Digital Editions

It's come to my attention that I didn't really give EPUBGen a proper introduction, and so there's been some confusion about the project.

EPUBGen project

EPUBGen is a Java library that demonstrates EPUB generation from a variety of document formats, and which may be a useful starting point or reference code for other EPUB generation needs. That is to say, it's an effort to promote the development of a variety of tools and workflows.

Continue reading "EPUB generation library written in Java" »

Posted by Paul Norton at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I realize this blog might have a diverse readership so I'll warn those of you who aren't developers, that this particular blog post probably isn't for you. Unless you find reading Java code interesting, you can probably skip this article. I've implemented the IDPF font obfuscation algorithm which is recommended here. The font obfuscation code can be found in the EPUBGen project, and so you can take and review, and use the code. In this article, I'm going to highlight just the portions of that project that are related to embedding and obfuscating the font information. (The project also has font subsetting and other features which I will not cover.)

Continue reading "Font obfuscation code, available for review" »

Posted by Paul Norton at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's a new update to InDesign CS4. Version 6.0.2. The update fixes lots of other stuff, so you may want to look at the release notes to see what's fixed that is not related to the EPUB export, I'm only going to talk about the EPUB plug-in.

Continue reading "InDesign 6.0.2 and EPUB export" »

Posted by Paul Norton at 3:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

EPUBGen is a project that Peter Sorotokin has started, it's a conversion utility for rtf files, word files, and FictionBook files. The output in each case is, of course, epub.

The project is open source, and available for download.

Note that there is also a .jar file for rtf2epub and it should work, but the main intent of this project is to provide source code and examples of the way things could be done. In other words, there's plenty of room for developers to improve and enhance the conversion.

The project includes code to convert a couple different formats to ePub, including generating all the required files and creating the package. The project also shows how to mangle embedded fonts, how to sub-set those font (thus reducing the size of the ePub).

Continue reading "RTF, Word, and FB2 file conversion" »

Posted by Paul Norton at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The covers on your books make a first impression. So when you're creating a cover for a book you're likely to put in some extra effort to make sure it looks good. When you're working with EPUBs and Adobe Digital Editions, there are some simple things that you can do that have a big impact on the look of the covers.

Continue reading "Working with the cover" »

Posted by Paul Norton at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)