8 Replies Latest reply: Nov 22, 2010 5:28 PM by mydoghasbigears RSS

    More epub export woes

    E Diane King Community Member

      I've moved back to CS4 to create and export my ebooks, since CS5 has the [very annoying] bug of failing to properly export intra book document hyperlinks.  Unfortunately, though CS4 seems to make better interactive epub files, I'm running into some other problems.  First off, every time I export a book to Digital Editions, ID CS4 crashes, often reporting damaged files on a restart--some of them so damaged that I can't reopen them and have to recreate them from scratch. The crash appears to be happening as the epub export is completing because I usually find the epub file after the crash and it will open and all of it is there. This has happened with 3 ebooks in a row . . . every time I do a book export to Digital Editions, CS4 crashes.

       

      Another strange thing I just ran across is the inaccurate export of typographical quote marks.  The weird thing about it is, that it can be correct in one book document and replaced by "Äô" in another book document in the same book.  I opened both docs, and they are using the same glyph and fonts, so I can't figure out why it's right in one place and wrong in another in the same ebook file.

       

      Anyone have any ideas about either of these issues?  I have fully patched CS4 (and CS5--though that helps little with the unfixed hyperlink bug) on an Intel Mac running 10.5.8.

       

      While I wait on any replies, I'm going to try the exports from my Windows 7 laptop to see if I have the same problems there.

        • 1. Re: More epub export woes
          E Diane King Community Member

          I was able to export without crashing from my Windows 7 laptop, but I still have the very funny glyph problem.  I don't know where to start on troubleshooting that one. Anyone have any ideas.

          • 2. Re: More epub export woes
            marcusstringer Community Member

            Can you make a screen shot of what you are looking at and upload it here, via the little camera icon. Like this:

             

            Screen shot 2010-10-30 at 9.06.37 AM.png

            • 3. Re: More epub export woes
              E Diane King Community Member

              Here is the way the bad section appears in the ebook:

              FromEbook.jpg

              This is the way it looks in InDesign:

              fromID.jpg

              This is the way a different document, same book, same characters, same styles appears in the ebook:

              FromEbook-no-errors.jpg

              • 4. Re: More epub export woes
                Joel Cherney Community Member

                Those glyphs for the en dash in "12-14" indicate to me that ID is spitting out that stuff in UTF-8 encoding, but that your epub display tool is not rendering it as UTF-8. I am not up to speed on epub, but that's what it looks like to me. Isn't epub just zipped-up HTML and CSS? Can't you pop it open and look at the headers of those files and see what encoding is being declared? Can you specify it yourself? It is something that a halfway-decent epub generator should be able to handle, but I have noticed when reading the forums that most of the fixes for ID-generated epub are "rename as zip, open it up, fix it by hand, rezip and rename."

                • 5. Re: More epub export woes
                  E Diane King Community Member

                  That's what I don't get, though.  It's only wrong in one section of the book, everywhere else, the encoding is correct and the individual files are dealt with identically.  All I did was take one ID document and break it up into multiple documents and tie them into a book (to get the chapter breaks) and when I exported the thing to epub, just one of those documents had the characters wrong--all the rest were displaying them correctly.  It makes no sense to me and I can't figure out how to fix it.

                  • 6. Re: More epub export woes
                    Fred Goldman Community Member

                    I have run into this quite a few times and I have tried a gazillion different ways to try and find out what causes it. I still haven't figured it out. However, what always works is to create a new document and paste the text into the new document and export from there.

                    • 7. Re: More epub export woes
                      mydoghasbigears Community Member

                      That was the first thing I did but copying the text to note pad and stripping all styles got me right back where I started. The strange thing is the encoding can be fine in some chapters and displayed wrong in others. whether it's a single file separated by first levels or multiple files in a book file.

                       

                      I've been told it's the reader's fault but that means ADE (and subsequent readers that use ADE would all see the bad encoding. In another forum I was told to add:

                      <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> in the <head> of the document. I did, but it didn't change things.

                       

                      One thing I noticed was when exporting you get varying results of the encoding if you sort by unordered and ordered lists as opposed to convert to text.

                      One will provide less encoding hassles. Anyway my only solution so far is manually editing the code to the html codes. Find and replace.

                      http://www.tedmontgomery.com/tutorial/htmlchrc.html

                       

                      It might be a worthwhile project to export the epub and convert the epub to epub in Calibre and see if Calibre reincodes it correctly.

                      • 8. Re: More epub export woes
                        mydoghasbigears Community Member

                        Calibre didn't work. Still got the unicode but the program has a lot to it. I might post a question on the Calibre Forum at MobileRead.