Is it also possible to export to ePub format from InDesign 2.0?

Heh, no, of course not. That's why it's advertised for CS4, which is four generations further down the line.

I have a pdf and a Word document that I want to export to ePub format. But I can't get either one of them to open in InDesign. Would this problem be solved if I upgraded to InDesign CS4?

Heh, no, of course not. Never, nowhere, it is said you can open either PDF or Word files with InDesign. Not even with the latest version (which is in fact CS5, not CS4, as you seem to think). It's just not something Adobe (and any serious ID users) think would be useful, or even remotely wanted.

It's also not possible to upgrade from ID 2.0 to CS4.

Is there another way to make my PDF or Word document into an ePub by using InDesign 2.0 without upgrading?

Heh, no, of course not. What could InDesign 2.0 do for you? It's as if you ask "is there any other way to hang up this picture on the wall using the wet sock I have, without anything like a hammer".

Why use InDesign at all? It's not the only (or indeed, a) way to "make a document into an ePub". Google is your friend!

You would, in my view, be better off learning how to do it properly with, for example "Getting Started Making eBooks with InDesign".

http://www.video2brain.com/en/products-53.htm

Derek

When it comes to real difficult layouts with footnotes, captions, side headings etc. the time to get a good looking epub increases significantly even with someone well versed with html and css. There is a lot of trial and error necessary to see what the device you intend your epub to end up on supports, too. For simple novels the time and importance of prior knowledge of html and css decrease significantly. I doubt LuLu's service includes all the the things you mentioned.

As noted by a number of posters already, this really depends on a number of factors.  We publish books (both hard copy and ebooks).  For the epub format, it can be extremely fast, to very long.  In particular (as also noted) epub is a form of XHTML.  This means a lot of issues arise when you have tables, graphs, pictures, etc, where exact placement or even size makes the book more readable.  Just going PDF is not the solution if you want to sell in some venues, so you need to do a lot of editing by hand.

Research books, with all of the above, and large numbers of footnotes and references can chew up time also.

We use InDesign, but only reluctantly.  Considering Adobe is one of the premier software vendors in this space, it is embarassing how buggy InDesign is for export to ePub (for example the well known date stamp issue, or the well known Table of Contents issues).  This is as good as it gets?  Wow.

For traditional novels, I would use Calibri and Sigil.  Start with an RTF with simple formatting--Heading 1 for chapter heading.. You can use word and avoid all the Microsoft meta data by saving as RTF (instead of HTML).

For a single book, if you don't think you are going to put out a lot of them, it may indeed be worth paying someone to do it, depending what your hourly worth is :-).

An hour and a half sounds fine for simple text.  We have spent weeks on complex ones, with tables and graphics, trying to get it "just right" in epub format.

A final note, while many complain about epub and the flowing text, it is one of the big sells.  It allows font size adjustments to occur rather seamlessly and might explain why so many Kindles are sold to people who are retired.  Our eyes get worse as we get older :-).

Stasa

NewLibri Press

Hello All,  myself am trying to learn about epubs, I truly need to have a 420 page PDF image intense catalog converted to the ipad with TOC links.  I do not have the time to RECREATE the book adding formats to all of the pages and attributes of each page in Indesign as i know very little about it and i have also taken the LYNDA.com Course and while this is VERY good!  I have not used Indesign before.  Is there a way to take your PDF and place it in indesign create your TOC and Navigational TOC links and make minor changes within and export it to EPUB.  I am under a time constraint and there must be a fast way to create an EPUB file that will truly work on the IPAD without having all images separate around in the PDF.  I always thought a PDF was a locked down document anyway but when it is put in EPUB format it shifts all over the place.,.,Is there a way to lock down or format the PDF on export as not to shift anything?

My PDF works perfectly in Digital Editions.  All Links and TOC work great ...  but the moment I export to epub or use programs to convert it,..  they get messed up in OrDER and quality goes out the window.  I have to think backwards here as i had to create the PDF from Indesign5.5  Files Export those out and put them together in a single PDF.  THERE HAS TO BE A EASIER WAY...  I am almost there!

To Jongware's point, this is not an "export" and your PDF is now a wonderful ePub format book!  The formats are TOTALLY different in concept.

If your book, in its PDF format, is full of images, you will most likely have a terrible ePub formated book unless you actually spend the time to work on this.  ePub is HTML and the text reflows as needed depending on many things.  Additionally, the fonts used are not necessarily embedded in the ePub.  The PDF is more like an actual print book, with everything frozen in place.

If you have tables, or pictures and graphs, this will also look strange in ePub if you don't work on it by hand.

There is a reason that most cookbooks that are eBooks are left in PDF format.  The iPad can handle PDF files fairly well.  You may want to consider selling/moving those to the iPad instead of the ePub format.

iPad also uses a slightly different ePub set of enhancements right now.  If you create a book to take advantage of the iPad you may not have a book that looks good on a Kindle or Nook (Kindle is actually Mobi format, but ePub to Mobi is pretty easy).   Otherwise stick with standard ePub, but lose out on some of the iPad enhancements.  Some of the enhancements were simply early adoptions of ePub 3.0, but some are iPad/Apple only (what a surprise).

There are some known bugs with TOC conversions in InDesign 5.0 and below when exporting to ePub.  You should look some of those up.  I do not know if those were fixed in version 5.5

Really, for a complex book, you need to go in and tweak the HTML by hand even after using InDesign to export to ePub.  When testing your epub, you really need to have a reader in hand (not just the computer) and in the reader you need to try changing the font size and see what happens. Go at least one size bigger and one size smaller than default.

No magic bullets, but plenty of tools for "simple case" situations (thus Amazon and Barnes and Noble have their upload and convert programs).

However to Bob's point, you still probably want to examine and tweak the end result.

Tools vary from InDesign (which I own, but never use for ePub, just for print. I feel it is an inferior tool for ePub), to Sigil, to Calibri to others.

After the "press a button" you will want to go in and edit the HTML by hand. You will want to make sure that each HTML section is not too long (on file per chapter, inside the ePub zip format).

You will probably want to get rid of all the MS Word garbage ahead of time, so really a "two button" then "edit" approach. 

Save the Word document as unfiltered HTML and use the UTF-8 option buried in word's options.  Or, save as unfiltered and open up in something like Notepad++ and make sure it is UTF-8 (well, not that is up to THREE magic buttons and an edit! ).

Of course ePub 3.0 puts a whole new spin on all this. There are almost NO tools for this right now. Lots of "by hand" editing.

The reason for no magic bullets is there are no standards at the EREADER level. Kindle is different from Barnes and Noble which is different from APPLE. There are lowest common denominators to these, but no full overlap.

Cheers.