Making an eBook

Building an eBook with InDesign and Acrobat

This is a walk through the process from choosing a text to delivering a PDF. Of course, there is a mass of detail left out.

Chris Jennings - PageToScreen

Ideas

• Consider:
  • Length of text
  • Amount of illustration
• Layout:
  • Vertical or horizontal
• Add value
• Possible sources
• Read the text
  • Familiarise yourself with the text to get ideas and illustrations
  • Find out about the author

The Text

Choices

• Your own text
• Create story or poems
• Travel journal
• Public domain text
• Author must be 70 years dead
• Sources of Public domain text - Gutenberg Project

Resources

• The content
  • Source the text
  • Check conditions of use
  • Remove any ‘fixed’ formatting
  • Remove multiple carriage returns
  • Archive as Word file
• Consider illustration
  • source and build in Photoshop or other tools

Layout

• Start an InDesign file
  • Name it, save it etc
• Build folder structure with images / text
• Decide screen format and target size
  
  • Horizontal / vertical
  • Convert pixels to millimetres
  • Use a temp graphic of correct proportion (640x480 - maybe)
• Build backgrounds
  • Cover to be different
• Create guides and text boxes on master pages
• Label sections

Into InDesign

• Place graphics
  • Images for the background need to go on the master pages
  • The working file needs to maintain a link to original
• Place text
  • Place Word document
  • Maintain link to source or embed
  • Autoflow and add pages automatically

Design

• Create meaningful block styles
  • paragraphs, headings
• Create character styles
  • Equivilent to inline special styles such as strong, italic etc.
• hyperlinks
• thread the text
• Master pages
  • Nested master pages
• Guides

Navigation

• Automatic contents page generation
  • Made from heading hierarchies
• Bookmarks for the PDF
  • Constructed from Contents as above
• Hyperlinks
  • Links to the web can be built in InDesign with autogeneration
• Link construction
  • Basic links to pages can be built but not as refined as Acrobat
  • leave more sophisticated linking to Acrobat authoring

Tagging (for XML output)

• Map styles to tags
• For final PDF to be a tagged version all the content needs to be tagged in InDesign
• This means everything needs to be styled from style palette
  • not by simply changing as a character / paragraph attribute
• Using ‘HTML’ familiar tags helps later in converting to HTML (although this is optional)
• See structure of the document by viewing XML in Internet Explorer or other tools

Metadata

• Is: Data about data
• File Info
• Title
• Author
• keywords
• All of this is transferred to the PDF on export and is used in search when
  • PDF is on the web

Export from InDesign

• PDF
  
  • Choose latest Acrobat version
  • Decide on compression - print or web?
  • Include Hyperlinks, bookmarks, ebook tags
  • Leave off printers marks
  • RGB colour space for on screen delivery

• XML

  • Remove tags from any elements that you don’t want in the XML
  • View with Internet Explorer
  • hand modify the XML

Work in Acrobat:

• Add:
  • Interactivity / links / buttons
  • Destinations
  • Security
  • Initial view
  • Multimedia - Audio, QuickTime, Flash

• Further editing:

  • Back to InDesign for changes to text  / layout
  • do NOT save over PDF that has added work (interactivity etc)
  • Replace pages in Acrobat (from new updated file) so as not to lose Acrobat work