Doodlebug, they did a lot of under the hood work to the forums this week, I’m so sorry that you’ve lost the posts! That’s really bad. The devs didn’t say anything like “tell people not to post this week” and there *are* other posts showing up, so it makes me wonder.

Would you try posting another forum post, even a test one, again, and then emailing me (at info@indesignsecrets.com) a link to the post? That way, if/when it disappears, we can see if the logs show anything with that URL.

Thanks,
AM

Experiment with using a different separator between the letter and the text, like the Em Space or En Space instead of the tab. See my post on this topic from a few years ago: https://creativepro.com/cre…..ndents.php

AM

Do you have the book written?

I don't know of an epub that talks about how to write an epub from scratch. It usually starts from the point where you have a manuscript.

But if you want to use InDesign to write your book, just be sure to apply good paragraph and character styles throughout, and keep all images inline. It makes no difference what size the page is how the margins are set since you'll be exporting it to EPUB which is “page-less.”

Or you can use any wordprocessor to write the book, then pour it into InDesign with autoflow enabled, and proceed converting your ID file to EPUB from there.

AM

Hi there. So you're working in InCopy on a Mac, and you're opening and editing files on a server. That's the usual way. Your files would not exist on your local computer, no.

InCopy keeps a constant backup of your edits, called a Recovery file. If the program crashes then the next time you open it, it should automatically open the most recent file(s) you had open, and you should see most of the edits you made, even if you hadn't saved them.

But you're saying that the program is not quitting or shutting down on you. Is that right? What happens exactly when “the connection dropped, and I've lost all my changes” .. I mean, how can you tell that you've lost all your changes? Do they just disappear on you?

Also, are you opening stand-alone InCopy stories (ICML files), or (more typically) are you opening Assignment layouts (ICMA) or InDesign layouts (INDD) and checking out stories within those?

AM

I'm pretty sure that the spaces in filenames problem is a warning, not an error. Meaning it's valid, with warnings.

Can you post some of the warnings you're getting?

InDesign does put in the placeholder %20 in place of spaces when necessary. Or with style names, it closes them up with hyphens.

Make sure you're using ID CS6.01 (the patch update) which fixed a couple filenaming issues with EPUBs.

I use a Tomaxxi script called LinkRename to rename image filenames right in InDesign, though I usually just bother when the filename has illegal characters like apostrophes and accents. The script automatically renames the original linked files too, so there are no worries about broken links. (Unless you've used those images elsewhere in another layout … if so choose Copy Links To from the Links panel menu before running the script). The script is here: https://tomaxxi.com/downloads/

AM

Keeping images and captions together is crazy-making in epubs. I would *not* recommend rasterizing the image and caption together; almost all the ebook resellers caution you against that (and could make them reject your book) because the rasterized caption text is not searchable or selectable, and they get a lot of user complaints about it.

For the iPad, try enclosing your picture and caption in a div, and assign a “nobreak” style to that:

In the HTML:

<div class=”nobreak”>

<img src=”/images/San_Fran%2C_1822_fmt.jpeg” alt=”San_Fran1822.jpg”/>

alt=”San_Fran1822.jpg”>

<p class=”caption”>View of Presidio of San Francisco circa 1817 by Louis Choris</p>

</div>

In the CSS:

Be careful because InDesign will add a bunch of divs to anything that's anchored. So test, and if necessary, prune unnecessary <div> </div> pairs.

AFAIK there's no way to set a “keep together” for Kindle devices. All you can do is set a page break before to force something to the top of a page.

AM

Oh my, this is great information! Gabriel would you like to repurpose this as a blog post for epubsecrets.com? (or would you mind if we did so on your behalf?)

Let me know here, or email me!

AM

(also this could be a great seminar at Pepcon ….)