InDesign keep options and epub

[Matt_J_Kuhns]

I am creating an epub with InDesign CC 2015.

My client wants images, captions, and image credits to lock together and never break across pages.

I have done everything I can think of with keep options to achieve this. It seems to work in InDesign itself. It basically seems to work in the epub… but if I change the font size, the keep settings seem to break down and occasionally e.g. some or all of a caption will appear on the page after the image to which it belongs.

My client (publishing industry) knows what keep options are, and believes I should able to 100% lock together all image/caption/credit groups, period. I have no idea how. I've reviewed the documentation. I've experimented. Each of the relevant styles is set to keep all of its own lines together, and to stay with the previous and/or next line as applicable.

Is there anything more I can do here? Is this a known limitation? Advice welcome!

[Steve Werner]

Moving to InDesign EPUB forum

[BobLevine]

Have you grouped the caption with the image?

[Matt_J_Kuhns]

It's a reflowable epub, so all the text including captions is a single story right now. There's no option to group parts of it…

…I suppose I could place captions into their own text boxes, then group those with images outside of the main story, then paste the grouped unit back in the story as one anchored object. I don't know what result that would produce when exporting to epub.

(Also, there are about 200 images in this book, so right I'm more interested in getting an expert's opinion on whether it's possible to accomplish this with keep options, or whether my client's expectation of the technology just does not bear out.)

[BobLevine]

That’s pretty much what you should be doing.

[Matt_J_Kuhns]

Thank you!

[BobLevine]

Try it with the first few and see how it goes.

[Matt_J_Kuhns]

Okay, initial results are that this does not work well. (When viewing the epub, increasing the font size seems to run up against a static-sized text box, and overflow.)

[BobLevine]

Which reader(s) are you using?

[Matt_J_Kuhns]

I test my files in a few. iBook, Adobe Digital Editions and the epubreader add-on for Firefox.

All of them have the same issue with this tactic, looks like.

[BobLevine]

Without seeing the InDesign and EPUB files it's really impossible to tell.

What I can tell you is that it's not possible to ALWAYS avoid breaks where you don't want them. There are methods to use such as the page-break:avoid in the CSS to minimize it but it's HTML and there's no way to have 100% control with the number of readers, as well as font and font size combinations that are possible.

[Matt_J_Kuhns]

Okay, this is kind of what I suspected might be the case, but my experience with epub documents is limited enough that I wanted to check. (I have been designing for the web since the 90s, though, so what you're describing is very understandable.)

Thanks for all of the help on this.

[BobLevine]

Good luck.