2.6 Edit All Export Tags

A slightly hidden feature of InDesign, Edit all Export Tags is the source of your EPUB superpowers. It is available from the flyout menu in upper-right corner in any of the character, paragraph or object styles palettes. 

From this window, there is a suite of options for making better, more accessible EPUBs. 

In this screenshot, the items marked with ¶ are paragraph styles, those with an A are character styles, and the bottom five are object styles. The second column presents some HTML options to map those styles onto. 

Paragraph styles will default to a <p> tag unless directed otherwise. The options are <h1> to <h6>. The style “cn” (chapter number) is mapped to an <h1> tag. In the third column, InDesign is directed to split the EPUB into chapter-sized chunks by checking the Split EPUB option. 

The character styles options are more limited to just <span>, <em>, and <strong>. When publishing with accessibility front of mind, these aren’t always the best choices. 

In this screenshot, the italic character style is mapped to the more semantically correct <i> tag, where words and phrases marked as needing emphasis are mapped to an <em> tag. Users aren’t limited to only the options InDesign presents. Better options, like mapping to an <i> tag can be simply keyed in. 

Looking more closely at the mappings for this sample content, small caps are mapped to a <small> tag, citations to a <cite> tag, superscript text to a <sup> tag. 

And at the bottom, the sidebar object style is mapped to the semantically correct <aside> tag, the caption frame to a <figcaption> tag, and the image to a <figure> tag. 

This window is also useful for controlling what can be left out of the HTML export, mapping to a different CSS name, and when to skip including something in the CSS.

Leveraging this suite of options is an ebooks developer’s secret weapon when it comes to getting a clean, accessible ebook.