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• • June 30, 2013 at 8:48 am #34111
    Clark Kenyon

    Participant

    I had a problem recently with exporting an ID CS 6 document to ePub, specifically with numbered lists. The numbers were formatted to be followed by a period, then a space. Actually, the resulting ePub looked fine, but when I converted it to Kindle via the Kindle Previewer and Kindlegen the numbers appeared above the first line of text (the period was on the line). (This wasn’t a peculiarity of the Kindle Previewer, because I transferred the file to an actual Kindle and saw the problem.) I tried converting the numbering of that particular style to text, but that didn’t help. I had to remove the period after the number to get the number back down on the line. What else could I have done to keep the appearance of the numbered list the way I wanted it?
    Clark

  • July 11, 2013 at 8:17 am #34223
    Clark Kenyon

    Participant

    I think I figured this out on my own. Kindle Previewer and Adobe Digital Editions are pretty much worthless for previewing Kindles and ePubs. You need to work with the actual hardware. When I got the ePub onto a real iPad and viewed it in iBooks another problem came up: the bullets in the bulleted lists all appeared above the line. I went back to ID and removed the space I had between the bullet and the text, and that fixed it. The rule seems to be to have nothing between the number or bullet and the following text, not a period, not a space.

  • February 2, 2017 at 7:17 am #91838
    Bill Jelen

    Member

    I still have problems with this today. Allegedly, they fixed a bug in version 2.5 of KindleGen. Per the release notes: “Resolved indentation issues in Mobi7 related to bullets and numbered lists. This was due to usage of “margin-left” CSS property with bullets and numbered lists. In Mobi7, the margin-left property is being ignored for bullets and numbered lists. The margin-left CSS property will continue to be preserved in KF8.”

    However, in version 2.92 of KindleGen, they continue to screw up the numbered lists. Clark’s idea sort-of worked for numbers like 1, 2, 3. Except for me, the number and the first letter of the text are overset.

    It gets worse for my figures, which are labeled Fig 1, Fig 2, Fig 3. I now get five lines for each caption. The first says “F”. The second says “i”. The third says “g”.

    If you only have one type of numbers, you can Convert to Ordered Lists. But if you are using numbered lists for Chapters, Figures, and numbered steps, this does not work.

  • February 3, 2017 at 1:35 pm #91886
    Bill Jelen

    Member

    I actually found a suitable solution elsewhere at InDesignSecrets, buried in a comment from Daniel Rodney in response to this post:
    https://creativepro.com/convert-numbering-to-text-in-indesign.php

    First, I tried 12 different solutions to get KindleGen to work. Nothing would work. Amazon KDP forum and Amazon Support could not solve it. I was tempted to manually convert all numbered lists to text manually by typing 1 2 3 before the text, but I did not have the patience to do this thousands of times.

    But then I found Daniel Rodney’s shortcut. This shortcut ruins your file, so Save the original file with a name like MyBookBeforeNumbersRemoved.indd. Then, Save As the file as MyBookNumbersToText.

    Say that you are managing numbers with three paragraph styles:
    NL
    NL-RestartAt1
    FigureNumbers

    Select any paragraph that is NL (those are the ones that go 2, 3, 4…)
    Open the Paragraph Styles pane. In the top right corner is a menu with an item called Convert NL Numbers to Text. Select this.
    Repeat for NL-RestartAt1
    Repeat for FigureNumbers

    I took the time to add a Tab (^t) to each paragraph style, in the Bullets & Numbering:
    Figure ^#^t

    I also added a left-tab at the 1 inch mark in the Tab well (also in the Paragraph Styles)

    I was able to convert thousands of numbers to text in about 5 minutes.

    Then, export as ePub3.
    Convert the ePub3 to Mobi using KindleGen.

    Success! All of the numbers move down to the same line as the text.

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