PUBLISHING

finalize the publication. 1 The most recent version of InDesign (InDesign CC)
has improved functionality for electronic publishing, but requires very careful
structuring and preparation of documents in order to yield good results within
reasonable work times. It is best suited for projects in which the content is
generated from databases, imported as XML into InDesign and from there exported
to EPUB. For a detailed look at these developments, see also the stepby-step
guide describing how to convert a document from InDesign to EPUB.
It is possible to create ‘interactive’ publications in the PDF format, working
with Microsoft Word and InDesign. In the end however these are also static
InDesign documents, upgraded with some interactive layers. This is still a
limited vision of the possibilities of digital publishing.
From Microsoft Word (.docx) to EPUB
Desktop publishing applications such as InDesign, and WYSIWYG word processors
such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice, are generally not well suited
for processing structured text (see Chapter 2, The basics). Though it is possible
to work in a structured manner, for example by using style definitions
rather than manually applying formatting, the user is not required to make a
distinction between formatting and structure, which is essential in the world
of digital publishing.
There is a viable solution for generating an EPUB from a Microsoft Word .docx
file using the latest version of the command-line tool Pandoc, a powerful
universal document converter. 2 However, since Word does not, as explained
above, enforce good structure in a document, the EPUB generated by Pandoc
will always be imperfect and thus not ready for publishing. Still, it should provide
a relatively clean foundation for a designer to produce the final ebook.
Other Word-to-EPUB programs, such as the built-in document converter
of Calibre, (Converting a Docx directly to EPUB using Calibre) produce less
satisfying results.
In order to obtain the best possible EPUB file, the .docx file should be formatted
using only Word’s standard paragraph styles such as ‘Normal’, ‘Title’,
‘Subtitle’, ‘Quote’ and most importantly ‘Heading 1’, ‘Heading 2’, ‘Heading 3’ for
1 Elizabeth Castro has provided a thorough guide for InDesign-to-EPUB publication in her book EPUB
Straight to the Point, San Francisco: Peachpit Press, 2010.
2 Pandoc a universal document converter, http://www.johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/.
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