One EPUB formatting question which I recently got interested in was: how to create a bilingual poetry book? That is, if you want to have a book of poetry in one language with line-by-line translation to another language (to aid a reader who knows the language of the original not too well), how do you do that? In a paper book, a good and well-tried solution is to have the texts in two languages placed on the left and the right page, facing each other. For an e-book, unfortunately, that approach cannot be reused; in particular because with an e-book you usually have only one page visible at a time. Splitting the page into two columns may be acceptable for short citations, but to format a whole poetic collection in this way would be inconvenient, for the columns are somewhat too narrow in this case even on bigger devices.

Here I describe a solution which I find acceptable. Though the problem in question is a rather narrow one, some details of the approach may be useful for other goals as well. In the examples I use the first lines of Catullus 1, with both the original text and the translation taken from the corresponding wikisource page.

There is, in fact, one special reason why I like to use passages from the Roman classics in EPUB examples. An e-book, which is scrolled page-by-page and remains open on the page where you stopped reading it last time, is in these respects amazingly similar to a papyrus scroll, which was what Catullus and Horace and Virgil used. Just think of that: when you are reading The Aeneid on your smartphone, your experience is in a way much closer to that of the original readers than what the generations before us had with codex-format books. Anyway, back to the topic…

The formatting of the poetic lines is done here in the same way as in my earier essay,
with a few small alterations: using dev rather than p as the tag for a poetry line (as proposed by Lee Passey in the comments) and adding page-break-inside attribute to avoid a page break in the middle of a split line (in the readers which support this attribute, certainly). I will not use line chunking here, in order to keep the examples simple and focused on the present topic. The entry in the style sheet goes as follows:

.poemLine {
  font-size: 1em;
  margin: 0;
  border: 0;
  padding: 0;
  page-break-inside: avoid;
  margin-left: 2.5em;
  text-indent: -2.5em;
}

The obvious good thing about poetry in our case is that it is split into fixed lines. What if we just place the translation below each line of text, formatting both language versions using the same poetryLine style?

The result is rather unreadable, though the direction is probably not bad. Is there something small to be improved? Sure. Let’s just make a separate poemLine2 style for the translation: almost the same, but with one addition:

color: #808080;

Now the result looks this way:

Suddenly, I almost like it. My only objection is that if the user needs to consult the translation only occasionally, its constant screenspace-consuming presence can be annoying. Stating the problem in a more abstract and general way, it would be nice to have a possibility to create several layers of text in the book (e.g. original and translation in our case) switchable on and off at the user’s will at any time.

Such a concept of an e-book may be useful in more than one case. Imagine reading an abridged verion of a history book, switching to the full version on the passages which you are more interested in, and back when such a passage is over.

Let’s try to get some reasonable approximation of such functionality for our particular case, keeping in mind that the support of scripting in EPUB is optional and so solutions based on scripting are undesirable at the moment.

Luckily, with e-books we are not afraid to make the volume a bit bigger; it weights nothing in any case. So, let’s make two editions, a monolingual and a bilingual one, united in one e-volume and tightly interconnected with hyperlinks all over. That is, the lines in the monolingual part (catullus1.html) are to be formatted as follows:

<div class="poemLine"><a href="catullus2.html#l1_1b" id="l1_1">&nbsp;+&nbsp;</a>Cuī dōnō lepidum novum libellum</div>
<div class="poemLine"><a href="catullus2.html#l1_2b" id="l1_2">&nbsp;+&nbsp;</a>āridā modo pūmice expolītum?</div>

And the lines in the bilingual part (catullus2.html) are to be formatted as follows (note the invisible elements: they are needed for the black and the grey lines to be aligned correctly together):

<div class="poemLine"><a href="catullus1.html#l1_1" id="l1_1b">&nbsp;–&nbsp;</a>Cuī dōnō lepidum novum libellum</div>
<div class="poemLine2"><span style="visibility: hidden">&nbsp;–&nbsp;</span>To whom do I give this delightful new booklet,</div>
<div class="poemLine"><a href="catullus1.html#l1_2" id="l1_2b">&nbsp;–&nbsp;</a>āridā modo pūmice expolītum?</div>
<div class="poemLine2"><span style="visibility: hidden">&nbsp;–&nbsp;</span>recently polished with pumice?</div>

If you want to keep every line on the same page with its translation, you may wrap each such pair into an additional div element with page-break-inside style property set to avoid.

