.indd to .book question

[matthewdee]

I have an .indd file, I need to create an .indb book file chapter by chapter or section by section. I see how to add documents to the indb Book file but the .indd is ONE document how do I add chapter by chapter?

R

[BobLevine]

You don’t. The book is a combination of INDD files. This is generally done to break a very large document into smaller, more manageable pieces.

What exactly are you trying to achieve here?

[matthewdee]

I have a client of mine that wants me to convert his InDesign doc to Ibooks Author. I see instructions on how to do as IBA will only import .idml files so I went chapter to chapter and broke the .indd into smaller .idml files.

Thats done, but now as I go to import those files to IBA IBA quits / crashes.

So now this is an Apple problem unless you would know why IBA behaves this way?

R

[BobLevine]

Why do you need IBA for this? Will fixed layout epub from InDesign not be suitable?

[matthewdee]

Exactly! As I did do a fixed layout and it looks and it looks great. But the client knows how to edit in IBA and for the life of me I say if you can edit in IBA you can edit an indd. Let me see what he says.

thx Happy Holidays!

[matthewdee]

I cannot believe that nobody answered this question in the Apple IBA forums especially when I have a crash log report which says

Exception Type:        EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP)

Exception Codes:       0x0000000000000002, 0x0000000000000000

the crash log is generated by IBA not InDesign , but I did get one reply saying that the forum I'm in is a user forum and as long as nobody has the same problem it will be tough to get an answer.

Now I have to tell this client I have to turn down his job because I cannot get something to work which s documented and has instructions on how to do. Bad for me.

R

[matthewdee]

This was solved as I was running CC 2017 off of OS 10.10 using IBA 2.4.1, I upgraded my OS to 10.11 and my IBA to 2.5 and the task works now.

R

[TᴀW]

There's nothing in InDesign that let's you split a document very easily. The best way is probably to make a copy of the document, delete any pages not belonging to the desired chapter, and save it with a sensible name ("Chapter 10"). Then, repeat for all the other chapters in the book. Finally, combine all those files in a single InDesign book document.*

Whether you need to use an InDesign book, though, is a different question. I hardly ever do, and I regularly work on books 400 or 600 pages long.

*This tedious procedure is automated by our "Extract Pages" script (not free): Extract Pages – Id-Extras: InDesign Scripts, Tips & Solutions

[Willi Adelberger]

But EPUBs can be split by Paragraph Style too, so you need not to split up a document into severals.