Controlling alignment and orphans in an EPUB file

This blog entry explains some tips and tricks on how to con­trol align­ment and wid­ows and orphans in an EPUB file.

Some basics

An EPUB doc­u­ment is a zip file with the .epub exten­sion. EPUB files can be read using e‑reader soft­ware on many devices includ­ing the iPad, iPhone, PCs, and smart­phones run­ning on Android.

For tech­ni­cal writ­ers, I believe EPUB files are one of the tech­nolo­gies to watch. The iBooks book­store sells its e‑books in an EPUB file for­mat. With tablets and smart­phones out­selling PCs, users are increas­ing­ly read­ing content—including tech­ni­cal communications—on these devices. Help Author­ing Tools also make it easy to cre­ate EPUB files.

Controlling alignment

In your Help Author­ing Tool, you can spec­i­fy your text align­ment. Most of the time, tech­ni­cal writ­ers left-align their con­tent. But if you are view­ing your EPUB file on an iPad, it over­rides your align­ment set­tings and presents the con­tent as justified.

Here’s an exam­ple of jus­ti­fied align­ment on an iPad:

For­tu­nate­ly, you can over­ride the iPad settings.

The eas­i­est way to do this is by ask­ing users to make a con­fig­u­ra­tion change on the iPad. As this is a pret­ty straight­for­ward change, I think it’s rea­son­able to ask users to fol­low a few steps.

To change the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion set­tings on your iPad:

1. Go to Set­tings on your iPad.
2. Go under your Apps set­tings and click iBooks.

3. Turn off Full Jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to over­ride the settings.
4. Open an EPUB file in iBooks.

Your con­tent is then aligned the way you designed it.

Controlling widows and orphans

In some e‑readers, you can con­trol wid­ows and orphans. A wid­ow is the last line of a para­graph, marooned on one side of a page break. Here is an example:

An orphan is a word, part of a word, or very short line that appears by itself at the end of a paragraph.

Using the Cas­cad­ing Style Sheet (CSS) in your EPUB project, you can con­trol wid­ows and orphans in Adobe Dig­i­tal Edi­tions and Nook. As of May 2013, you can­not con­trol wid­ows and orphans in iBooks.

Unzipping an EPUB

Com­plete the fol­low­ing steps to unzip your EPUB file: 

1. Locate your EPUB file.
2. Change the .epub exten­sion to .zip.
3. Unzip the con­tents of the folder.
4. Dou­ble-click the OEBPS fold­er (“OEBPS” stands for Open eBook Pub­li­ca­tion Structure).

5. Locate the default.css file. This is your CSS file.

Editing your CSS

Using a text edi­tor, type the fol­low­ing code that spec­i­fies the for­mat­ting for wid­ows and orphans.

For the para­graph tag (“p”), the high­light­ed exam­ple ensures that at least two lines of con­tent appear togeth­er at the bot­tom or top of a page so that you don’t have sin­gle-line wid­ows and orphans. Of course, you can change the val­ue to what­ev­er you prefer.

Next steps

After you make changes to the CSS, re-zip the EPUB project, rename so it uses an .epub exten­sion, and test it on all the dif­fer­ent e‑readers that your users may be using. Dif­fer­ent e‑readers may ren­der your EPUB file dif­fer­ent­ly so test­ing is vital.

I am speak­ing about for­mat­ting EPUB files at the Cana­da West Chap­ter of the STC on July 16th, 2013.