InDesign 2025 Is Out

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If you use InDesign to create EPUBs, check your Creative Cloud app and update to InDesign 20.0 which has just been released. As a result of work by the InDesign expert group — made up of Richard Orme (DAISY), Jonas Lillqvist (Accessibility Library Celia), Gregorio Pellegrino (Fondazione LIA), and Laura Brady (eBOUND) — there have been a few waves of improvements to the EPUB export in the past year or so. See this Inclusive Publishing post, and the Fondazione LIA blog for news.

Pagination Source

What’s new in this release? There is now a place in the EPUB export wizard to augment how InDesign generates a pagelist.

Screenshot of the General tab of the EPUB export menu highlighting the middle of the screen where the page navigation button is checked, and the pagination source drop-down menu is activated

Ebook developers have been able to create a pagelist for a few months now, but this latest release also has a space to name a source for the pagelist. Being able to point to a print ISBN is an important piece of the accessibility puzzle as it gives important context for the pagelist, allowing readers to understand the source of the pagination. This means that students in a classroom where some are using digital, and some are using print can all literally be on the same page. 

Note: InDesign exports the source ISBN as: <meta property=”pageBreakSource”>urn:isbn:9781000000000</meta>. Ace by DAISY will report this as an error at present because it is looking for the older way of marking the source ISBN — that is, <dc:source id=”pg-src”>9781000000000</dc:source> — but Ace will be updated very soon.

MathML

Also new to this version of InDesign — and frankly a long overdue development — is the ability to create and export MathML expressions which will be of interest to a broad swath of ebook developers and textbook publishers. While this is an early iteration of MathML, and the integration has some known limitations, this is a very positive step.

Screenshot of the Insert MathML window. Raw MathML is on the left with the equation preview on the right.

At present MathML is exported as SVG vector images with MathML added after the image and hidden. Work is ongoing to improve this feature. Read a little more about MathML integration on InDesign’s site.

Table Headers

When exporting tables from InDesign to EPUB, rows marked as headers are wrapped in a <thead> tag. The latest version improves accessibility by ensuring that non-empty cells in the header row are now correctly marked as <th scope=”col”>. This enhancement simplifies the process of creating accessible EPUBs with tabular data. This is a nice fix that will make creating ebooks with tabular data a little easier.

Coming Soon

Early work on exporting images and captions in proper HTML 5 is underway. While it’s been possible to manipulate object stylesto get <figure> and <figcaption> in the EPUB export, developers have to edit the code to nest the <figcaption> correctly inside the <figure> tag. Read more in the InDesign release notes.

Our thanks to Laura Brady and the rest of The Accessible EPUB from InDesign Expert Group for this report.