Way to have comic book display two pages in landscape and one in portrait?

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Level 1

136 points

Way to have comic book display two pages in landscape and one in portrait?

I'm trying to use iBooks Author to build a very simple manga-style graphic novel. It's based on a print book (with a lot of unconventional frame use), so I'm not using any fancy interactive features or individual-frame zoom-ins or such.

What I want to do is very simple and seems obvious: In landscape, I want two images (one for each page) to display side by side. In portrait, I want a single image to fill the whole display.

Preferably the portrait view will also display one image/page at a time and require page turns, like landscape, rather than a continuous vertical strip of images.

I assume I'm overlooking something really obvious, but I can't seem to figure out how to get this to work in portrait, and searching, or even buying a graphic novel template from a professional studio (they just disabled portrait), hasn't helped. I can set up landscape well enough, but if I check the option to share images with portrait, I just get little inline thumbnails in the continuous-scroll-style vertical view, when what I want is large, single-page images. (Perhaps what I'm really asking is how to disable the infinite scrolling mode in portrait view?)

I'm sure the answer to this will be something simple that makes me feel like an idiot, but I would tremendously appreciate any help.

iMac, OS X Mountain Lion, 1st Gen i7 27"

Posted on Aug 20, 2013 4:18 PM

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Answer 1

K T

Level 7

23,877 points

Aug 20, 2013 4:24 PM in response to Marc Marshall

Let's start with page turns first.

See that topic here: iBA Tips and Tricks 01

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Answer 2

Marc Marshall Author

Level 1

136 points

Aug 20, 2013 4:38 PM in response to K T

Thanks for the suggestion, K T.

I'd already read through several of those tips lists, and I was aware that the page turn animation was exclusive to epub documents. I was assuming there would be some way to display a full-screen image in portrait view with an .ibooks file, but perhaps that's not currently the case (which, admittedly, seems like a huge oversight on devices with less-than-10" screens).

I could accept a continuously-scrolling portrait mode if that's a requirement, but I'd at least need to expand the page-images to fill the column, which is where I also wasn't having any luck with. It seems like doing a new section for each page might be a sort of hack, to get around this as well, although it might preclude re-using the images in portrait view.

(I probably also should have mentioned that I realize I could build this as an .epub or PDF book and get it to do more or less what I want, but there would be annoying faux-gutter and borders that I'd prefer to avoid, and iBooks Author otherwise seems to be capable of producing exactly the material I'm looking for with a lot less work than hand-coding an ePub file.)

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Answer 3

K T

Level 7

23,877 points

Aug 20, 2013 4:49 PM in response to Marc Marshall

I could accept a continuously-scrolling portrait mode if that's a requirement

No 'if'. I'm not sure you understand that.

Given your requirments, hesitation and disdain for percieved hacks, I doubt iBA will suit your needs.

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Answer 4

Marc Marshall Author

Level 1

136 points

Aug 20, 2013 5:02 PM in response to K T

Okay, that was what seemed to be the case, and the answer I was looking for someone to give but wasn't finding; "No, you cannot turn off continuous scrolling in portrait view."

(As for hacks, I'll take anything that works--I was willing to manually hack compiled Kindle files to get around a stupid bug in Amazon's Kindle exporter.)

I'll try rephrasing my question, with the understanding that portrait view will always be continuously scrolling:

Is there any way to get an image from landscape view to display at roughly full-screen size (width) in portrait view? Or will they always be thumbnails with the assumption that portrait must accomodate variable-screen-size devices?

(If the answers are "No" and "yes", the solution would be to either just lock it in landscape or abandon IBA in favor of a fixed layout EPUB. Well, that, and file a feature request with Apple, since it seems like this is something you should be able to do.)

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