ePub creation tools : what's missing ? wishlist / dialogue

[richardigp]

Originally Posted by Valloric

Questions:
1. How do you convert existing epub books to your format? Is it even possible to load existing epub books and edit them?

Over on the XML blog we explain that we created eScape as an easy way to make more than respectable ePubs from Open Office, more or less because we could do it. This was in response from a lament by Dave on the Teleread blog about there being no way to work with ODT and there should be a plug-in. So its ODT2EPUB only at present. eScape makes the packaging so easy, just focus on the editing (following a few basic rules), export XHTML and click.

I have also been on a lot of the forums here and seen how hard people find it to even make a simple drop cap. It doesn't have to be so hard! The problem is the approach is wrong meshing content & styles, instead of having clarity with structure. The whole idea of eScape is to have an existing ODT and make editorial corrections there in a user friendly, powerful content editing environment. You can then generate an ePub in just seconds, corrections and all. But the output is pure, consistent XHTML, with class statements as structural identifiers. You then select the style sheet of your choice, and eScape processes it together into an ePub package.

We don't have an ePub to ODT importer, but probably could. The approach would be to strip all styles inside if they aren't the eScape Structure-Styles because that would be the only way to maintain the structural integrity. That I think would get howls of anguish. We are looking at putting a file edit/repackage mode into AZARDI, but that is only on the drawing board and we have a lot more to do there with package checking/reporting first.

Originally Posted by Valloric

2. How do you guarantee display fidelity? Last time I checked, OpenOffice.org did not have an advanced XHTML renderer.

Not quite sure what you mean by display fidelity - making it look like the OOo file? That is exactly what we are not doing with eScape. We are using OOo to apply consistent Structural styles so the XHTML that comes out is absolutely the same for all books, and addresses the core text book structures, block styles, paragraph styles and inline presentation issues that seem to plague all e-book production environments.

eScape is a different approach. It lets anyone achieve the XHTML nirvana of separating content, structure and style. The XHTML is so consistent you can have any number of optional stylesheets and apply them to any ePub package and they will present accordingly. In effect eScape is saying to the reader, I will handle the XHTML (trust me!?), just use these Structure styles to tell us what you want various content blocks to be.

This is the core of good e-book packaging - especially for reflow. So while we exist in a Babel of ePub readers you can have a stylesheet optimized for Stanza, one optimized for ADE/Sony, another for whatever, and we can all stop crying about how everything doesn't do everything.

Originally Posted by Valloric

3. SVG? OO.org doesn't support it. Do you?

We don't support it in eScape, in fact we don't support any images in eScape for the reason that OOo makes it hard to get the output size from XHTML. We would have to put into place more "rules" which would make the tool more difficult to use at the OO level. We left it out of this version to see if there is significant interest. For 99% of the books on MobileRead images (other than cover) - and trade & retail books in general don't have images. For those that do - there are other options.

The biggest problem most people seem to have is getting a drop cap, or other text presentation styles. or simple formatting for text-only books without a lot of anguish unless they are talented HTML/CSS experts. We tried to bring in clarification of structure vs. styling with advanced content block structures, lines and character styles applied directly to the content. We are waiting to see if it is of interest. eScape addresses the presentation issues of standard books by separating the XHTML structure and CSS at the point of origin. The CSS files can then be manipulated to your hearts content.

4. How do you handle the "longdesc" attribute? Do you support it?
No images - No longdesc necessary.

Originally Posted by Valloric

5. Object tags?

Not with eScape.

Originally Posted by Valloric

6. DTBook?

Not with eScape.

Originally Posted by Valloric

7. XML islands?

Not with eScape. Not easy in OOo, or any other visual editor probably. This would require some style based "include/insert" statement to process the remote XML in at an insertion point - Eg: to put native MML into the file as an Inline or Out of Line Island. This implies a level of expertise that I think goes beyond the target user of eScape - and just about any other system. It also goes beyond the ability of most reader apps to handle it. As with the MML example, the Reader has to be able to render it, or send it to a processor such as MML2SVG and then display it. Inserting some DocBook into XHTML using islands is probably trivial, but why bother?

