ID 17 English LTR document with any RTL text exports as RTL epub
I edited this to remove the urgent notice. The publisher does not want to publish this book as an epub.
The basic problem remains, however.
When exporting an epub 3.0 from an academic book written in English with some RTL text sections, typically tables with Hebrew and English text, the epub exports in reverse order. That is, the title page is at the end of the epub, and the last page of the text is the first in the epub. So far it seems that the presence of any RTL elements, even a single character, causes the epub to export as if it were an RTL book.
17.2.1, 17.1 and 17.0.1 all export the same way.
The reflowable epub export General tab has the Content -> Order set to "Based on Page Layout". That is the only option available.
To reproduce, export to reflowable epub a book with a few RTL elements. I created a 50 page 6×9 in. lorem ipsum ID document with three Hebrew words in the first sentence; exporting the file as a reflowable epub results in the first page at the end of the file. Even a single RTL character is sufficient to export with the first page at the end of the epub.
I cannot attach my .indd test file; it should be be easy enough to create one.
The attached screen snap shows that the epub page ordering is from right to left.
Michael Brennen
shared this idea
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Michael Brennen
commented
This is embarrasing, but now that I look at the epub with the Calibre viewer and with Sigil, I see that the problem is really the Apple Books reader, not the ID export. That had never occurred to me; I did not step back far enough to think about the problem differently. In Sigil I see that the content.opf file has these lines,
<dc:language>en-US</dc:language>
<dc:language>he-IL</dc:language>and it appears that from the language specs that the Apple Books app decides to interpret the epub as an RTL book. The Calibre viewer and Kindle Preview 3 apps show the book correctly.
So there is no problem with ID export. My apologies for not looking more deeply into the problem before posting.