Planning for Digital
Layout Best Practices
In the context of book publishing, there is no such thing as a book with only one life. Print is the primary format, sure, but no book is published these days without a corresponding ebook. When considering the accessibility of content, we must collectively start thinking about how accessibility is a part of everyone’s job — including typesetters and designers. As someone who has been typesetting for a few decades and has converted thousands of ebooks by hand, I have some tips and tricks.
This post will focus on InDesign, the most common tool used in layouts. But all of this advice is relevant for other layout programs and word processing tools. I can hear some of you saying that you send PDFs to your conversion vendors so this doesn’t really apply to you. Ahem. Under the principle of garbage in, garbage out, PDFs created without these sketchy practices will not cause conversion issues and ease your internal QA processes.
When considering the accessibility of content, we must collectively start thinking about how accessibility is a part of everyone’s job — including typesetters and designers.
Avoid Forced Line Breaks
Sometimes known as shift-returns, these soft line breaks are, in my opinion, the work of the devil. I recently inherited some INDB files (for heaven’s sake, don’t use those!) in which the typesetter clearly didn’t trust InDesigns hyphenation engines or their paragraph composer. I understand hesitation about layout tools; I don’t understand five soft line breaks in one page of typesetting.
The example above is a dramatic one but, honestly, not all that unusual. Think about migrating firmly away from this quick and dirty habit. Put energy and attention into how you allow your paragraphs to flow, playing with hyphenation and justification settings to suit the chosen typeface.
There were also hard-keyed hyphens inserted into the typesetting before the line breaks. In case it needs to be said out loud: never ever ever do this! Don’t typeset for print assuming that that book doesn’t have an afterlife.
If you absolutely positively cannot avoid a soft line break, then put a note on the pasteboard for whomever inherits the files.
Don’t typeset for print assuming that that book doesn’t have an afterlife.
Non-Breaking Spaces
If you are worried about a line break you have two typesetting tools at your disposal that will not interrupt new editions, reflow the lines, or mess with the conversion to other formats. These are non-breaking spaces and tracking. A well placed non-breaking space will reflow a paragraph. That space will maintain into the ebook but is far less likely to wreak havoc than the abrupt line breaks in the middle of lines that the above example would have created.
In this small video snippet, I delete two forced line breaks and then use non-breaking space to achieve the line breaks the typesetter was going for. There are typesetters who use a GREP search to insert a non-breaking between the last two words of every single paragraph, taking care of orphans with one quick find/replace. That always felt a bit dramatic to me but the main message here is that non-breaking spaces are your friend.
Tracking
You could also squeeze or expand the type via the tracking function in InDesign. If you work with show local overrides on —and you should! — fiddling with the tracking will turn your paragraph turquoise. But if you can hold your nose and see past that, it will not impact the fitness of your ebook whatsoever. Tracking does not get inherited in the HTML. The flip side of that news is that tracking doesn’t become letter-spacing CSS, even when built into a style sheet.
But you can use tracking as a typesetting tool without worrying about its afterlife.
Title Pages
I rarely have a tonne of time for preserving the text design when we convert to digital. I always do the best I can with text and display fonts, of course, but will always waste a lot of oxygen trying to talk publishers out of opting for fixed-layout because they are attached to their text design. Title pages are where that ends, though. I almost always turn the title page into a JPEG with full alt text to preserve the flavour of the design and imprint information. I am careful to include a good image description for the sin of converting live type to an image. In InDesign, that means unthreading the title page from other elements in the book, grouping all the frames on the page including logos, and then rasterizing the container into one image.
Design by Michel Vrana
This will help with how a funky type treatment, like a word broken intentionally, will be read by screen readers.
I am well aware that this violates some rules about live type, etc., but I want the books I touch to be both accessible and artful. It’s a fine balance!
Language Shifts
Mark up language shifts of all types in InDesign using character styles. Ideally those shifts are styled by editorial staff as part of their process.
It is absolutely possible to map language shifts from Word character style into InDesign and out to EPUB. In the case of the content in this screenshot, this is a file that was downloaded from the Gutenberg Project and cleaned up in Word, then brought into InDesign (for teaching purposes). This style sheet held from Word to InDesign; the only thing that had to be updated was the language. This is done by editing the character style, clicking the “Advanced Character Formats” tab, and then changing the language to the appropriate one.
Using some of these simple best practices will help typesetters and designers level up their layout hygiene and help them make friends with their ebook developers. Please feel free to drop your own tips and tricks in the comments.
