[How-to-Fix] Bold / Italic not showing in Epubs
Making Epubs is a pain in the ass. You can't just convert a PDF into an Epub that can be used effectively for e-readers as it requires style formatting and further editing. One thing that was super annoying was that Bold & Italic text wasn't showing properly. The Epub worked fine in Adobe Digital Editions, but the font style didn't show up correctly in Calibre.
One way to fix this is to manually dig into the Epub and change the CSS (rename the file's extension from .epub to .zip or .rar -> open it -> find "template.css" -> edit the CSS in an editor such as Dreamweaver -> save -> rename file extention back to .epub). This option is very tedious and sensitive to errors, but it does the job.
Later I found out it could have been fixed way easier... Upon exporting your Epub in InDesign, go to the Contents tab and Uncheck "Include Embeddable Fonts". This is very counter intuitive as you might think you would want to embed any fonts for it to be able to display your fonts properly.
Anyway, easy fix... took me hours to figure out... hopefully I can save someone some headaches :)
[How-to-Fix] Working with InDesign to export ePub
I started working on an eBook with InDesign a few weeks back. InDesign has an option to export your document to an ePub file which can be used for eBook readers. If you don't have a reader to test it on, you can download the Adobe Digital Editions on your computer for free! Or even better... Use Calibre to manage your ebooks or test your epubs on virtual devices!
Anyway, exporting to ePub is quite easy, but you need to pay attention to how you format your documents. For example, page layouts are different, page breaks and returns aren't included, fonts paragraph/character styles, etc. I found a very nice guide from CreativePro, which explains these problems and gives you solutions on how to fix it :D
Indesign ePub Guide Part 1 | Part 2
The most annoying thing however, is that InDesign (CS5.5) doesn't export your table styles. The guide suggests manually editing the CSS file after exporting, which is a pain in the ass. To do this, export your document to ePub. Rename your file from .epub to .zip. Open the file and locate the CSS file.
It's a drag... but it's the only solution that I could find on the web until Adobe fixes this in the new CS version.