From the course: InDesign CC to EPUB (2018)

Work with InDesign book files

From the course: InDesign CC to EPUB (2018)

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Work with InDesign book files

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- [Instructor] Up until now we've been working with InDesign documents that are single files with multiple chapters inside a single layout. Which is typical. But there are a lot of people who publish books that don't do it this way. Instead they use the InDesign book feature, and you do that by going to the file menu, choosing new, and instead of saying document you say book. Then you name your book, we'll just call this Book One, save it on the desktop, and then you add individual documents to the book, and then from the book panel menu, you can do lots of fun stuff. Now I've already done that this book. I've split it up into multiple chapters, standalone chapters, and I've created a book called English Cottage Gardens, and it's inside the exercise file. So the actual book file ends with .indb, and then I happen to have organized all the chapters into a separate book folder, and we have chapters one through four and front matter. Now this video is not to teach you how to do books, it's just how to export epubs from books. If you want to see how to create this cool little book feature, and this allows multiple people to work on different chapters or documents within the same master document concurrently, it's pretty neat, it has a lot of great features. Check out any of the InDesign training videos in the online library. But essentially what I've done is I have added these documents and I have front matter open right now, that's why the dot appears here. And all the front matter is is just that. And if I want to open up chapter one, here is chapter one, and it stops right there, though it looks like we have some overset text. So I think I'm going to fix that right now by clicking here, creating a new page, and then I will flow the text onto there. Like so, here we go, that's better. So you can edit the individual files inside of a book and save as you go. So press and command S to save. Now two things: First of all, if you want to export this as an epub, you have to make sure that nothing is selected. You have to click on the gray area below here, and then you don't go to the file menu and choose export as EPUB, it's not going to know what to do. You use the book panel menu, and here you choose export book to EPUB, just as you would with a PDF. But before we get there, let's talk about the nav TOC, remember how important that is. You have to have created a nav TOC as well for your book. And you always do so from the very first document in this list. So here in front matter, I have already created a table of contents style called epub, and there are other table of contents styles that I've been using for an in book TOC. But epub is the one that we use when we specify it during export. So make sure that you do that and that you do it to the very first document. This little icon next to the first document indicates the style source, which has more to do with syncing styles across all your documents than epub at all. So don't worry about that. But when you create that TOC, let me show you something. I go to layout and I choose table of contents styles, epub, edit, make sure and turn on to include book documents. That's what that command is for. So you know that you always choose make text anchor in source paragraph. We talked about that earlier with a book. Make sure and choose include book documents, otherwise it's not going to know about this style that is appearing in all these different documents in this book panel. Alright, so you have your nav TOC done, you might've created an html TOC that we're going to do in a later video. Normally you would do that in the first or second document as well. Deselect everything and then come here and choose export book to EPUB. And here I'm just going to export it to the desktop call it book after it so we keep it straight. And here's our TOC style in EPUB. Now you can still choose to split the documents based on paragraph style as we did in a previous video. But if every one of your chapters is a stand alone document you really don't need to because InDesign is automatically going to make these into separate HTML files, not going to combine them. So I can even leave it alone, and we can see what happens. I'll go ahead and check this, we don't want preserve local overrides. We're going to look at it in iBooks, click export, and there it is, and the chapters start at the top, and the nav TOC is the same as before. So the only time that you would really need to use split chapters when you're dealing with a book is if you had some individual InDesign documents in here that you wanted to split up even further. Say for example a subhead style or something like that. Then you can include that when you export to EPUB to split whenever it encounters that style. But typically you're just going to export individual chapters, and those will appear split automatically. So pretty easy working with the book panel as well to remember you export to EPUB from the book panel menu and not from the file export menu.

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