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Indents shrinking when going from InDesign to Kindle

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    • April 20, 2016 at 1:39 pm #84157
      Duncan McKenzie
      Member

      When exporting EPUB files from ID, the program creates a CSS file which turns indents that were defined in units of picas into units of pixels (px), so they look like this.

      margin-left:48px;
      margin-right:48px;
      text-indent:18px;

      When these are converted into Kindle documents, these pixel indents tend to get resized so they are very small, and it looks bad.

      One way to fix this is to edit the EPUB’s CSS file, and change the units.

      text-indent:2em;

      I can save this as a custom CSS and use that for my exports, but it seems a clunky workaround. Is there any way to make InDesign change its behaviour, so it exports in a unit other than pixels? Strangely, it happily uses ems in other situations—font size, for example.

    • April 20, 2016 at 1:57 pm #84158
      Aaron Troia
      Participant

      Duncan,

      Unfortunately no, there isn’t a way to change InDesign export to use different measurements. I use a custom stylesheet for all my ebook exports and prefer it, with the custom CSS I know exactly how my export is going to turn out and can modify and adjust anything that needs adjustment afterwards, but I know that’s not everyones way to do things. I wish we could use em’s in InDesign, it would make adjusting multiple paragraph styles (using Based On) on the fly so much easier.

      Aaron

    • April 20, 2016 at 2:16 pm #84159
      Jeff Senter
      Member

      A. A. Ron: Can I get a you to email me your CSS file, I can use InDesign but when it comes to CSS I just don’t know it.

    • April 20, 2016 at 2:24 pm #84160
      Duncan McKenzie
      Member

      Thank you SO much for the info, Aaron. Just knowing that it can’t be done is a big timesaver. I will focus on making a good custom CSS, then. I can certainly see the advantages of using a predefined CSS.

      I just hoped that maybe InDesign could be a bit more versatile in its EPUB output. Pixels is not a good unit to lean on.

      Do you have any tips on creating a generic custom CSS?

      Duncan

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