Tips and Tricks in iBooks Author

Apple’s iBooks Author is a great program for creating ebooks. The software comes loaded with a variety of templates ready to be customized. Although it may be time-consuming, the process is simple, clean, and easy enough for beginners. For those who like more choices in typography, graphics effects, layout, and animation, iBooks is rather limited. There are ways to work around that using Adobe InDesign, along side with iBooks Author. This article is for designers who are experienced with InDesign and don’t mind doing some double work in order to achieve certain effects in iBooks Author. Both programs were used on a Macbook Pro running Lion.

iBooks Author only accepts True Type (.ttf) and Open Type (otf), which are embedded into books. In InDesign, however, fonts are available through the Mac OS Font Book, which means a large supply of fonts can be opened in InDesign.

When a design calls for a fancy font treatment that is not available in iBooks Author, one way to achieve that effect is to create it in InDesign first. The example here shows a page title with typography and a background. Once the page is ready, it can be dragged directly to the desired page in iBooks, which then converts all the items into one image, including outlines, drop shadows, etc., and any other effect done in InDesign. To make any changes, the original file must be edited in InDesign and dragged back to iBooks.

Another example of a type treatment done on a circular path in InDesign for an iBook cover.