1.5 Semantics
Making Ebooks with InDesign: Module 1, Step 5
Making Ebooks with InDesign: Module 1, Step 4
Subject(s):
InDesign to EPUB
Resource Type(s):
Step-by-Step
Audience:
Technical
Before reading this, you might want to read:
Non-breaking spaces are the only item that will pull through into an EPUB from InDesign. As such they can be an important tool in your development tool chest. Use these to glue the last two words of a paragraph together to avoid widows.
Or, you can use them to manage line breaks in headers. In this example, we want the last word of this made-up title not to be stranded alone on the last line. To avoid using a forced line break, I’ve put a non-breaking space in between the last two words in the title. This is a typesetting hack that I encourage you all to share with others in your workflow.
Perhaps you want to keep a month and date together — a non-breaking space would do the trick.
In general, it is a best practice to avoid extensive use of forced line breaks — not a hard paragraph return but what is achieved in InDesign by typing a shift-return. These will also be preserved in the ebook and have the potential to wreak havoc on content. The forced line break in the following screenshot will result in a <br /> tag in the middle of the paragraph which will be there no matter the reading environment.