Electric Book Works Publishing reinvented for the digital age

Epub production tips

We’ve got a lot of info on making epubs in our section on creating epubs from InDesign. We also post tips and guidelines for epub production here.

Small caps

Arthur Attwell 20 October 2010
This information is more than two years old, and may no longer be accurate.

When you make some text appear in small caps, is that a content or a formatting decision? It should be a formatting decision. However, a couple of dominant applications, combined with lax work by designers and typesetters, has confused the issue. Here’s an explanation. … Read more

Superscript and subscript

Arthur Attwell 20 October 2010
This information is more than two years old, and may no longer be accurate.

Superscript and subscript can be achieved using old-style HTML tags, CSS, or XML entities. If you’ve created an epub from an app like InDesign, it’s possible that your super and subscripts are all made to look so using CSS. … Read more

Embedding video and audio

Arthur Attwell 1 February 2011
This information is more than two years old, and may no longer be accurate.

When we created the original Moxyland ebook with an embedded soundtrack (it’s no longer available, long story), the best way to embed rich media in an epub was with Flash. We created Flash video of an audio controller that played an audio track. Then we simply included this in our epub code: … Read more

Learning HTML and CSS

Arthur Attwell 29 June 2012
This information is more than two years old, and may no longer be accurate.

Learning how to make reflowable ebooks – epub mostly – means learning, more than anything, how to edit and eventually write HTML and CSS. Learning HTML and CSS is a chicken-and-egg thing. You have to learn them side by side to understand them, but they should be treated separately. All content should be stored and structured in HTML. All formatting (anything related to layout, look and feel) should be stored and managed in CSS. … Read more

Arthur Attwell 20 October 2010
This information is more than two years old, and may no longer be accurate.