E-mail to David Blatner at Indesign Secrets

I love the guys at indesignsecrets.com, David and Ann-Marie. I have been listening to their podcasts for more than three years now. Every show of theirs uncovers something new and interesting about InDesign.

I have written to David three times over the years with different problems, and I am sad to say that he has not been able to help me on any of those occasions – and in no way do I blame him for that. In fact, I thank him for having written back to me every time. I think the problems there have been that he is so busy and that I have not expressed my problems clearly enough – which is made worse given that I am a professional communicator by day.

I wrote to David about a month ago (I think) when I first encountered the problem with how ePubs always export with flowing text and no apparent ability to insert breaks between paragraphs other than to start a new chapter.

He didn't appear to understand my question the first time round. (The good news is that I have since found the answers to that problem.)

Not giving up, I also wrote to him last night about the problem I was having last night during my "tinkering" stage of working with editing CSS and XHTML properties. The problem I was having was that my iPad was refusing to allow my edited ePub into the iBook "shelf" of the app (next to Winnie). It would show up in iTunes on both the local Books folder as well as on iTunes on the iPad's own Book folder – but not when I turned on my iPad and opened iBooks.

There must be something wrong with the ePub, you might say. But the stupid thing is that when I copied the exact same file to my Sony e-reader it opened fine.

This was why I wrote the following e-mail to David to see if he had any clues (I hope David doesn't mind me posting his reply).

Again, it seems he did not understand my problem. Again, I can only blame myself for not explaining it clearly. It was, indeed, close to 1 a.m. at the time.

I realise that his show and website focus on ID, not ePub specifically, but I had been hoping that he might have been able to shed some light – any light – on the problem.

What frustrates me at the moment is that things seem to work for David and for Elizabeth Castro when they use Springy to edit ePubs, with no problems – but for me it is a total nightmare so far.

Anyway, I hope that with time this blog can become a place to turn to for all of you frustrated (I can't be the only one, surely) people who also can't seem to get the hang of ePubs. Together we can solve the problems – fingers crossed.