Digital Editions

So, when I need to create an epub by hand, I'll put everything I need in a folder, and then use the Terminal & zip it up by hand. Like so:

1. Navigate to the folder.

2. zip -Xr9D book.epub mimetype *

Ok, so I realize not every one is comfortable working at the command line. That's where MakePackage.scpt comes in. It's an Applescript script that will take a folder and turn it into an EPUB. It expects the folder to be the same layout as the EPUB should be. So, just as if you had renamed a file to .zip and then extracted the contents. Anyway, it's here if you find it useful, if not, there's always the command line.

Posted by Paul Norton at 9:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Seems InDesignSecrets.com is starting to cover EPUB and InDesign. Awesome. Seems there's a real need for EPUB information for designers, publishers, and authors. Maybe this will help fill that need.

Posted by Paul Norton at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We've released Digital Editions 1.7:

Adobe has updated its popular Digital Editions software, a lightweight, rich Internet application for reading, acquiring, and organizing digital books and other publications. Digital Editions 1.7 greatly expands language support.

In addition to the current support for English, German and French, Digital Editions 1.7 supports Japanese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Korean, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Portuguese. For publishers seeking to include special roman characters in their publications, we highly recommend embedding fonts in your digital publications. Version 1.7 also provides for a standalone installer option which can be used to install Digital Editions in networked environments including corporate, educational and other locations that require administrative installations of the software. The expanded language and installer support in Digital Editions 1.7 enables Adobe Content Server 4 customers to protect and fulfill both PDF and EPUB files to users who want to purchase or borrow content in the above languages and also to users who use Digital Editions in networked environments.

I think it's worth mentioning that you may see a small change in behavior for files exported from InDesign CS3 and InDesign CS4. Digital Editions 1.7 supports justified text. If your books in InDesign have justified text you should now see them justified in Digital Editions. For other authoring applications, supporting justified text is a matter of using the text-align property:

p {text-align:justify} 

Posted by Paul Norton at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)