Is it OK to ask an EPUB question?

Learn / Forums / General InDesign Topics / Is it OK to ask an EPUB question?

Viewing 5 reply threads
  • Author
    Posts
    • #14328485

      Howdy! Somebody over at the Adobe forums suggested I check out the forums here for my EPUB questions, but I noticed that the EPUB forum was closed, so I hope it’s OK if I sneak in a question on this general forum.
      My ebook skills are cobbled together from YouTube tutorials and trial and error, so even after a couple of years making EPUB and MOBI files, I’m still bumping into what are probably elementary issues. The latest cropped up in some “love notes” from Amazon about my footnotes not back-linking to the text. Is that some magic setting I need to adjust in InDesign, either in the footnote formatting dialog or the EPUB export dialog? Or is it something I need to do outside of InDesign? If the latter, anybody got any leads for me?
      And if I’m being unacceptably off-topic, just shoo me away, and I’ll go weep quietly in a corner… ;-)
      Thanks!
      ~Valerie

    • #127004
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      We may not have the answer here, but just in case: Are you referring specifically to an InDesign document you’re exporting to EPUB, and then uploading to Amazon to convert to Kindle?

    • #14331392

      Yep! InDesign > EPUB, then from Kindle Previewer > MOBI.

    • #14331393
      Aaron Troia
      Participant

      Valerie,
      I’m not sure how many footnotes you have, but probably one of the easiest ways is to go through and replace your footnotes with InDesign’s Footnotes (right click > Insert footnote). That will create the cross-reference linking that is needed in Epub’s and Mobi’s for linked footnotes.
      Aaron

    • #127037

      That’s how all of my footnotes are always done…and I assumed that would be sufficient, but evidently not. Any ideas on troubleshooting?

    • #127223
      Clark Kenyon
      Participant

      KDP has lately taken to objecting to endnotes (which in my case they referred to as “footnotes” for some reason) that don’t link back to the text. They provide the html code for creating backlinks in their Kindle Publishing Guidelines, but this would require a lot after the fact code tinkering that defeats the purpose of doing an ePub in InDesign. If you have actual footnotes, the ePub export dialog in InDesign lets you specify whether they appear as popups or at the end of a chapter. I haven’t received any negative feedback from KDP about these, but I have about endnotes that I set up as cross-references. There are several ways to get back to the text when viewing an endnote and it varies depending on the Kindle device/app. I did an experiment with a dummy document, creating the backlinks the way KDP wanted them. I didn’t see any difference between these backlinks and what you get when you export an ePub with cross-references. My suggestion is tell KDP the error they are concerned about is not an issue.

Viewing 5 reply threads
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
>