- [Instructor] The EPUB format is the file format
for eBooks around the world
and you can view EPUB files on iPads,
many other tablets, as well as on most computers.
InDesign can export your document as an EPUB,
although it might take a little bit of work
to get it looking the way you want.
Now the first thing to understand
is that there are actually
two different kinds of EPUB files.
There are reflowable EPUB and fixed layout EPUB.
I'm going to show you both
and give you some quick directions on how to make them.
Now you can see that I have two documents open
in InDesign right now.
One is this long document book called gardenBook,
and the other one is the InteractiveDoc,
both from the Exercise Files folder.
Now I'm going to switch to Apple iBooks,
which is the default EPUB reader on the Mac.
If you're on Windows you're going to need
to download an EPUB reader
and the easiest is probably
the free Digital Editions software,
which you can download from the Adobe website.
First, let's take a look at this
long document reflowable EPUB.
As you can see, it's a lot like a Word document
or a simple web page.
I'm just paging through this by pressing
the arrow key on my keyboard.
The line breaks and page breaks will change
depending on what device you view them on,
or how big the font is on that device.
So you as a designer don't really have a lot of control
over what each page will look like.
In other words, when you export a reflowable EPUB
it will look very different than what you see in InDesign.
Reflowable EPUB is usually best for novels
or other documents that are mostly text.
But now let me close this document
and I'm going to open our brochure,
this interactive document.
This is a fixed layout EPUB,
which some people call FXL.
And you can see, it's totally different.
This is great for things like catalogs,
magazines, and children's books
in which the layout of the page
can be as important as the content itself,
because what you see in InDesign is pretty much
what you're going to see in a fixed layout EPUB.
Now I say pretty much,
because some things may change,
but InDesign tries to match it as closely as it can,
given the restrictions of HTML and CSS,
which is what EPUBs are made of.
Let's switch back to InDesign
and I'm going to show you how I made these.
But first, I just want to point out
that making EPUB files with InDesign,
especially reflowable EPUBs is as much an art as a science
and it can be tricky.
Now I've done a lot of work on this document here
to make it export properly to reflowable EPUB.
For example, I'll go to the Window menu
and choose Articles.
This opens the Articles panel.
And I won't go into the details of how this works,
but you really need to use this panel
to set the order of your images and stories.
You also need to really carefully anchor
all of your images into the text
in order for them to show up in the right place.
And I cannot emphasize enough the need for you
to be religious about using paragraph and character styles.
With all that in mind now let's go ahead
and export this as an EPUB.
I'll go to the File menu, choose Export,
and then I'll save this out to my Desktop
as a Reflowable EPUB.
You can see that down here in the Format popup menu
there are actually two different EPUBs to choose from,
Fixed Layout and Reflowable.
In this case we're going to use Reflowable.
I'll click Save and up comes the EPUB dialog box.
And in here I need to change a few things,
for example, I'm going to change the Content popup menu
from Based on Page Layout to the Same as Articles Panel.
Because I did all that work to set up my Articles panel
I want to use that here.
I also need a navigation, a table of contents,
and I did that by creating a table of contents style
and saved that in this document already.
And I can choose that by going to Navigation TOC
and choosing Multi Level TOC Style,
then from the TOC Style popup menu
I'm going to choose LM LongDoc,
that's the name of the table of contents style that I saved.
And finally, I'm going to tell InDesign to split this document
every time it sees a chapter number.
I'll turn on the Split Document checkbox
and change my Paragraph Style to Chapter #.
That ensures that each chapter begins on a new page.
Alright, now let's click OK and see what we've got.
InDesign exports to EPUB
and it opens it in our EPUB reader app.
Now you can see that we still probably want to make
a few edits and fix up some things,
but this is looking pretty good for a reflowable EPUB.
If I want to jump to a specific chapter of my document
I'll simply open my Table of Contents here
and click on one of the chapters.
It takes me right to it.
Now like I said, one of the great things about EPUBs
is that they always reflow based on the device,
the font, even the size,
so for example, I can come up here
and change the size of my font and it all reflows.
Now let's look at exporting a fixed layout EPUB.
This is even easier.
I'll switch back to InDesign,
and I'll close my Articles panel,
and I'll open my InteractiveDocument.
But before I export this
let's add a video, it's really easy to do.
You import it just like any other graphic.
I'm going to jump to page five
by pressing Cmd + J on the Mac or Ctrl + J on Windows,
then I'll type 5 and hit Enter or Return.
Next I'll go to the File menu and choose Place.
Now here in the Links folder from my Exercise Files folder
I'm going to scroll down until I see my movie.
It's this one, the customer testimonials,
and you can see it ends with .mp4.
That's a movie format that InDesign can read.
Now when I click Open InDesign loads my place cursor,
and then just like any other graphic
I can click in this empty frame to put the movie in it.
Now it's a little hard to tell,
because the first frame of the movie is black,
but believe me, the movie is in there.
But I happen to know that the movie is actually bigger
than this little frame.
So I'm going to come up here to the Object menu,
choose Fitting, and then choose Fit Content to Frame.
Now I cannot play this movie on my InDesign page,
but InDesign has a cool feature
that can show me what my fixed layout EPUB
is going to look like.
To find that I'll go to the Window menu,
choose Interactive,
and then choose EPUB Interactivity Preview.
When you open this panel InDesign literally exports
the current page to a temporary EPUB file
and then opens it in the panel.
And that can take a few seconds,
depending on the complexity of the page.
Again, this is exporting a single page,
but if I click this little button
in the lower right corner
it will preview the whole document,
but that takes way longer,
so I'm not going to do that right now.
I can also make this panel much bigger
by dragging this corner,
which makes it much more useful.
I can even play the video file in here
by clicking this button.
So it looks like it's going to work.
Now let's export our EPUB file and see how it looks.
I'll go back to the File menu, choose Export,
and this time down in the Format popup menu
I'll choose EPUB Fixed Layout,
then I'll click the Save button.
For this introduction I'm going to skip over
all the features inside this dialog box.
I'm simply going to click the OK button
and see what happens.
InDesign exports the file
and this can take a little while
depending on how big your file is.
And when it's done exporting it sometimes warns me
that some of my InDesign formatting
just won't work in the EPUB.
In this case I guess I have some overlapping JPG files,
which might look slightly different,
but that's usually not a bit problem,
so I'll click OK and InDesign opens my EPUB
in my default EPUB reader.
Again, on the Mac it's iBooks.
Now not all EPUB readers can read fixed layout EPUB files,
but the newest versions of Apple iBooks
and Adobe Digital Editions can.
So here it is again, almost identical to the InDesign file.
You can tell that fixed layout EPUB
is kind of similar to a PDF file,
but EPUB can do some things that PDF can't.
For example, EPUB supports animations and slideshows
and other interactive features that PDF can't do,
especially on devices like an iPad.
Now let's go see if that video works.
I'm going to come up here
and click on this little navigation button in iBooks,
that's an iBooks thing, not InDesign,
and then I'm going to come down here
and click on page five.
That just jumps me directly to that page.
To start my video I just click
this little play button down here.
That's excellent,
but the coolest difference between a PDF and an EPUB
is that you can sell an EPUB in Apple's iBooks Store
and for many people that along is enough
to get them exporting fixed layout EPUBs.