Now we have two versions of the page appearance, between which we can switch by clicking on the pluses and minuses (no actual links in the examples below, just the general appearance of the pages is imitated; the a tags are assumed to have text-decoration: none set to switch off underlining, otherwise the little links look worse). The link near every line ensures that you are always directed to the right page of the other version (because, obviously, one monolingual page corresponds to several bilingual pages).

A bit strange, but, hopefully, convenient enough (I have tried it in Aldiko on an Android phone). There is much space for task-specific alterations, certainly. You may create an option to leave only the translation on the screen; or make three layers for each line instead of two (e.g. original + translation + commentary), or design a nicer and more convenient appearance for the links (the simple ones are sometimes easy to miss with the finger), and so on. So, good luck to anyone who is going to experiment with that.

Written by Anton Bryl.

What we are going to discuss here is how to format poetry in XHTML format (which underlies EPUB) so that it looks nice on smartphone screens – that is, when many or even all of the lines do not fit the screen width. In other words, our concern is how to break poetry lines nicely.

We do not discuss the poems which use non-standard formatting (Lewis Carrol’s Fury said to a mouse, shaped like a twisting tail, is a good example of what we are not talking about here); each poem of this sort is a separate formatting problem of artistic rather then technical nature. What we are going to consider are poetry pieces which use some sort of conventional formatting. The examples used further in this tutorial are from Shakespeare, from Horace, and, for a more specific formatting convention, from Beowulf.

Note: This is a guest post by Anton Bryl

It is clearly unacceptable to use plain left-align text with no style modification: the result of line breaking will be rather ugly, as shown below (a few lines from Shakespeare’s Henry V are used):

Centering everything (a solution frequently met in actual e-books) is better, but still far enough from perfection:

Let us now proceed to another variant, which is also used widely enough and which I think to be a reasonable basic approach to the problem, and then see what we can add to it.

1. The Basic Way

The idea in this basic approach is simply to use different indentation for the first and the subsequent portions of every poetic line. It has already been proposed several times by different people online; I suppose, it is usually the first thing better then just-center-it-all that comes to one’s mind (after one figures out that, alas, text-align CSS property cannot be defined separately for the first-line selector).

In terms of CSS properties, it means that the text should have a non-zero left margin, and the first line of each paragraph should be negatively indented with respect to the rest of the text (each paragraph being a poetic line rendered, depending on the screen width, as one or more lines of text on the screen):

If different lines of the poem have different indentation, it is possible either to define several style classes, or just to add some non-breaking spaces ( ) in the beginning of the indented lines.

Now let’s format the same few lines from Henry V using this style.

Below you see how it will be rendered…

…on a wider page:

…on a narrower page:

…on an even narrower page:

The result looks better then the previous ones. However, to my taste it is still not as readable as desired. This solution is nearly perfect for the cases when only a small percentage of lines do not fit the screen width (see the second of the three screen widths in the example above). However, when smartphones are in question, splitting of a line into two is no longer a rare emergency which is to be handled just ‘nicely enough’, but rather something that happens to nearly every line (see the last of the three screen widths in the example above). For such cases this formatting is, to my taste at least, good enough to consult the text but not really good enough to enjoy it with convenience. So what can be done to that?

2. Structuring the Text

The way to overcome the lack of structure is, certainly, to add some. In our case apparently a reasonable thing to do in this direction is to allow line breaks only at pre-selected positions which correspond to pauses, or to boundaries between phrases, or to something else of the same sort. An easy way to do it is to replace the white-spaces which should not become line breaks with non-breaking spaces ( ).

An alternative way could be to use white-space property in CSS, but the support of this property by EPUB reading software is, in my experience, not guaranteed in practice; yet another relevant markup element, nobr tag, is by now deprecated and should be avoided.

