What to expect after exporting to epub

After you’ve created a basic epub from InDesign, there’s more to do to make a good, sellable epub. You will:

• extract the contents of the epub file
• add a cover
• add all fonts to the manifest
• make images resizable
• check the order of book parts
• add page breaks, remove span-related spaces, fix non-breaking spaces
• correct the titles of the chapters
• add ADE page-template file
• check that the Table of Contents works
• add metadata
• edit CSS
• embed video/audio files if necessary
• optionally: replace head tags with structured HTML head tags
• zip the contents of the epub up again (in the right order)
• test the epub.

To do this you’ll almost always have to work a little with the epub’s code. We go through this in detail below.

Note: When we say ‘Book’ with a capital B, we mean an InDesign Book, which gathers documents into an .indb file. When we say ‘book’, we mean the title you’re working on.