Unlike the ePub export for apps like Pages, which flattens styles onto images, these styles are just that - CSS styles. Vellum offers five template styles for photographs: plain styling, drop shadow, black border, grey thick border, and photographic border with drop shadow. Contrast that with the 50-60 hours I used to spend formatting images in Word, then having our art team reformat them in InDesign, and formatting them a final time for iBooks and Kindle using custom CSS sheets. And then there's the issue with Retina-quality images and size constraints, and keeping captions tied to images.īuilding iMore's first how-to book with Vellum was almost comically simple in contrast to my old workflow: It took about four hours to format the entire book and get it ready for export. Some platforms (cough - iBooks - cough) remove certain image-related code so as to avoid major bugs within the iBooks WebKit framework, but that means having to write extra code for the Kindle and Nook side of things. Each platform uses slightly different CSS behind the scenes. Take it from someone who's struggled for the last few years - cross-platform image implementation is hard. 11 months later, the company has delivered on that promise. Vellum 1.0 launched this January with those limited tools, and image support promised down the road. I got my first glimpse of the Mac app two years ago back in its early beta stages: At the time, the WYSIWYG ebook-builder only supported text and limited styling, but its live-preview engine and instant-compile for iBooks, Kindle, and Nook gave me true hope for a great cross-platform ebook tool.
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