Comments on: IDPF e-book standards news: ‘Adobe InDesign CS3 Generation of OCF/OPS Content’

By: Paul Norton

Paul Norton — Thu, 31 May 2007 01:36:36 +0000

@ Robert Nagle: It means you can create reflowable ebooks that support an open standard using Adobe InDesign. If you look at Digital Editions you’ll find it supports both PDFs and the reflowable epubs.

@ Preston DuBose: It really works best with narrative content… if the look of the spread is important, you’ll want to keep using PDF as the output format.

@ David Rotham: If you grab the 1.0.1 version of the plug-in you should find that the generated .epub files are very close to the IDPF spec… the 1.0 came a bit before the latest draft of the OPS spec, and therefore, had some issues.

By: Robert Nagle

Robert Nagle — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 21:29:22 +0000

You know, although one can rag on adobe products for various reasons, i find the capabilities promised by their tools to be both interesting and forward-looking. (investigating on the website, it seems they have a server-client package for cs3 as well–it’s some attempt at an end-to-end solution).

Commercial solutions involve some degree of vendor lockin/commitment. I wouldn’t mind that so much if you could have the ability to separate code from presentation (if for example I could import docbook/whatever files and then let adobe handle the presentation layer). We’re dealing (it seems) with two different kinds of workflows, and I confess I know too little about the Indesign workflow to comment more.

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 20:08:53 +0000

This bears investigating, of course—with the big question being: How fully compatible will this be with the IDPF standards? Will Adobe-specific stuff clutter things up? I’d hope that if need be, you could set up the InDesign so that the results were viewable on a wide variety of IDPF-compliant readers.

But conversions into Mobipocket and the rest? Ferget it. Hey, Adobe is still Adobe.

By: Preston DuBose

Preston DuBose — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:24:58 +0000

I’m with Robert. I’m not entirely sure what this means. I’m glad it can export to xhtml, but at first glance it seems to be limited to something readable by Adobe Digital Editions. While there may be benefits to doing that over PDF, AFAIK we’re still limited to Adobe products. Or am I missing something here? As Robert asks, what about other formats like MobiPocket and others?

I have some InDesign CS1 files I’d love to try this out on, just to see the results. My documents include illustrations and data tables, so I’m very curious to gauge the output.

By: Robert Nagle

Robert Nagle — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 19:08:47 +0000

This sounds interesting, but I really don’t know what it means.

My question becomes: If I can export as a reflowable xhtml ebook, how easy would it be to produce a mobipocket file or a fb2 file? And what (if anything) is lost by the process?