Originally Posted by Valloric

8. Font embedding?

Not with eScape. We see font embedding as really important for e-books with class that compete with print for presentation quality. Interestingly (from what we have observed) ADE doesn't handle these correctly in that they display fonts that are not in the manifest but are declared in the CSS - I have a feeling (but can't say for sure) InDesign ePub packaging works like this. Our full commercial packager handles font embedding, and I suppose it wouldn't be hard to have an extra input directory - fonts; but the user would be responsible for the application of the fonts in the CSS to specific styles. We wouldn't do font embedding allowed permission checks however: that would be up to the integrity of the user.

eScape is a pure production environment for ODT to ePub (via an XHTML intermediary). It uses powerful separation of content, structure and styles to give new production options if someone wants to maintain their source content in an ODT.

All of the advanced issues you questioned, Islands, fonts, objects, etc. are non-trivial, andit is interesting to see these brought up. These issues are addressed in IGP:FLIP, but unfortunately we are not giving that away today, although there is a sandbox site where anyone can play.

[Valloric]

Thank you for the very thorough response. While the lack of image, SVG and font support is unfortunate, you do cover a large volume of books one would want to create.

By "display fidelity" I meant "It looks on my screen the same way it will look on conformant Reading Systems". You seem to be going a different route though (not necessarily a bad thing).

The other thing that bothers me a bit is that a power user does not have direct access to the source code that will end up in the epub file. While most people don't need this level of control, some do.

Lastly, it's disappointing that you use a nice cross-platform editor like Writer from OpenOffice.org and then make your final converter Windows only.

[richardigp]

On the fidelity issue, we have created the OO stylesheet to look like a classic book where possible (except for the coloured lines), but in this version we were unsure about how to put leading lines above and below a block extract for example, and then adding a first para style for the non-indented paras so they look good in the OO file. That will be more XSL work, but make the using/learning curve steeper. We will look at that in the future.

Interesting point about the XHTML source code, and I may blog about that a bit further, the difference between the Structure-Styling and other HTML environments, is that it always looks the same for the same structure, so in some respect you don't really need to see it (if you believe this!). I am not sure that this is the place to get to technical on this matter, but I might put an extra "chapter" into the online tutorial. So assuming the XSL's and slicers and dicers are working nicely, the XHTML elements and class statements are totally predictable and I can just crack open the style sheet, or make a whole series of custom style sheets for a range of looks and feels.

In one development version we did have an XHTML exporter, but thought that got too complicated. It output the book as a single, fully processed XHTML file - the one that is used internally before being split apart to create the final package.

Having said that, I think we were trying to address the make a good looking eBook fast with a bit more styling for someone who would prefer never to see the source. (are there any of those on this forum?)

From the believe it or not department; the last point is our shame! We are a Linux development house working primarily in Python and mainly do Web services applications. Some silly little interface issue stopped the deb, but its coming.

[Mcnaz]

Hi all.

Sorry to jump into this thread at this late stage but I stumbled in from Google whilst doing research on an EPUB Maker type application I am working on.

Brief Background.

I am a Book Designer (BD)/PRS-505 fan but got very frustrated with the inability to customise my own searches/replaces though advanced RegEx.

I've started coding an APP in Delphi that presents the user with a Rich Edit (based in RichEd20.dll V3) control which gives some semblance of WYSIWYG (i.e. bolding and simple formatting).

The goal is to have a BD type tool that is able to import from various formats (lit, pdf and so on) convert to html (using clit, pdf2html and so on),
clean the HTML and present to the user.

ATM I am at the import and clean HTML phase (using a few LIT -> clit.exe) examples and the produced HTML is dreadful! I am resorting to stripping all the HTML and rebuilding paragraphs. HTML stripping is done via loading the html into an IE COM object and saving as text... not ideal so I am looking at LIBXML2 implementation instead

I can see one obstacle ahead and that is that internally the document is stored as RTF (for the WYSIWYG) and this will need to be converted into HTML/XML when exporting to EPUB. I am currently researching the ability to embed control characters into RTF (i.e. chapter 1, heading, subheading) for use during the export.

I've read the first few pages of this thread and although a few interesting features are mentioned my goal is primarily to develop a tool that is aimed more towards importing/converting/tarting up then EPUB output as opposed to a full blown publishing platform (maybe in version 4!).

