Hi Allen, I dont' think you're doing anything wrong. I'm experimenting w/the plug-in these days too. You know it's only for CS4 and CS5, not 5.5. As far as I can tell, the plug-in ignores anything 5.5-specific.

I emailed Amazon about it but haven't received a reply. Worst case scenario is that we have to build it ourselves in a text editor and add it to the epub (after extracting).

If I learn anything new I'll write up a post about it, and share it here too.

AM

Congratulations on the self-teaching! That's how most of us learned the program. :D

There is a free script that can split up a long ID file into multiple ID files, it's worth a try.

The script is here: https://www.scriptopedia.org/in…..Pages.html

I first wrote about it here: https://creativepro.com/fre…..  (Many comments on this post, some from the script writer, so it'd be good to skim through these so you can see any glitches that might occur.)

If you've never installed a script or used one, it's pretty simple: https://creativepro.com/how…..design.php

If the script doesn't work, the old school way would work, which would be to open a copy of the catalog (just in case), delete all of the pages except the first 20 or 30 (your first section), and then choose Save As and give it a name (catalog sec 1); then re-open the full catalog copy and delete all of the pages except for pp 31-60 (or however section 2 would lay out), then Save As section 2; and so on.

AM

I don't think you need GREP, just a nested style should do it. Be sure you have a character style that only applies Bold styling to the text. I'll call the style Bold in this example.

Edit the paragraph style that you're applying to those entries.

679,03:26:59,1003,Mister,Person,M,

Let's say the paragraph style is called Entry. Double-click the Entry paragraph style and click Drop Caps and Nested Styles. Add four nested styles (just click New Nested Style button to add these).

There are 4 fields in each Nested Style that you need to specify: Name of character style, Up to/Through, a number, and a stop character. You can manually enter a comma in the stop character field.

So your nested styles should be:

NONE | Through | 1 | ,

BOLD | Through | 1 | ,

NONE | Through | 1 | ,

BOLD | Through | 2 | ,

–AM

I looked at your thread in the Adobe forum (great screenshot, very helpful!) and you got the right advice there. But I think you're still missing some important techniques.

You need to create a specific paragraph style for your TOC entries, as recommended. That paragraph style should include the correct tab stop(s) and the leader dot style for the tab … all of this is selectable in the Paragraph Style Options dialog box, in the Tabs panel.

If you want to change the font or color or tracking of *just* the leader dots, then you need to 1) Create a character style for the leader dots; and 2) Edit your new TOC Entry paragraph style so a Nested Style automatically applies your leader dots character style when it encounters a tab, and only applies it to that tab character.

Test out your new TOC Entry style on some sample text to make sure it's right. Then choose the name of that style in the TOC dialog box, in the middle section (Style heading section, the Entry Style: pop-up menu). Right now you have it set to “Body” per your screen shots.

That should fix your “update TOC” problem.

AM

There are so many variables involved in why you sometimes run into problems exporting a book w/lots of placed PDFs into one big PDF, it'd be really hard to diagnose. I guess I'd look at RAM first, and then perhaps reducing the PDF file size in Acro before you place it/them. I'm also wondering if fonts and font subsetting are a problem. You know when you place a PDF and then export to PDF, InDesign is essentially “re-frying” the PDF again, and thus has to re-subset all those fonts. I don't know of any surefire fix for avoiding font conflicts/problems other than rasterizing the PDFs in Photoshop first (changing them into pictures) before placing into ID, and that would be probably be a last resort.

You can insert dividers (extra pages) into an InDesign file, but you'd have to manually create a new section with a new starting number for the “real” doc page following that divider so that the divider page isn't counted. So if you have a 10 page doc and insert a divider page after page 5, you'd go to page 7 (the first page after the divider), choose Numbering and Section Options, turn on Section Start and Start at Page Number and enter the number 6. In the document, the Current Page Number special character will honor what you set here.

AM

We don't have an ebook, unfortunately, but if you have a Lynda.com subscription, you can watch the videos in my InDesign CS4 New Features title (there were tons of them):

https://www.lynda.com/InDesign-…..650-2.html

If you don't have a lynda.com sub (only $25 for a month), you can get a free week's worth of access by filling out this form:

https://lynda.com/trial/indesignsecrets

Also, in a pinch, the What's New section of Online help is always good because it summarizes the new features and links to the relevant parts of the online manual. Even if you skipped CS4 you can get to its online help file, here's the What's New page:

https://help.adobe.com/en_US/In…..C809a.html

AM

Hi there!

Re how quiet it is here … :-) … it's only because you're asking questions that only a very small percentage of people on the forums are familiar with. If you were asking questions about image scaling or hyphenation, then you'd probably get a ton of answers. EPUB exporting out of ID is something that relatively few people do, though of course it's picking up steam. You might get many more answers to these types of questions by also posting to forums where everyone is making EPUBs, such as https://mobileread.com. (I showed that site in my video.)

For the navigational TOC in ADE that you're talking about, what appears there is a list of links to the separate XHTML files comprising the book. If you're starting with a Book document (many INDD files in the Book panel), and you're not using the TOC/first-level option in the Export dialog box (only available w/CS5), then the navigational TOC will be the filenames for your InDesign documents. In other words ID will export one XHTML file per INDD file. The name of each INDD file will be what the nav TOC shows.

Cross-references are problematic. If you've got cross-references, do NOT rename the INDD files, otherwise you'll end up with broken links. You'll see that in the Hyperlinks/Cross-References panel after the fact, when you open a doc. Even if they're working perfectly in the INDD file/book, when you export to EPUB they may break. There is a known bug involved w/them and EPUBs, that the Teus DeJong script I show in the video partially fixes.

In my experience talking w/other EPUB producers, you'll likely have to fix the x-ref links after the export to EPUB, by making them into relative links instead of absolute ones and if you've changed a filename, to the correct filename. Knowing how to use GREP in your Find/changes and doing so across all the documents in the book will help a great deal. Or this might be something you should just job out.

Sorry I don't have better news for you!

AM