epubcheck Error

[Karellen]

Originally Posted by soniya

Hey hi, review the HTML code to check compliance with EPUB specification. Replace class with permitted attributes like dir, lang, version, or xml:lang as needed. Validate the HTML code against the EPUB standard to resolve the parsing error.

Are you a Bot?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by mdpeterson42

My next struggle is line breaks or emphasis within block quotes. Here are two examples:

Error:
28, 79: Error while parsing file: text not allowed here; expected element "address", "blockquote", "del", "div", "dl", "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6", "hr", "ins", "noscript", "ns:svg", "ol", "p", "pre", "script", "table" or "ul" (with xmlns:ns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg")
28, 100: Error while parsing file: element "br" not allowed here; expected element "address", "blockquote", "del", "div", "dl", "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6", "hr", "ins", "noscript", "ns:svg", "ol", "p", "pre", "script", "table" or "ul" (with xmlns:ns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg")

Here is the code:

<blockquote class="calibre8">Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,<br class="calibre4"/>


Error:
26, 94: Error while parsing file: text not allowed here; expected element "address", "blockquote", "del", "div", "dl", "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6", "hr", "ins", "noscript", "ns:svg", "ol", "p", "pre", "script", "table" or "ul" (with xmlns:ns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg")
26, 114: Error while parsing file: element "em" not allowed here; expected element "address", "blockquote", "del", "div", "dl", "h1", "h2", "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6", "hr", "ins", "noscript", "ns:svg", "ol", "p", "pre", "script", "table" or "ul" (with xmlns:ns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg")

Here is the code:

<blockquote class="calibre8">“—the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, <em class="calibre6">which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.</em>”</blockquote>


Thank you all again!

em cant have a class=.
If you need to style it, then use span

[mdpeterson42]

Originally Posted by theducks

em cant have a class=.
If you need to style it, then use span

Interesting, since I had just used <em> in HTML and Calibre added the class. So if I just did <em> and </em>, would that work? Weirdly, this only seems to be an issue in blockquote and not elsewhere (there are italics sprinkled throughout the book).

Thank you!

[Quoth]

Exporting from LO Writer via Save As docx would give something like

<p class="quote">“—the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, <span class="emp">which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.</span>”</p>

Some might argue <blockquote> is semantic info. But often it's just a different paragraph style, a hangover from HTML3 or something.
Any change within <hn>, <p> or <blockquote> is always needing a <span>

Consider editing odt files in LO Writer using paragraph styles and an "export" via Save As in docx for Calibre (don't open the docx in LO Writer).
All the paragraph styles map 1:1 to <p> with 1:1 CSS and all character styles map 1:1 to <span>
I use Edit Span & Divs tool to fix back any <p class="some heading" etc to be <h2 class="some heading" etc, less than a minute.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by mdpeterson42

Interesting, since I had just used <em> in HTML and Calibre added the class. So if I just did <em> and </em>, would that work? Weirdly, this only seems to be an issue in blockquote and not elsewhere (there are italics sprinkled throughout the book).

Thank you!

<em> has semantic meaning. If it's italics for some reason other than emphasis, then <i>text</i> is better.
Blockquote isn't really needed at all if it has a class setting margins, indents, padding, font etc. A <p class="whatever" is fine.

KISS principle. Don't multiply entities unless needed.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by theducks

em cant have a class=.
If you need to style it, then use span

<em> and <i> can have a class. I've seen it done.

[DNSB]

<blockquote class="calibre8">Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,<br class="calibre4"/>

<blockquote class="calibre8">“—the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, <em class="calibre6">which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.</em>”</blockquote>

What is even funnier is that when I ran those code snippets through epubcheck using epub3 (I did add the closing blockquote to the first snippet), there were no errors.

When I repeated running epubcheck using epub2, I needed to add a block tag inside the blockquotes which oddly is what first error message posted for both was complaining about. I tested with <div> and <p>, any of the others would likely work.

<blockquote class="calibre8"><p>Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,<br class="calibre4"/></p></blockquote>

<blockquote class="calibre8"><p>“—the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, <em class="calibre6">which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.</em>”</p></blockquote>

Perhaps either more practice or an online CSS course and a review of the ePub specifications might be in order.

[PeterT]

Or maybe, use an editting tool like sigil to create the epub.

[mdpeterson42]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Or maybe, use an editting tool like sigil to create the epub.

That was what I thought I was doing with Calibre!

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by mdpeterson42

That was what I thought I was doing with Calibre!

I actually mean for the editing of it; not a conversion from html to epub

Sent from my Pixel 7a using Tapatalk

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by mdpeterson42

Hi all,

I am trying to publish my first book. I wrote it in HTML and converted it to epub using Calibre. On the Google Play Store, I received the following error on about half of my splits and I have no idea how to address them:

Error while parsing file: attribute "class" not allowed here; expected attribute "dir", "lang", "version" or "xml:lang"

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

The best solution (IMHO) is to convert your eBook to text. Then load the text into MS Word or Libra Office. Use styles to set the styles you want. Then take the DocX file and convert it to ePub and clean it up from there. There should be a lot less errors.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Or maybe, use an editting tool like sigil to create the epub.

calibre does have an editor. The problem (I think) is the HTML has too many errors in it.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by mdpeterson42

That was what I thought I was doing with Calibre!

calibre's conversion has some issues with the ePub standards since ePub implements a subset of the CSS2/3 and enforces some html/xhtml bits that have been deprecated for many browsers. For instance, most browsers do not require the <!DOCTYPE> anymore while the ePub specifications still mandate this.

My process when I must convert HTML to ePub is to do the conversion in calibre since it gets rid of much of the header cruft that is not used/needed for an ePub. After this I open the ePub in Sigil and do the cleanup and any editing in there. Sigil as an ePub editor is a lot more concerned with being ePub specification compliant than calibre and that makes my life a bit easier.

The other posters here who suggest using either Microsoft Word or LO Writer saving as docx and then converting that with calibre or importing to Sigil as being the easier path are correct as long as the author is careful to use styles to format the document (header, paragraph, etc.).

I've received some .docx files where the author treated the screen as a glass typewriter and they are a pain to deal with. With those, the easiest route I've found is to save the file as a text file and then add the styling in Sigil.

[mdpeterson42]

Thank you all for the thoughts; I really appreciate it.

I am curious why you all are saying Sigil is easier to use for editing than Calibre. They both seem about the same to me, so I wonder if Sigil has a feature I am not taking advantage of. I tried "Mend Code" but that did not seem to do anything. Honestly, all of the HTML functions just fine as HTML - it's just a matter of not knowing the proper epub syntax for some of it.

It seems that <div> </div> works in the blockquotes in place of the line break, though in Sigil with the Flightcrew plugin, I then received this error, which I had not gotten with epubchecker - "Error schema not satisfied : no character data is allowed by content model near column 157". This just refers to a </blockquote> tag, so I am really not sure what the issue is:

<blockquote class="calibre8">“—the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus."</blockquote>

Also, <span> did not work inside the blockquotes for italics. I think I am just going to drop the italics from any blockquotes and call it a day.

Maybe it would have been cleaner to just do this all in Word from the beginning using styles, but I thought the HTML would have been better. But at this point, with over 6000 lines of HTML, I think it is going to be easier to just fix the errors than start from scratch on the formatting. Most of it works fine. Next time, I'll use a paragraph style instead of the <blockquote> tag!

[mdpeterson42]

Actually, I discovered a much easier and cleaner way to fix all the blockquote issues. Since Calibre had converted the blockquote into a style, I just replaced every "blockquote" with "p" (leaving in the calibre style reference) and that looks like it may have done the trick.