PUBLISHING

InDesign’s features for print layouts – such as master pages, control of headers
and footers, and precise positioning of text, images and other elements
– are ignored in reflowable EPUB documents. However reflowable EPUB
does permit choosing settings such as (initial) font size, leading, font type,
spacing before and after paragraphs, whether a paragraph should begin on
a new page, etc. Keep in mind however that individual users are often able
to partially or completely override these settings in their e-reader devices or
applications.
InDesign can also be used purely for EPUB production, with no print output.
In this case you can simply ignore how the book looks in print, and focus
instead on generating flexible EPUB documents that look good and work well
across a range of e-readers.
The most important thing when creating EPUBs using InDesign (or any other
tool for that matter) is to make sure that the layout of the documents you are
working with is as structured as possible. Therefore we will begin this guide
by applying structured formatting (known as ‘styles’) to the various elements
of the manuscript.
Keep in mind that this is a very brief step-by-step guide, while InDesign is
a very complex general-purpose software package with many more options
than those described here.
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