The reason for this was not just that Adobe was best positioned to create this export in a technical sense, but also that fixed-layout EPUB bridges an unfortunate gap between designers working in InDesign and the finished digital product. This work had value and it needed to be done, but it had to be done by Adobe. The problem, I thought, as I looked despairingly at my slides about another such workflow, was that none of us should have built anything: PDF is not suitable, and InDesign markup language is too complex for this approach to yield the quality required at an affordable price. Last October, at a conference focused on the future of EPUB in education, we had a room full of companies offering workflows just like that. Since Apple added fixed layout to iBooks, many companies large and small have created workflows that take InDesign or PDF input to create fixed layout EPUB for publishers. ![]() The technologists (and I have to include myself here) are taken out of the loop, and I want to argue that this is a good thing. ![]() If there are improvements to be made (Matt Garrish proposes a few in his notes on the accessibility of the export) there is a good chance that they will be made in a future release.Īs these discussions took hold, I started to wonder if we are missing the main point of the feature, which is that it returns control and ownership to the designers. What we have to remember is that this new feature didn’t invent fixed layout EPUB it shares the strengths and weaknesses of the general approach. And there was also a concern that the code inside the EPUB was hard to read and even harder to edit. ![]() A fixed-layout EPUB exported from InDesignĪfter the big events, reactions went two ways: some people loved the ease with which beautiful books could be teleported from InDesign to iBooks (and remain beautiful!), but others worried that the lure of fixed layout would become too strong.
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