Ars Technica reviews ePub-focused update of Indesign

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kuwisdelu

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It's fair to say that publishing is in the middle of a long transition period, and nowhere is that transition more obvious than in publishing software. Publishers now have to hit multiple formats for maximum sales, while having little extra money to support the additional staff needed to keep their publications in the black. That puts a lot of pressure on their tools—and Indesign CS5.5 looks to be a reliable team player.

Until recently, the Indesign EPUB features for creating e-books felt tacked on. Features were missing that just made the solution lacking as a whole, and you'd invariably have to use other tools to hack at the unzipped EPUB code to really have it render the way you want within e-readers. Indesign CS5.5 looks to fill these workflow holes: covers can now be embedded, flow can be strictly controlled, and it looks like one app can finally handle the e-book creation process from start to finish.

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If anyone here with experience in e-publishing has had the chance to try out this new update, I'm interested to hear their impressions of it. I don't really have any experience with typesetting or publishing other than trying out Pages' "Export to epub" feature to see how my manuscript looked in iBooks. I know many have concerns about the sometimes questionable quality of e-books the big houses are putting out. The sooner better tools are available, hopefully the the quality will improve, too. How are we coming along?
 
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