When we place audio on the page of a fixed-layout eBook, we cannot expect it to contiunue to play when the page is turned. Simply, each page is a new XHTML document, so audio (or any media) will stop on leaving that page.
If we want to get audio to continue to play as we turn the pages, we need to modify the markup inside the ePub package after we have exported from InDesign.
This is a 3 part screencast (please view parts 1 and 2 first)
For this episode we look at adding multimedia but give the users some control over the playing of that media rather than just have it play on page load.
When we export our book to the reflowable ePub from InDesign, we have a choice about the content order. Usually we choose 'Based on Page Layout', but if you want to make sure that your front matter pages don't end up at the back of the book, then you need to use the Articles Panel to organise the content.
Once we have exported the reflowable ePub from InDesign we can edit the CSS. First we need to unpack the ePub file and use a text editor to edit the main CSS file.
The objective is to get out own version of the CSS file so that we can use this later when we re-export from InDesign.
This screencast uses Textwangler to edit the ePub. Look back through the screencasts and you can see how we can use Dreamweaver to do something very similar.
We edit the CS to add a background to a heading and remove the forced page break that is generating a blank page.
I am slowly working on a project to construct a publishing system that uses a web first interface to provide an editing environment which then leads to XML that can then be exported ready to be imported into a ready prepared InDesign template.
This screencast demonstrates the building of an international recipe book with contributions from various editors.
There is no direct way to get your content out of InDesign and into iBooks Author.
[edit]Please note that as of iBooks Author 2.2 you can insert chapters from an IDML file that has been exported from InDesign
What we have to do is to make use of a number of scripts added to InDesign to break down a single document into separated files and then extract the text. Lucky for us, iBooks Author can build a chapter from a Microsoft Word document and will even respect the styles built in Indesign!
In the previous part, we added a master page header to to every page and used this to split the ePub.
Now we are unpacking the ePub and after creating a local Dreamweaver site, we edit the various files inside the ePub package.
Note that I am using a MAC with the latest OS (Mavericks) to do this work. This makes life easier since I can view the ePub file with Apple's iBooks app.
If you are working with a PC/Windows, then you can test the ePub with Readium within the Google Chrome browser.
Addendum: To make sure that the header (originally only on the master pages), will appear above the main text, make the header text box very wide so that it is the first item reading left to right. The articles will then put things in the correct order reading from top left.