Julie

  • March 31, 2011 at 7:20 am #59130
    Julie Gallagher

    Member

    I've trashed my preferences, rebooted, and opened ID. “Export for Digital Editions” is still greyed out on any file I open in any job (as are “Export for Kindle” and “Export for Dreamweaver”).

    I installed and ran some scripts to clean up the ID files (preptext, applynestedstyles) when I began this project. Could that have any effect on the problem?

    Julie

  • March 31, 2011 at 9:07 am #59132
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    The silence you're hearing here is everyone scratching their heads. I can't think of any reason those should be grayed out. Very weird. Yes, CS5 would likely help in some ways. (And you can have CS4 and CS5 on the same machine.)

  • March 31, 2011 at 9:38 am #59135
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    In regards to the command being grayed out … have you tried usual troubleshooting, such as rebuilding preferences? Experimenting with a simple one-page file? Logging in to your comp as a test user and trying from there?

    All those “Export for” commands are actually scripts, which should be in your Adobe InDesign CS4 > Scripts folder. For example, there should be a subfolder in there named “XHTML for Digital Editions” which has a bunch of files and subfolders within it. Do those all look intact?

    Re the images resizing, that's because Liz uses CSS to change the size of the images to a % of the screen width. I don't cover that in my title … but I did move it to the outline for an as-yet-to-be-recorded “Advanced EPUB formatting” course. ;-D Liz does cover using auto-resizing image CSS in her book, so grab that and take a look.

    AM

  • March 31, 2011 at 10:22 am #59137
    Julie Gallagher

    Member

    Thanks for your responses. And thanks for the tip on sizing images with CSS!

    I trashed my preferences, restarted, and relaunched ID. Is there something else I need to do to rebuild the preferences?

    I've tested the feature with an unrelated single ID file–same result. I can try logging in as a different user, but this is happening on both my desktop and laptop computers. It's hard to imagine that they both got screwed up at the same time (though the Springy crashes make me nervous). The first export was successful, then the greyed-out buttons showed up.

    I looked at the XHTML for Digital Editions folder. It looks complete to me. I took a screenshot but don't know how to attach it here.

    I'll try installing CS5 next. I'm migrating to a new computer, was waiting for a lull in the storm before setting it up, but it looks like now is the time…

    Thanks again,

    Julie

  • March 31, 2011 at 12:01 pm #59138
    Julie Gallagher

    Member

    I'm not sure what I did or didn't do, but the export feature is now working. There is one anomaly that I didn't remember from my successful export on Monday: after the export, ADE opens the epub … and ID immediately crashes. I now recall that it happened on each of my computers. This must be the problem — something is not stable. There's plenty of RAM and disk space. I'll install CS5 on the new computer and hopefully that will be the end of it.

    Thanks for all your help,

    Julie

  • April 2, 2011 at 6:45 am #59153
    Julie Gallagher

    Member

    Here's a followup on my progress:

    Everything worked fine with ID-CS5. I didn't auto-open ADE on export (once burned…), but used the Firefox plugin and Safari to check files. I had to add hundreds of text anchors and links, thought it would be easier with coding than ID since it crossed chapters. (The publisher wanted each text reference superscript linked to its reference in the Notes section. Fortunately, he decided against linking the index.)

    I validated the epub, then used Sigil to add the guide section (hand-coding didn't validate because I didn't know all the terms). Major problem! Sigil created a different folder structure and adjusted all link coding. When I viewed the resulting file in ADE, Safari, and Firefox, NONE of the links worked any longer. Fortunately I save backups at each step, so I went back to an earlier version, copied/adjusted the guide section to its content.opf — and the links worked again.

    I'll check the file on an iPad before submitting it to the publisher. I learned a lot, so hopefully the next project will take a more reasonable amount of time.

    Julie

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