So, let us format the same piece of poetry once more, now with non-breaking spaces enforcing some logic in line-breaking:

The difference created by structuring the text with non-breaking spaces is seen on narrow pages:

…and:

The choice of ‘permitted line-breaking places’ is surely rather subjective, and may be made differently. In any case, to my eye, the text is both easier to read and more pleasant to see when formatted this way.

A drawback of the approach is the amount of manual markup needed to format a long piece of poetry this way. However, such or similar «chunking» of poetry lines into non-breakable fragments can be done automatically, or semi-automatically. Here is a sample set of rules for English (and a Perl script – poemnobr.pl – based on these rules) which would produce tolerable result in many cases:

1. If application of any of the following rules results in a non-breakable block longer then 25 characters, this rule is skipped. The choice of the number ’25′ reflects my understanding of what should fit on any screen and is rather subjective; you may use whatever number seems reasonable to you in its place.
2. With the above restriction in place, the following rules are attempted, in the given order:
   1. If there is a space before a dash, it is made non-breaking.
   2. If there are punctuation marks in the line before the end of line, everything after the last such punctuation mark is transformed into a single non-breakable block.
   3. If an article (‘a’, ‘an’, ‘the’) or a demonstrative (‘this’, ‘that’, etc.) is not followed by a punctuation mark, the following white space is replaced by a non-breaking space.
   4. Next, the same is applied to the word ‘no’ (the word ‘not’ cannot be processed that easily, for it may be connected, in different cases, both with the previous word and with the next one, e.g. ‘not knowing of something’ vs. ‘Somebody knows not of something’).
   5. Next, the same is applied to interrogative words (‘who’, ‘when’, etc.).
   6. Next, the same is applied to conjunctions (‘and’, ‘but’, etc.).
   7. Next, the same is applied to prepositions (‘of’, ‘from’, etc.).

After such automatic processing, some manual post-correction may be applied, which, in turn, may eventually lead the editor to formulating additional automatic rules to her/his own liking. It may be potentially interesting also to consider more advanced text analysis for automatic chunking of poetry lines; e.g. syntactic parsing may be helpful in deciding which portions of text should be ‘kept together’.

3. Some special cases

This section is dedicated to special sorts of poems, and if you are not interested in them, you may just skip it.

3.1. Greek and Roman Classics: Handling Formal Cæsuræ

For the metrical forms with clear cæsuræ it may be good for readability to enforce those as the only allowed line-breaking positions. Like this:

(The example is taken from the Ode 1.11 by Horace, as translated by Arthur Hugh Clough)

Below you see how it will be rendered…

…on a wider page:

…on a narrower page:

…on an even narrower page:

3.2. Old English Poems

One more special case: Old English poems. Here, obviously, the most appropriate line-breaking position is right before the long space which separates the half-lines. Note, that in this case the long space itself will provide the necessary indentation for the second half-line, so no special provisions for indentation are needed, and the CSS style should look as follows:

Then the text is formatted as follows:

(The example is taken from Beowulf)

Below you see how it will be rendered…

…on a wider page:

…on a narrower page:

…on an even narrower page:

That said and shown, it remains only to wish the readers good luck with formatting whatever they want.

During some research on using Adobe’s InDesign to create EPUB documents I came across this UK training course entitled, “Creating ePubs with InDesign”, which is being run by Highlander, one of the UK’s oldest and most successful training providers for the creative, web and marketing sectors.

They have two 1 Day sessions available in March and April (London, UK) and the course will cover everything from an introduction to EPUB documents, to setting up paragraph and character styles, to setting up metadata, to covering the processes involved in converting the exported EPUB files to other ebook formats – I presume the Amazon Kindle will be covered, but there is no mention of it on their website.

You’ll need to have previous experience with Adobe’s InDesign CS5 software and it’ll also be useful if you have some previous knowledge of HTML and CSS, although it’s not a requirement.

