HTML Text Rendering Best Practices

Question

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What are some best practices for rendering text as HTML?

Answer 1

Here are a few tips for getting the best out of rendering text as HTML:

1. Make sure all your text has Paragraph (and in some cases, Character) Styles applied with no overrides. You can see an override by placing your cursor in the text, if the applied style has a plus sign (+) next to it, the style has been overridden. in5 has to guess a some aspects of overridden styles, so cleanly used styles work best.
2. Short text blocks work best. HTML cannot replicate all of the spacing characteristics used on text in InDesign. These spacing discrepancies add up over long text blocks. Keeping text blocks short minimizes the effect of this.
3. Use a) a web safe font, b) a font that can be embedded, or c) Google Fonts. Using one of these options with increase the fidelity between the InDesign document and the resulting HTML.

Alternatively, if you don't absolutely need your text as text, rendering it as images or SVG will replicate the layout with a greater degree of accuracy.