Again, suggestions/help will be welcome (I will lurk here for a while)

I will keep the thread updated on my progress

Cheers.

[zelda_pinwheel]

hi Mcnaz and welcome to the forum ! we are always really happy to hear about new epub creation tools being developped since at the moment we are still waiting for the "perfect" tool, and since different users have different needs. please do keep us informed of your progress ; you'll find plenty of people around here interested in trying it out and giving suggestions, if you are looking for that.

and don't hesitate to take a look around the epub forum to see what else is available, and get some useful information.

[RealImages1]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Since I like writing my XHTML and CSS code by hand, I won't ask this from an editor, but I would appreciate a user-friendly way to generate and edit the opf (metadata, manifest, spine, guide) and the ncx (hierarchical table of contents) files.

I realise this is an old thread, but I agree absolutely with this post ! Has anyone found a way to do this ?

[Adjust]

Just unpack an existing epub and reuse those files and simply change the content, and keep those files for new titles.

[RealImages1]

Originally Posted by Adjust

Just unpack an existing epub and reuse those files and simply change the content, and keep those files for new titles.

Thanks for that, Adjust. That's exactly what I'm doing already. It just becomes very tedious (especially with the OPF). And it's too easy to make a mistake. I'm not a programmer, but I would have thought it would be relatively simple to build an applet which would scan the unzipped project files and generate an OPF. The NCX of course would need to be to generated first and would need some user input to determine play order.

[GeoffC]

well; there's the hard way, and there's the hard way, no one ever said it was easy !

[Andrew Brooks]

Hi, not quite sure where on this forum to post this,

I'm a photographer whos pretty new to ePubs/iBooks, been working on one of my work for the last few weeks and have it looking good on my iPhone and iPab, but now really interested in making it available to my network using the iBooks store. On running it through http://threepress.org/document/epub-validate/ it came up with this error on every sound and video file that is in the book

ERROR: New Worlds.epub/OPS/chapter-1.xhtml(5): unknown element "audio" from namespace "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"

and

ERROR: New Worlds.epub/OPS/chapter-30.xhtml(5): unknown element "video" from namespace "http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"

Anyone know a good solution or way round this problem?

Also is there a file size limit on iBooks that can be uploaded, as mine features embedded video and sound it works out as just over 80meg.

I have put together the iBook using iWork pages.

Any help would be very appreciated,

Thanks for your time,

www.andrewbrooksphotography.com

[GeoffC]

Andrew

Welcome to mobileread ....

An expert will be along, no doubt!
Hope you get a solution.....iPad/iBooks are beyond my ken....

[Jellby]

It seems you are using the <audio> and <video> elements, and those are not allowed in ePUB (yet).

[st_albert]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Since I like writing my XHTML and CSS code by hand, I won't ask this from an editor, but I would appreciate a user-friendly way to generate and edit the opf (metadata, manifest, spine, guide) and the ncx (hierarchical table of contents) files.

Originally Posted by RealImages1

I realise this is an old thread, but I agree absolutely with this post ! Has anyone found a way to do this ?

You could import the XHTML and CSS files into sigil. It will do the grunt work.

[RealImages1]

Originally Posted by st_albert

You could import the XHTML and CSS files into sigil. It will do the grunt work.

Thanks for that st_albert. I've found that Sigil does a very odd thing with the css when I import - it makes a new copy of the css for every xhtml file. Is there a way around this ? I should mention that I'm running vers 0.2.4 because I'm on a PPC G5 and the latest version is not universal binary.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by RealImages1

Thanks for that st_albert. I've found that Sigil does a very odd thing with the css when I import - it makes a new copy of the css for every xhtml file. Is there a way around this ? I should mention that I'm running vers 0.2.4 because I'm on a PPC G5 and the latest version is not universal binary.

You are importing multiple EPUB filesand trying to combine them into a single EPUB?
Even if the stylesheets are identical, Sigil will rename them and keep them separate because it does not examine each item and compare.

If YOU know stylesheet1 is the same (or subset) of stylesheet:
just edit (CV) the line in each document (Search and replace)to read stylesheet. (or pick the one that is the super set of them all)

Then delete the 'extras'