Finally! I figured out a much more seamless way to force the headings and any other content to be left aligned in our ePubs for iBooks. The goal of my ePub creation is really to have a seamless process, we can’t afford the time to unpack, edit html/css, and repack files just for one document… so everything needs to be able to come straight from InDesign and be ready for viewing in iBooks.
I’m also assuming that a large proportion of users probably don’t even know how to turn off the full justification setting for iBooks.. I mean, I didn’t realise the options were in the settings on the iPad for a LONG time myself.. So, by forcing the left align on the headings at least the ePub will look and read nicer with the justification setting still turned on.
The only solution I saw on the net to solve the left-aligned problem was to edit the html of the unpacked ePub (which is a massive no for our workflow) and add a span element inside the heading tags. It got me thinking though, and the idea suddenly came to me. Get InDesign to just do it for you.
First off, create a new character style in your master document (the one that synchronises styles between all the docs in your InDesign book). Call it something like leftAligned. Go to the bottom option, tag formatting, set it up so a is added with the class of leftAligned. Now, in your css file (the one you use when you export your ePub files) you can have a class that looks something like:
span[class*="leftAligned"]{ text-align: left; }
* little note; just found out the span doesn’t even need to have any styles at all, oh well!
Now, to use the character style and get InDesign to do the work for you; do a find and replace for every document in your book; and what I did was search for any H1 paragraph styles, and have it apply the leftAligned character style to them. I then did it with every other heading type and the referencing paragraph styles.
When I exported to ePub and viewed in iBooks, FINALLY I saw left-aligned headings. MUCH nicer, and much easier than unpacking, editing, and repacking the ePub.
