Marc Marshall

Q: In a fixed-layout epub is there a way to turn off the faux spine effect for just one pair of pages?

I'm formatting a graphic novel as a fixed-layout epub.  Because the pages are generated in Manga Studio with an intended print target, it by far makes the most sense to just use a single, large image for each page.  I'm coding the .opf, .xhtml, and .css files by hand, and I more or less understand everything I'm doing.

 

Because the pages are often full bleed, I actually want the faux book chrome afforded by having <meta property="ibooks:binding">true</meta>.  The shadow effect in the gutter gives a nice deliniation between the pages without me having to do anything additional with the formatting.

 

However... a handful of pages in the book are two-page spreads.  These look good enough with the shadow spine in the middle, but they would obviously look better without it.  What I'd like to do is identify these particular page pairs as two-page spreads and turn the binding chrome off for just that page pair.  I could of course "fake it" by adding a shadow to the pages themselves (except the spreads) and turning off the binding chrome on the entire book, but it'd be a lot easier to be able to do it in software.

 

Apple's formatting guide mentioned nothing of the sort, and searching for a while hasn't turned up anything (not even anyone asking the same question so far as I can tell).  I'm guessing this isn't possible, but it never hurts to ask.  Anybody know of a way to do this?

iMac (27-inch Late 2009), OS X Mavericks (10.9), i7, SanDisk SSD

Posted on Jan 20, 2014 4:40 PM