- Document Setup
- Work with Images
- Set Your Document Flow Using the Articles Panel
- Text Formatting and EPUB
- Export Your Content
- Where to Go from Here
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Set Your Document Flow Using the Articles Panel
As you saw earlier with the text and images, the flow is really important in an eBook. You can insert content and anchor objects and hope for the best, or you can ensure that content flows properly (appears in the right order) in the EPUB by using the new Articles panel in InDesign CS5.5.
- Open the Articles panel by choosing Window > Articles and make sure nothing is selected on your pages.
- Cmd-click (Mac OS) or Ctrl-click (Windows) the Add Selection to Articles button (see Figure 8). This opens a dialog box that asks you to create an article.
- Click OK (see Figure 9).
In order to see the order that content will flow, you need to create at least one “article” and add the content from your document to it. This allows you to drag and reorder that content.
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Figure 8 Add content to the Articles panel
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Figure 9 Create the article
Notice that all of the content for you document is added to the Articles panel and is listed in order. The order reflects the order in which it will appear in the EPUB flow (what comes first, second, etc. starting from top to bottom in the panel). Notice that anchored objects don’t appear. They are considered a part of a text frame. Also notice that if you have threaded text frames, they all appear as one “story” object. Continue with these steps:
- Double–click one of the objects listed in the Articles panel. That content will be selected on the page.
- Click and drag one of the items in the list up or down and notice that it changes the ordering in the Articles panel, but the layout in InDesign is unaffected (see Figure 10). This order tells InDesign what order to put the content in the EPUB when you export.
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Figure 10 Change the flow (order) of the document content in the EPUB
If you were to delete something from the InDesign layout after adding all of the content to the Articles panel, that object would be removed from the list. If you add new content to your layout, you need to add that new content to the Articles panel list by dragging the content from the layout into the list or selecting it in the layout and clicking the Add Selection to Articles button and dragging it into the right order.