Digital Editions

If you've just created an ePub and now you want to make a small change, the normal approach is to rename the file with a "zip" extension, extract the contents, make the change, and then repackage the contents.

Fortunately, there's a better way, but I'm not sure if it's been mentioned.
It's from the Mars Project over on Adobe Labs, and it's called the "PDFXML Inspector".

The Mars Project is an XML-friendly representation for PDF documents, and while the vocabularies used by Mars and by ePub documents are very different, the containers are very similar, and so we can share some of the same tools. In this case it's a matter of our "borrowing" the PDFXML Inspector. Thanks to the Mars team for making it work with ePub documents.

The PDFXML Inspector can be found on the downloads page for the Mars Project, and it requires the latest version of Adobe AIR.

Once installed you can drag an epub into the app, and you'll have a view that looks like this:

That's the contents of the package on the left, and the source of the selected file on the right.

So here we could, for instance change the title, open the OPF file and fix up the metadata, etc.

You certainly could also use the PDFXML Inspector to, say, add chapters to your book, but you'd have to understand the changes you'd need to make to the OPF file (manifest entry and spine entry) and to the NCX file (to add navPoints), as the tool was really made for small changes, not big ones.

Posted by Paul Norton at 1:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

With the release of Adobe InDesign CS4 you'll find that there's a couple of interesting new features in the Export for Digital Editions plug-in. The most noticeable are the addition of DTBook support and support for "Local Formatting". There's also some subtler changes, like floating anchored images and additional semantic information in the XHTML files.

So we'll go through the major new features and what each one does:

1) DTBook DTD
The OPS spec, one of three at the heart of the ePub format, has two preferred vocabularies for textual content XHTML and DTBook. XHTML is an XML compatible vocabulary for HTML files, but what is DTBook.

DTBook is a vocabulary from the Daisy Consortium. DTBook is a format intended for ebooks, and helps in making content available for people with print disabilities. The DTBook format has taken much of it's markup from XHTML, but the DTBook format is enhanced with additional structure that better defines the parts of a book, chapter, and sections. (An h1 element in HTML identifies a title, but a 'level1' element in DTBook completely wraps the chapter or section so that there's no confusion what does, and does not belong in the chapter.)

For K-12 textbooks, DTBook content in an ePub should have all the elements required for a NIMAS submission. It also means that we support "Daisy XML".

2) Local Formatting support
With InDesign CS3, the ePub export plug-in interpreted Paragraph and Character styles when generating the CSS. With InDesign CS4 we've added the option for generating CSS from whatever formatting is applied to the text, whether through styles or through "local" or direct formatting.

Now you can apply bold to text and it will indeed be bold.

3) Floating anchored images
If you anchor an image to the left or right in the text flow, it will retain that positioning in the ePub file, and the text will flow around the image.

Images anchored in the document should look more like you intend them to when you export.

4) Additional Semantic information
When using an InDesign TOCStyle (and only when using the TOCStyle) we now convert the levels of TOC to heading levels. (So, a second level item in the TOC becomes an H2 heading.)

You actually won't see much difference, but the XHTML files may be easier to work with if you're post-processing them.

Well, that pretty much covers the new stuff.

Posted by Paul Norton at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)