Digital Editions

Recently I mentioned that I’m working on improving epubcheck, but then I was asked, “what about the items that don’t relate to validation, but really should be checked anyway?”

The issues at hand are things like the 300k file size limit on content files, 10MB limit on images, and complexity issues with CSS.

The solution is a tool tentatively called “stylecheck” that would run much like the epubcheck tool, but would look for issues that are important to the reading systems, but are not necessarily issues of conformance.

An initial release of the tool alert the user to problems if it found:
* 300k or bigger chapter files.
* 10MB or larger images.
* CSS stylesheet with more than some number of styles (150?)

I could see other uses for the tool, checks to make sure that the package for a NIMAS submission has DTBook content rather than XHTML, or checks to make sure the publisher information in metadata is in the approved format. However the first step will be to create the tool and get the basic checks working.

Which is a work underway, and you should see something relatively soon on the epubcheck project pages.

The epubcheck is a validation tool for ePub documents. It should determine whether the ePub under inspection conforms to the rules laid out in the IDPF specifications. In many circumstances it does just that, but it’s not always clear what’s happening, and sometimes the tool out and out fails. Of course the community is working to bring the tool forward and make it better.

Here I will give an outline of current and ongoing changes that I’m planning to make. Of course I would also like to put out a call for additional contribution/involvement in the process. There’s plenty of room for more people to contribute, whether it be in the form of development, testing, review, or documentation. Anyone looking to get involved should head on over to the discussion group.

So here’s the current changes I’ve added, and things I’ll be working on:

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