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Summary: for best results in fixed layout Epub books, specify a portrait cover design but switch off Generate cover page and create a front cover as pages within the project. |
When testing your fixed layout book on Apple Books (iBooks), you may find that you only see the top half of the cover page when launching the book, even though the cover thumbnail is fine.
There are two covers in an Epub book - the cover image file, and an HTML page that wraps around the cover image file to create an ebook page. The raw cover image file is shown as a thumbnail, so if it's in a portrait orientation, it should look OK.
The HTML cover page is more tricky. If you are creating a landscape book, Apple Books prefers you to provide the book in separate left and right pages. Then it can show these pages both in portrait (singly) and in landscape mode (joined together). Even if you create your pages as a full-width spread, you can get Jutoh to split the pages up by setting the configuration option Pages per spread to Two, and then setting Page width to half of the spread width. If you do this, then the portrait HTML cover page will be consistent with the rest of the book and will display correctly.
If you don't want to split your landscape pages up, but still want to provide a portrait cover image, clear the configuration option Generate cover page. This will omit an HTML cover page, but will still include the portrait cover image for the thumbnail, so long as your Cover design option is set. If you want to include a cover in the content of your book, you can create it as a page and set the guide type to "cover" in the section properties.
Since Apple Books will display the generated, portrait cover HTML page with a blank half in landscape mode, you might want to disable the cover page anyway by clearing Generate cover page.
Kindle configurations omit the HTML cover page by default, and the cover image will be resized appropriately, so it's not such a problem.
Note: this behaviour has changed in Jutoh 2.85, because previously the code generation failed to display cover pages properly in readers such as Adobe Digital Editions and AZARDI. While the code is now more correct for these readers, unfortunately Apple Books doesn't handle the cover so well. Since most people want their books to work across a range of platforms, we thought it better to add warnings and this topic to enable people to make their covers display correctly on all Epub 3 platforms.
Contents | Start | End | Previous: KB0359: Why does Jutoh warn me that 'TOC Entry' styles are used outside of the table of contents? | Next: KB0361: Why do paragraph styles include direct character formatting?