Comment by lxgr
2 years ago
> You _can_ export books in epub format from InDesign but the process for getting a clean ebook is difficult to say the least since InDesign was primarily designed for print publications.
I wonder if that's why so many, and even relatively new, ePubs feel a lot like poorly OCRed PDFs?
It generally seems like most publishers and I have opposite goals when it comes to ePubs: They want them to look and feel as much like the physical book as possible (by including custom fonts, applying custom margins/padding etc.), while I want absolutely none of that.
It's frustrating having to fight the publisher to get something readable on a small display or non-Kindle ePub reader, and I don't even want to get started on dark mode...
There are two kinds of epub layouts, reflowable (the good kind) and fixed-page (the badly OCR'd feeling kind). Most print designers who don't follow best practices in turn don't do the work required to make InDesign output reflowable epubs.