Languages such as Arabic and Hebrew are written right-to-left (RTL) rather than left-to-right (LTR), as in European languages. When dealing with only one of those scripts at a time, computers generally handle the directionality well by just falling back on the user’s general language setting. But what if you have to render text in multiple [...]
[Today's guest post is by Keith Fahlgren. - Liza]
The three ePub specifications (OPF, OPS, and OCF) include a lot of detail on ebook metadata and markup, but do not include a technique for describing covers. Despite this omission (a fix is being discussed), there are some widely adopted approaches for marking up covers that will [...]
If I say that a document is in “XML”, I’m not really saying anything very specific. All I’ve told you is that the document has some text wrapped in various angle-brackets, and that those angle-brackets are “well-formed.” A well-formed XML document just means one in which the angle-brackets open and close in a predictable [...]
ePub books are supposed to have a unique identifier: the Dublin Core identifier found in the OPF file. Unfortunately, the ePub spec doesn’t have any mechanism to enforce the uniqueness of the ID, so we live in a world where in fact many many epubs don’t have truly unique identifiers (or indeed, any identifiers [...]
This was an experiment and is a bit of a hack. Most people seeking to embed video in ePub should use the Flash method described earlier.
I wanted to see if could construct a valid ePub file using HTML5 (in this case, employing the HTML5 <video> element). The problem is that ePub only supports one kind [...]
Since Bookworm has support for video you may want to experiment with creating your own video ebooks. Here’s how to do it and still create a valid XHTML 1.1/ePub.
Assuming you have a Flash movie called Creative_Commons_-_Get_Creative.swf and a containing XHTML page called chapter-1.html, put this in your OPF:
<!– Flash video [...]
This is an experimental new feature but of course a very cool one: Bookworm can now display and play ePub books with embedded video.
Whether the video will actually play depends on the epub file’s formatting and the capability of your web browser. Bookworm also needs to register the particular file type.
Supported video formats:
MP4
OGV
SWF
In later [...]
This is the first in a series of posts describing some of the lesser-known features in the ePub spec. Many of them aren’t implemented by any readers, yet, but can provide some interesting functionality.
The first is “fallbacks.” As ePub developers know, only a small handful of content types are supported by the spec: [...]
Most of the time, command-line users will be able to run the epubcheck Java binary without issues. But sometimes mysterious problems occur — this happened to me on OS X before upgrading to Snow Leopard. So while it’s a bit awkward, you can use the remote epubcheck API combined with some XSLT to [...]
Our web tool for using the open-source epubcheck validator got a quick refresh:
Now includes epubpreflight results
EpubCheck’s lesser-known companion checks for additional issues like content documents that exceed 300K, which can’t be loaded on the Sony Reader. The complete (short!) list:
Content files that are empty or are >300k
Image files that are empty or are >10MB [...]