Over on his own blog, Ned Batchelder has written up his HTML5 appcache validator tool he whipped together while working on Ibis Reader:
The result is Caveman, a Python tool to validate HTML5 cache manifests. It scrapes the HTML page you specify, finding resources, then compares them to the cache manifest and reports problems.
Full blog post [...]
This is part two of a series on using author-friendly word-processing tools with native EPUB export. Part 1 was about Apple Pages.
Part two: Scrivener
I first became aware of Scrivener’s support for EPUB export in November of 2010, when they released a special edition for NaNoWriMo (and the less said about my novel-writing experiment, the better). [...]
Yes, but it may require a Mac.
The IDPF board met on the last day of the Digital Book 2011 conference at Book Expo America. One of our topics for discussion was what the IDPF as an organization should do to further the adoption of EPUB. I brought up an issue that’s been concerning me [...]
I haven’t been checking each incremental release so it’s possible this landed earlier, but the current version of Apple Pages has improved the semantics of their EPUB export.
The original template now produces <p> elements instead of <div>s, an important update:
<h1 class="s7">Introduction to ePub</h1>
<p class="s6">This document will show you how to use paragraph styles to create [...]
We’re very excited to have a new team member for Ibis Reader. Ned Batchelder will be working with us in the weeks ahead to update and improve Ibis, and to add some features that have been requested by current and prospective software licensees.
First up is internationalization. One of the key advantages of an HTML5 [...]
epubcheck is a valuable tool for anyone working with EPUB documents. Many beginners choose to start using it via the online validator at http://threepress.org/document/epub-validate, but it’s a mistake to use that too often. More explicitly:
If you’re making more than 3 EPUBs this year, you must setup epubcheck on your computer
Why setup epubcheck locally? If you [...]
EpubCheck, the open-source tool widely used for checking and testing EPUB files, has been updated to release 1.1. The release is available on Google Code.
Note: There is a new jar file in lib/. Ensure you copy that to the same place as your existing saxon.jar.
Threepress sponsored the following fixes:
Error message generated for valid ISO8601 [...]
Threepress has contributed patches to a number of significant bugs and improvements to epubcheck recently:
Error message generated for valid ISO8601 date [BUG]
Checking for unused files which are not in the manifest [ENHANCEMENT]
Existence of files referenced in guide not checked [BUG]
Version r128 has broken test suite [BUG]
The unmanifested file warning in particular has been a critical [...]
Apple’s iBookstore requirement that all files in the .epub must be listed in the OPF manifest has caused a lot of headaches for content producers. There’s no such requirement in the actual EPUB 2.0 specification, and therefore no test for this condition has been in epubcheck.
However, the vast majority of cases where this [...]
Version 1.76.0 of the open source DocBook-XSL stylesheets, which convert DocBook documents into a variety of outputs including PDF, HTML, and EPUB, has just been released into the wild for testing. It includes a number of EPUB enhancements and bugfixes that we’ve contributed over the last year, so we’d love to have your feedback.
DocBook-XSL uses [...]