“Other than for print, or for very special markets, publishers should be thinking “reflowable” and not “fixed”, and not fear letting the end-user decide on selecting the typographical presentation parameters they prefer — that’s the future.”

I agree…but only half way: The reality of the reading situation is, that the author would like to ‘fix’ lets say an image to a certain informative text or even a short byline, and on the other hand the end user perhaps wants the possibility to ‘fix’ this image on the screen (’freeze’ the position) while ’scrolling’ several more screens of text and still having the image at hand. Also a demand for zooming up the image while remaining the font size….

In my opinion the question is not either/or, but to give the enduser complete freedom to choose both when and how they want (or need of) the ‘flowability” or “fixed” features to work.

As for Adobe - I wouldn’t be surprised if Bill McCoy allready have a new Authoring Tool in mind, aspecially designed to create ADE Books… maybe a ‘Dreamveawer Lite E-Book’?
(If he is not, perhaps someone else have?)

A validator is a must. So is reading system flexibility. For example, my version of Digital Editions will not display pages of an epub containing XHTML with XML declarations.

Wow, I need to download the latest version and try it out on some of my EPubs where I not only include the XML declaration, but the DOCTYPE as well. If this is the case, I will need to do my usual and let Bill McCoy know that this is not a feature (in case they believe that, not sure), but rather a bug that needs fixing as soon as possible.

OPS definitely allows, and I believe encourages (and possibly requires, I’ll have to recheck), all XML documents in OPS (both content documents and the Package) to include the XML declaration. It is a pretty simple thing in parsing/processing the documents to not let the XML declaration be a problem, so the fix hopefully should not be that major.

(To be fair to Adobe, I suspect they have a whole slew of issues to fix, but this one is pretty important, in my opinion.)

Jon, I’m not necessarily saying that .epub should go beyond CSS2. However, new users of InDesign and .epub might reasonably expect that the formatting that they put into their InDesign document will carry through into .epub — which it definitely will not.

Thanks for the clarification, Gerry.

Yes, I agree with you it is a matter of expectations on the part of the authoring tool user. But this is not the fault of EPub, Adobe Digital Editions (and other EPub readers), nor even InDesign.

It is simply that those who are used to building fixed-page formats (where all typography is fixed by the publisher) need to learn that EPub is a reflowable format and thus some typographic information will not, and more importantly should not, carry through to EPub presentation to the end-user.

It will take time for this to sink in. I’m not sure what IDPF can really do about this. Since InDesign is Adobe’s tool, I hope that Bill McCoy will consider prodcuing some sort of “EPub from InDesign” document which explains why some InDesign stuff does not carry through to EPub, and more importantly why this benefits the publisher. The message of how it benefits end-users to have more control over typographical presentation is something that publishers need to understand.

(p.s., I read Aaron’s and Joseph’s replies after I posted the above comment.)

A validator is a must. So is reading system flexibility. For example, my version of Digital Editions will not display pages of an epub containing XHTML with XML declarations.

I don’t think InDesign is ever going to be the preferred method of outputting a final .epub, but perhaps a convenient intermediate step. It is, as Jon Noring points out, for fixed-page layouts, and as such is not going to export a look-and-feel but a useful data structure. An open-source .epub conversion API is going to be far more useful in enabling reading systems to convert on-the-fly, so users don’t have to worry about mass-scale conversion of different kinds of ebooks.

Aaron Miller
Bookglutton.com

http://blogs.adobe.com/digitaleditions/indesign-epub.html

If a user expects that all of the formatting and features that they use in a program like InDesign will “carry through” to an .epub document, then either they are naive in their understanding of the software and the formats that they are using, or the software publisher is not adequately documenting what features work when exporting to various formats (or both).

For example, if I were to create a complex document in MS Word and then saved this document as HTML, I wouldn’t expect that the layout, graphics, fonts, etc. in the HTML document would exactly match the Word document. I understand what the limitations of HTML are and don’t expect it to do something it wasn’t designed to do. In the same vein, why should I expect .epub to do something it wasn’t designed to do, just because I created a document in InDesign, using features not supported by .epub?

A new user of such powerful software as InDesign can be forgiven for not fully understanding these things at first, but that ignorance should not be used as an excuse to badmouth .epub or any other document format, because the user didn’t get the results they expected.

I see three things that could be done to aleviate this problem. First, the IDPF should quickly create a web site so that a user can submit an .epub document for validation (similar to the one for HTML at http://validator.w3.org). Why the IDPF? it’s their standard, they should take responsibility for validation. Second, tools like InDesign should make it clear what features “degrade” when using .epub. Third, InDesign (and other tools that output .epub) could also incorporate a built-in .epub validator.

I use InDesign regularly for designing and producing books, and it’s a terrific program with fine control over every aspect of the layout. It should be noted, however, that much of that control is not maintained when outputting to .epub format. This is due to limitations in the current .epub standard, since its CSS feature set does not support the full range of layout options offered by InDesign (and since reflowable text, by its nature, has a much looser level of layout control).

Hmmm, maybe I am misinterpreting your comment, Gerry, but are you saying EPub should support styling options not included in CSS 2/3? EPub certainly supports CSS. It requires support for a significant subset of CSS 2, and allows authors to include, and reading systems to support, CSS properties outside this quite inclusive subset.

If there are CSS properties you believe EPub should support by default, by all means let the IDFP OPS Working Group know about it!

And yes about your other comment regarding the looseness of layout. EPub is a “reflowable” format, and thus will not, and should not, support anything allowing publishers to page-fix digital presentation. That’s the function of PDF and similar page-fixing formats. Other than for print, or for very special markets, publishers should be thinking “reflowable” and not “fixed”, and not fear letting the end-user decide on selecting the typographical presentation parameters they prefer — that’s the future.

An article entitled Media players more dangerous than Windows at the website “Windows Secrets” lists the version numbers of several programs that “can be attacked across the Internet”. The article says many people are now keeping Windows itself patched so “hackers have turned to applications that allow Trojan horses to silently infect PCs. Now we all need to learn to keep our add-ins updated, too.” The article provides advice on obtaining updates. Sadly even updates are not risk-free and can cause problems. So use the guidance in the article at your own risk! Caveat downloader.

If you are considering InDesign for .epub output, you can get a fully-functional 30-day trial from the Adobe web site.

Can you support CSS on the iPhone, using Safari somehow ?

If you’d like to add a search engine directly in your application, you can also take a look at the API that we’re building on Feedbooks: http://www.feedbooks.com/help/newsstand_api