Making Ebooks with InDesign: Module 4, Step 1
Subject(s):
InDesign to EPUB
Resource Type(s):
Step-by-Step
Audience:
Technical
Before reading this, you might want to read:
There are a number of things that InDesign exports that must be remediated for accessibility. Before we dig into that, let’s talk about text editors. There are a number of free and paid text editors on the market. The screenshots in this training will be from oXygen XML editor, a paid tool that is really useful for editing EPUBs as it opens and closes them without zipping and unzipping, it validates HTML, CSS, and the EPUB itself on the fly, and has powerful RegEx find/replace capabilities. The interface is quite sophisticated, which may be off-putting to people who are new to editing code.
Another useful tool is Sigil, a dedicated ebook editing tool. It is free and open-source and very helpfully includes a preview function so users can see edits to HTML and CSS as they are making them. Sigil reorganizes the ebook a little bit and sometimes inserts code into the OPF that you might not want, but it is a very capable editing tool.
That said, there are a number of text editors in the world and it’s worth noting that the best tool for the job is the one the user is the most comfortable with. Most other editors (like BB Edit, Notepad ++) will require that the EPUB is unzipped by a separate utility, and then re-zipped when editing is concluded.
To help with that task, eCanCrusher is a very useful drag-and-drop tool that will take care of the unzipping and re-zipping.
