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Conceptual Issues

  1. 8 years ago
    L

    Lucky L

    9 Jan 2016

    Hi
    I'm new to pubcoder and trying to get the hang of it. But I got stuck.
    Ok, it's surprisingly easy to create a couple of demo pages and turn them into an ebook. I also understood that there is a workflow starting from Indesign material. Fair enough.

    However, what if I do not what to get into InDesign? Am I indeed stuck with entering my entire content bit by bit into pubcoder?
    Or is there some way of importing (marked up) material? People I'm working for tend to use Word for writing manuscripts. (Not that I'm very fond of that approach but it's simply a fact I have to live with...). So the preferred path would be importing Markdown or HTML.

    BTW, one of the main reasons I don't want to use InDesign is a rather fundamental one:
    to my mind one of the most important features of epub3 is freely flowing text. I mean, this is what it's all about, isn't it? Yet, I couldn't find any features in pubcoder that would support it. Ok, I could hack my way via CSS to get some sort of auto-layout, but that doesn't seem to be the pubcoder way of doing things, right?

    Sorry guys, I just don't get it. Did I severely misunderstand the concept behind pubcoder? Can somebody please explain?

    Cheers,
    Dieter

  2. Paolo A

    11 Jan 2016 Administrator

    Hello Dieter,

    if you don't want to start from inDesign, you will have to do - as if you were starting a project in inDesign - insert your assets one by one. There are many ways you can do this, depending on how you organize your workfow. You can either import all your assets (divided in type of assets: images, audio files, videos) using the assets panel on the left, and then layout your objects and bringing the assets in the correct placeholder, or start directly by laying out your objects and bring the assets inside one by one. This is usually the way most of our users go. There is no intermediate format that would allow you to bring your contents (markdown or HTML), but we are currently thinking of building an import API (still on a very conceptual level, though), will advise as soon as this idea becomes more concrete.

    As for the EPUB3 and more general idea of the application, PubCoder is a fixed-layout authoring tool. So yes, you got it right, text at the moment does not flow, and probably will never in the context of a fixed layout output. What will happen is the ability to edit the text in a flowing mode, similarly to what happens in inDesign or iBooks Author, but this again I can just say it is in our development roadmap but do not know when it will happen.

    Hope this helps.

    Paolo
    PubCoder CTO & Founder

  3. Ran C

    13 Jan 2016

    There's a nice shortcut, though. you don't need to drag new image objects to the stage and then place an image in it for each of your images. You can simply drag all your images from the assets tab into the stage (but not onto an existing object) and a new objects will automatically be created for each image. Then, it is just a matter of placing the objects in their location, and sorting the layers (drag/drop). Very easy. I built a 16 pages interactive children's book in 3 days, with dozens of elements (images, animations and audio).
    Ranco

 

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