Many, many, thanks everybody. I will check the tutorials out and report back.

And thanks for stearing me away from Calibre --

Steve

AnneMarie -- I just finished your tutorial. Watched the whole thing over a period of a few days. Great job! Terrific, super-helpful. And, as I guess everybody here knows -- you are a helluva good teacher. I say this as somebody who has taught motion picture editing for years and who is creating a book about it.

Which brings me to some questions.

First -- images. I've got hundreds of screenshots with callouts. They are grouped and they are inline. But, as discussed, they callouts get separated on export. The only thing I can think of is to export as a jpeg and then place the jpeg. Or maybe I could use Layout Zone, which I think, would force ID to create the jpegs for me, when the file is exported. The images are roughly the right size now -- about 3.5" wide on the printed page. When ID exports them at 72 ppi, they look way too small in the Kindle. The reason is that the Kindle screen is 167 ppi. 4.5" at 72 ppi is more like 2" at 167 ppi. You can barely see these things.

I've done a lot of experimentation and it seems like the best answer is to export the jpegs at 150 ppi, then place them, then export to epub and select original images in export options. (I have CS4.) Such images look good, partly because Kindle will scale them if they're too big for the screen. Does this make sense? Or am I shooting myself in the foot somehow?

Second, file names. There are 25 chapters in this book. All the filenames have spaces in them. If I change the filenames now, all chapter-to-chapter cross references are going to break, because they rely on pathnames. I'll have to update over 100 cross references by hand. Can I live with the chapter names? Is there a way to change them and automatically update the cross-references?

Third, the index. You mentioned in the tutorial that indexes get dumped. My index has a good 600-700 items in it. I can't really imagine recreating every entry as a cross reference. Is there anything I can do? Do readers expect an index in an ebook?

Thanks again for a terrific tutorial -- and thanks to anybody here who can help with these questions,

Steve

Steve,

Thanks for responding.

1) -- good. I'm glad I'm not alone on this one. I was worried because you can't do this in CS5. Which makes no sense to me. It would seem like you ought to have a lot MORE options for images, not less.

2) -- I just did a very quick check and it seems like ID substitutes %20 for spaces. Which might work. But more to the point, if this didn't work, could I do a global search and replace on the XHTML files? That might be easier than fixing the cross references in ID. (Adobe really ought to make the path/file names in Cross References editable.)

3) -- Yes, that's what I thought. In any event, I ain't creating a 700 item index by hand, so this is the result. (But Adobe ought to fix this, too!)

Thanks,

Steve

That's a big improvement. All it needs to do after that is automatically convert a grouped image into a single jpeg for the epub. (I'm frankly a little dumbfounded that it won't do this. It seems like all the many graphics tools are pointless if the stuff you create won't end up in the epub.)

If it did both of those things, it would save me a good week of 8-hour days. And I'd think about upgrading.

Steve