Taking a word processing file and getting it ready to go to the printer is the focus of this article. At the same time, this is the step that prepares the pdf file that will be sent to the printer. The publication will then be easy to convert to html for the web, and subsequently processed for the Kindle, and as an ePub file that can be read on any of the e-book readers, especially iBooks on the iPad.

I use inDesign (from Adobe) for laying out the pages, producing the table of contents and exporting the book as a pdf file to be sent to the printer. This process also gets the book ready to be exported as html which is the next step toward producing a web publication, ePub (iBooks) publication or a Kindle book.

Document setup

Create a new inDesign document and set up the page size to be equal to the final trim size of the book. A common size for a book is 5.25″ by 8″. There are any number of standard and non-standard sizes and some sizes are much more economical than others. You should consult with a printer to determine a page size that will work for your book.

Formatting your book

Here is the essence. Every bit is done with a style sheet.

For most publications, 80 percent of the paragraphs are “body copy” and use the same format. Define a body copy style sheet and apply it to the entire document. You are 80 percent done. Define style sheets for every other paragraph type in the publication and apply that style to the corresponding paragraphs. This gets you to 99 percent.

The final 1 percent is character styles. Two of them–italic, and bold. Use search and replace to find all italic words or phrases inside the paragraphs and apply the italic character style. Do the same for bold.

Adjust your style sheet definitions until your publication looks just like how you want it to look.

Final outputs

Export the pdf file for the printer. Export the pdf file for emailing your publication or placing it on the web.

Use “Cross-media Export” (from the File menu in InDesign) and choose “XHTML – Dreamweaver.” In the Save dialog be sure to specify “Export: Document,” “Images: Optimized, Formatted, and Automatic Image Conversion” and “Advanced:  Empty CSS Style Declarations.”

That’s it. The next step will be formatting the html by using the Empty CSS Style Declarations.