Digital Publishing Hub
Help for publishers and students of publishing

InDesign for Print and Digital

InDesign for Print and Digital

Help Pages

Anchoring and Wrapping

We look at how to ‘place’ images on the page, and the issues that we might encounter along the way.

This document last edited on: 17 May 2017

Building the TOC in InDesign

The table of contents (TOC) belongs to, what are normally referrer to as, the front matter. We might also refer to them as the prelim pages.

This document last edited on: 13 June 2017

Create XML from InDesign

XML is eXtensible Markup Language and is a non-proprietary markup language that can be used as a future-proof way to store content. XML indicates structure rather than style; in fact XML includes no information about appearance, only structure, hierarchy and element taxonomy.

This document last edited on: 22 November 2017

Creating a Reflowable eBook

This work follows on from previous workflows in creating a Shakespeare play for print. We should already have an Indesign ‘book’ with at least 2 sections. We will export from InDesign for ePub (reflowable) and then 'break open' the ePub file and make some changes to some of the included files.

This document last edited on: 18 December 2017

Footnotes, Endnotes, Sidenotes and Popup Notes

These need to be separated from the main body of the text, and are best set with a smaller size and possibly event a different typeface and colour. The idea of any notes is that it is supplementary information and it is entirely optional that the reader even bothers to look, so setting in a style that does not distract from the flow of the reading experience is important.

This document last edited on: 29 May 2018

InDesign to HTML and CSS

HTML is the language for the web; delivering content for our various types of screens. InDesign is a *page layout* tool; presuming for the printed page, but we can still generate HTML from our content and with some attention to detail, we can can get good HTML markup ready for further styling and attention to a responsive design.

This document last edited on: 15 January 2020

InDesign to the Fixed Layout Recipe eBook

This fixed-layout format can be considered almost the same as an interactive PDF, however, as you will see, the ePUB can have much more interactivity and, you, the designer can control the way the eBook is displayed.

This document last edited on: 30 July 2017

InDesign to the Fixed Layout ePub

The fixed-layout format ePUB3 format provides a way to deliver every single page in your print book laid out just as it was in the print version.

This document last edited on: 18 December 2017

Master Pages in InDesign

The Pages panel will show you the pages in your document as thumbnails. You can configure the way this displays through the Panel Options from the context menu in the Pages panel.

This document last edited on: 30 July 2017

Preflight and Package for Print and Output to PDF

At some point during our workflow and design process we want to send something to the proof printer. Normally the best approach to this is to output to PDF from InDesign and then print from this file.

This document last edited on: 8 December 2017

Text to InDesign

When working with text from sources outside InDesign, we are likely to find that we want to make changes as soon as we ‘place’ in InDesign.

This document last edited on: 8 November 2017

Typographic detail with InDesign

InDesign is a brilliant tool to design the display of type on a page. We have every possible control over the letters, the words, the lines, the paragraphs and how the blocks of type are shaped, spaced and aligned.

This document last edited on: 5 December 2017

Using the Book Panel in InDesign

Quite often we will be working with very long publications that will benefit from the concept of separate files for separate sections or chapters. There are also advantages from having individuals in a team, work on different InDesign files (with common styles), and then bring them all together inside one book.

This document last edited on: 8 December 2017

Screencasts

eBook Typography

A presentation that cover aspects of my book I walk through the issues when creating reflowable eBooks.

This document last edited on: 27 February 2014

Web First Workflow System for Publishing

This screencast demonstrates a web-first publishing system. It uses a web interface to provide an editing environment which, when ready for page layout publishing ready, can be exported to XML.

This document last edited on: 16 July 2015

Using the Articles Panel

When we export our book to the reflowable ePub from InDesign, we have a choice about the content order. Usually we choose ‘Based on Page Layout’, but if you want to make sure that your front matter pages don’t end up at the back of the book, then you need to use the Articles Panel to organise the content.

This document last edited on: 1 February 2017

Structure, Tagging and Export to XML

With a Shakespeare play in mind we have a DTD that we can import into InDesign. This provides us with the TAGS. If we name our styles with those same tags, we can ‘map the styles to the tags’ very easily.

This document last edited on: 18 September 2016

Roundtrip MS Word and InDesign

In this screencast we show how we can make style changes in InDesign and then reflect those changes in the linked Word version. Although we cannot directly export the MS Word we can use the intermediary format of RTF.

This document last edited on: 14 January 2020

Processing some text inside InDesign

Using GREP and a Script

We have our play (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) placed in InDesign, but we have some changes we want to make to the text.

This document last edited on: 28 July 2017

More on XML from InDesign

In our InDesign document all content needs to be attached to an appropriate style element.

This document last edited on: 10 November 2016

Linking a document for editing workflow

Sometimes we want to give editors some editing capabilities after the text has been placed into InDesign. To do this we need to maintain a link between the Word file (.docx) and the InDesign document.

This document last edited on: 1 January 2020

InDesign to iBooks Author (Part 2)

Part 2 of the 2 part screencast Now we have created separate IDML files from InDesign we need to import these into an iBooks Author template.

This document last edited on: 3 April 2017

InDesign to ePub Reflowable

We take an existing InDesign document prepared for print and export to ePub. We then make some adjustments and do that again.

This document last edited on: 18 February 2017

InDesign to HTML

We can generate good quality, sensible HTML markup from InDesign so long as we make some adjustments to the way the HTML tags are mapped from our styles.

This document last edited on: 2 February 2020

How to Create Running Headers

In book design there is often a requirement for headers on the page; that is text that is displayed in the margin that describes the title and often the author of the book. This text may be displayed in the top or bottom margin. Further into the book pages we may want running headers. These are dynamically generated items that change according to where we are in the book. How do we generate these running headers?

This document last edited on: 29 November 2019

Fixed Layout eBook Part 3

This is a Multi-part screencast (please view parts 1 and 2 first)

This document last edited on: 15 March 2020

Editing inside the ePub Package

Once we have exported the reflow-able ePub from InDesign, we can make changes by editing the CSS that InDesign has created. We want to achieve a roundtrip workflow, allowing us the potential to go back to InDesign and re-export. To achieve this we must make our own version of the CSS, that will override those generated by InDesign.

This document last edited on: 26 February 2017

Converting the reflowable ePub to a Kindle Version

Our eBook production workflow involves perfecting for the ePub3 format first by exporting from InDesign and then making minimal adjustments through our own CSS file. Once we have everything ready to go, we can then convert this ePub to the MOBI file for the Amazon Kindle.

This document last edited on: 21 January 2020

Alignment of the Body Text across the spread

The baseline in typography is the imaginary line on which most letters sit. The descenders of letters will extend below this line. Also, the body of some letters such as the J and Q in some typefaces will also extend slightly below this baseline.

This document last edited on: 29 November 2019

Adding Front matter pages to our Recipe eBook

We are using an InDesign book to build a recipe eBook. We have added our recipes, now we need the front matter pages. We will also need an introduction to our book; this will come after the table of contents.

This document last edited on: 24 February 2017