InDesigner: Ebook Expert Laura Brady
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Laura Brady’s ebooks are beautiful inside and out.
Is it hard to make an ebook from InDesign? Not really—until you’re handed a layout that uses runs of spaces and tabs instead of indents, or has dozens of highly-formatted tables, or full-bleed images that must remain full-bleed (even though there’s no such thing in a reflowable ebook), or hand-drawn lettering, or any number of other non-standard elements that the client is expecting to see intact in an ebook…
Laura Brady takes these challenges in stride, for the most part, as a result of years of experience that few of her peers can match. Founder of Toronto-based Brady Type, Laura started designing and developing ebooks back in 2009, a year before the debut of the Apple iPad, the iBooks app, and the iBookstore. She caught the big wave in a publishing sea change and has been riding it ever since.
What’s more important here, though, is that Laura came to ebook conversion and design only after fifteen years of hard work laying out and typesetting trade print books. That background instilled in her the expectation of getting the same quality, readability, and elegance in the ebooks her company produces for their clients.
Laura won the annual Digital Book Award for Ebook—Fixed Format/Enhanced: Children for this children’s book at the F&W Digital Book World Conference last year. She customized the Kindle’s pop-up text (the green-background caption) to more closely match the book’s aesthetic.
Ebook Challenges with InDesign
Let’s imagine a scenario in which Laura is handed a beautifully-designed InDesign layout of a simple, text-heavy book with a few images. And let’s go further, and assume that the client who created that file did so properly, applying paragraph, character, and object styles consistently throughout, using OpenType fonts, high-res images, even anchoring the images in the text flow so they’d appear in the correct location when the book was exported to EPUB (Reflowable) from the File > Export dialog box.
Does that mean all she has to do is export the thing and send an invoice? Many designers would—maybe after doing some basic tweaks and testing—but not Laura.
Before she exports, for example, she always combs through the layout and sets accessibility attributes in Object > Object Export Options for stories and images, such as semantic tags and ALT text. This makes the ebook ready to work with assistive devices like screen readers. Laura says, “I think InDesign’s accessibility features could be dramatically improved, though. It needs default Section and Aside tags, for example. Not just for accessibility, but also for rendering [in an eReader].”
Even after that and other preparatory tasks are done, she’s seldom satisfied with the resulting EPUB export. Laura will always open the EPUB in an HTML editor to clean up the code (the HTML and CSS markup) that InDesign creates.
“InDesign adds a lot of unnecessary code, which makes it difficult to edit. But I can clean up much of that with a few RegEx (GREP Find/Change) in a text editor,” she says. Laura likes to use her own CSS file whenever possible, linking the HTML to it in the EPUB Export Options dialog box. “The CSS that ID gives you doesn’t cascade at all. And the style sheet that gets used so often, paragraph body, is put at the bottom of the CSS file. It should be at the top!”
Nevertheless, InDesign is the central hub for Brady Type’s ebook work, even if a manuscript comes in as a Word file. “I love that landmarks [a usability feature in modern EPUBs] is built in. I love that you can group boxes, manipulate them, and have them rasterize on export,” she says. Laura pointed out, “Most advanced EPUB developers just use HTML, but that file is hard to update for most people. When the ID file is really well constructed, that’s your archive. It’s agile and ready to update for the next edition or version.”
Leading the Way for Her EPUB Colleagues
In recent years, Laura has taken on leadership and mentoring roles in the EPUB community. She speaks at industry conferences like our own PePcon and BookNet Canada’s ebookcraft (which she organizes as well). She also pens blog posts about ebooks on publishing portals, presents workshops, and helps run the vibrant #eprdctn community on Twitter.
Through it all, she’s always learning, and as her home page says, she’s “committed to the art of type—in print or digital format.”
Laura created the ebook version of noted fine art photographer Snygg Mas’s Just Another Day. This book is a series of “Flows” where the photographer stands in one place and takes a series of shots of passersby over the span of hours. It’s a fixed-layout ebook with numerous two-page spreads to showcase the photography.
Spread from a cookbook Laura laid out as a reflowable ebook, so it’s readable on any size screen.
Laura is adept at creating children’s books as fixed-layout EPUBs for the iPad, Kobo, and Kindle platforms. Above is a spread for Little Bear’s Day, which includes read-aloud interactivity (note the highlighted word). The book is designed to help children learn the Cree language, which appears in syllabic and phonetic forms beneath the English text. Below is a spread from the illustrated ebook Windblown, also showing a word changing color as it’s being read aloud. Creating read-aloud functionality is all done manually in the HTML files; InDesign doesn’t offer it.
Even though she’s an expert at the fixed-layout format, Laura says, “I spend a great deal of time trying to convince people who want fixed-layout that it might not be the best format for their content.” The client/author for this project was adamant that it maintain the print design in the ebook, so Laura created it in iBooks Author. Later, the client requested a reflowable EPUB version of the same (below), and that’s the one his Colour Theory students turn to most often.
One of the challenges when creating reflowable ebooks is making reflowable tables. When Laura works on the Akamai Connectivity Reports, she knows she’ll have to ensure that the numerous tables contained in the ebook will not only reflect the formatting of the printed version, but will be readable on a wide range of screen sizes. In other words, she ensures that the tables are responsive and reflow to fit without sacrificing design or readability. Below, you can see what one of the tables looks like in the InDesign file, and how Laura’s HTML cleanup work helped make this happen.
Above: One of the tables in the INDD file for the publication Akamai Connectivity Reports. Note that all the text, cells, and the table itself have been formatted with styles. After exporting the INDD file to EPUB, Laura opened the component files in a text editor. Below: The original HTML output from InDesign, which Laura terms “overburdened.” Also below: The same table after she stripped the markup to the essentials, resulting in the clean, responsive tables show on the previous page.
Spreads from the textbook Calm, Alert, and Learning, published by Pearson Canada.
Laura has a special affinity for replicating complex print layouts as reflowable EPUBs. Reflowable ebooks, as compared to fixed-layout ones, have a much wider distribution channel (because so many eReaders can access them) and can be made accessible.
Here you see an example of a complex textbook with sidebars, sections, lists, and deep navigation in the TOC. These screen captures are from Adobe Digital Editions, and you know if it looks good in ADE, it’ll look good anywhere.
Setting poetry in reflowable ebooks is especially challenging, as the line indents and breaks carry almost as much meaning as the words. The only way to do it right is to create individual paragraph styles for practically every line so they convert to matching CSS classes. Above is how the InDesign file was originally formatted with space and tab runs, to the right of that is how it looked after Laura cleaned it up. And the final result, as seen in iBooks below, shows why all that work was worth it.
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