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• • January 27, 2015 at 12:41 am #72932
    Clark Kenyon

    Participant

    I’m working on a book layout for a client. He wants both a print and ePub edition. One of the characteristics of the book is shaded text boxes that span several pages. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make a reflowable ePub with these text boxes. (I can make a fixed layout ePub, but that’s not what the client wants.) It doesn’t work to just shade the text frames because on some pages the text box does not take up the whole frame. I’ve drawn extra boxes around the affected text, shaded these and sent them to the back (so the text will appear), but when I try to anchor the first one to the text the shaded box comes back to the front and covers up the text. I’ve tried putting the shaded boxes on a separate layer and putting it below the text layer. No luck. And then what do I do about the next box and the one after that? The text is linked, but the shaded boxes aren’t. If the text boxes were smaller than the text frame on each page there’d be no problem, just anchor them to the text. What’s the solution? I can’t figure it out.

  • January 29, 2015 at 6:24 pm #73011
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    This might be a situation where you have to combine all the content into one colored box (or div if you want to think about it in HTML) and anchor it somewhere close in the body of the text that makes sense. I know that might not sound good but it’s one of those things that doesn’t carry over to ebooks and you probably will have to explain that to your client. It might also make sense to make a copy of the file that you do things that make sense for the eBook conversion, it will make you’re life easier than trying to do both print and ePub from the same file. Anyway, let me know if that makes sense.

  • February 1, 2015 at 1:13 pm #73038
    Clark Kenyon

    Participant

    Thanks for responding. I’ve tried what you suggest and it doesn’t work. The only way I could get it to work was to break the text up into separate boxes and anchor each to a paragraph mark at the top of each page. But the results are inconstant sized boxes. My client saw someone else had done this in an ebook (probably exported from Word) and wanted it. I have told him that it is not going to happen.

  • February 2, 2015 at 9:35 am #73058
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    No problem, that can be a tough decision on how to rework that into an eBook. You might try unzipping the ePub and setting all three div’s to the same style to see if you cant get the same box size. If you would be interested, I would be willing to look at the code to see what’s possible, as it might be possible to make it work by playing with the eBook’s CSS. Just a thought, no pressure but I thought I would ask.

  • February 8, 2015 at 9:31 am #73185
    Clark Kenyon

    Participant

    Thanks for the offer, but the author understands he won’t be able to have the shaded boxes in the ePub.

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