InDesign flubs CSS in ePub for exported lists

I think InDesign is a pretty powerful tool for generating ePub documents. But I've found an annoying mistake in one of their ePub export options.

InDesign has a cool feature that lets you format paragraphs as bulleted or numbered lists. You choose the system and InDesign inserts the bullets or numbers automatically. It's a very powerful and useful tool.



Here is what the list looks like in InDesign:



In the Digital Editions Export Options box, you can choose to convert paragraphs styled with InDesign's handy Bullet and Numbered List style characteristics into ordered and unordered lists in an ePub.



If you choose Map to Unordered Lists, InDesign converts paragraphs styled with Bullets into <ul> elements, complete with <li> items. Seems good and it's what you'd expect.



But when you look at the CSS, you find that InDesign has missed a step. Though they convert the list to <ul> and <li> items, they leave the formatting assigned to <p> items.



As you might expect, the formatting is lost when you visualize the ePub (here on an iPad, but the same holds true in any eReader):



If you choose not to Map to Unordered Lists, InDesign won't convert your lists to bulleted lists (<ul>) and instead leaves them as <p> items.

And since the CSS corresponds to <p> items, the formatting is now preserved:



So, you can either decide not to convert your lists in InDesign into actual lists in the ePub, or you can adjust your CSS manually by changing the selectors for the bulleted style so that they point to <li> items instead of <p> items.

Or you can wait for Adobe to fix the bug.