The vast majority of ebooks today have print cousins, despite some recent digital-only publishing news. As a consequence, many people creating ePubs want to know how to tie references to the printed pages back into the ebook. My personal opinion is that this sort of print-centrism is unnecessary for the vast majority of titles1, but [...]
InDesign CS4 is one of the most popular tools for creating ePubs, but the range of options it provides when exporting can confound many users. While I’m not a wizened InDesign expert, I have accumulated a set of choices for the various options that differ from the defaults and can help form the basis of [...]
Languages aren’t just written right-to-left or left-to-right, of course. They can also be written top-to-bottom, as in Chinese. How can you indicate that a block of text should be rendered vertically rather than horizontally?
In ePub, you can’t.
I was surprised to discover that the subset of CSS supported by ePub only includes the rtl or ltr [...]
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 [...]