Here’s a (shortened) outline of the course details;

• Overview
  • EPUB vs. PDF
  • Supported devices
  • What is kept and what is lost in EPUB?
• Overview of InDesign long documents
• Adobe Digital Editions reader
  • Evaluating an EPUB in Digital Editions
• Modifying documents for EPUB export
• Video and your eBook
• Managing images for EPUB export
• The Export Process
  • Embed metadata
  • Embed fonts
• What is the EPUB format
  • Converting EPUB to other eBook formats
  • Applications used to create eBooks
  • Applications used to read eBooks
  • Applications used to convert eBooks to other eBook formats
  • Other eBook formats

If you’re a UK resident then this could be a really useful course for anybody who needs to use InDesign CS5 for exporting to EPUB, but please note that this is not an official endorsement as I have no previous knowledge of Highlander. However, according to their website, they’ve been running all kinds of training sessions since 1995 and are an authorised Adobe Training Centre, so I would expect the quality of their courses to be of a good standard.

The 1 Day course price is £350 and there are currently two sessions available; 3^rd March and 28^th April 2011. You can book your place at Highlander.co.uk.

Now firmly placed as a mainstream item, ebooks have grown in popularity enough for many libraries to have started making digital versions from their catalogue available for lending.

The only thing you’ll need, except your eReader and an appropriate library card, is an Adobe ID (see below).

Most libraries that do provide ebooks are using the Adobe DRM protection system, which also means that most dedicated eReaders (Sony, Kobo, etc) and several eReader apps (Bluefire, OverDrive) can be used to read these DRM protected library ebooks.

I’m going to write three very short tutorials on how to get your library ebook onto your eReader/App. One of these three options should give you enough information even if yours is not actually covered here.

Adobe ID / Activation

As libraries are using the Adobe DRM protection you will first need to create an Adobe ID before you’ll be able to read those borrowed books. If you don’t already have one, then please visit the Adobe website and complete this form.

Adobe Digital Editions (ebook reader)

Unless you are using the OverDrive iPhone/Android app (see below) you must install Adobe’s Digital Editions Reader so that your library books can be activated before they are transferred to your ebook reader.

Download Adobe Digital Editions here.

The first time you run DE, you will be asked to activate it with the Adobe ID and password you created previously.

With DE installed, you don’t even need a digital reader as you can read EPUB books on your computer directly from within Digital Editions. If you do have a digital reader, then read on.

Bluefire eReader App for the iPad and iPhone

Bluefire has become a very popular app as it was the first eReader to allow Adobe DRM EPUB files to be added no matter where you bought your books from, which also makes it perfect for users wanting to read library books on the iPad.

First, download the Bluefire Reader app from iTunes (available for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch).

Before continuing please activate Bluefire with your Adobe ID; start the app and on the “Library” page click the “Info” icon, located at the bottom. Here you will see the button for activating your Bluefire reader.

Next, visit your library’s website, checkout an eBook, and click the download link – when asked to save or open, select “Open with Digital Editions”.

Using iTunes we will now transfer the book to the Bluefire app;

• Connect your iPad to a computer and start iTunes.
• Select your device (iPad/iPhone) and click on the “Apps” tab.
• Scroll down to the “File Sharing” section and click the “Bluefire Reader” icon in the Apps section.
• Click the “Add…” button.

At this point you’ll need to browse to where Adobe Digital Editions has stored your eBook. By default they will be saved to one of these locations;

On Windows: your-home-directory/Documents/My Digital Editions
On OSX: your-home-directory/Documents/Digital Editions

The EPUB book will then transfer to Bluefire where you can then start reading.

Library Books on a Dedicated eReader (Sony, Kobo, etc.)

Dedicated ebook readers often have their own software for adding books, but we will stick with using Adobe Digital Editions to get your library ebooks on to your eReader.

I’ll be using the Sony Touch Edition for this example, but it should be the same for all devices that support EPUB with Adobe DRM protection. This procedure will be very similar to the way you do it when you purchase ebooks from a store, so please refer to your documentation for more detailed help. Otherwise here is the brief outline.

• Connect the eReader to your computer and start Digital Editions.
• Unless you have already done so, you will be shown the “Device Setup Assistant” – you will need to authorise your reader.
• Visit your library’s website, checkout an ebook and download to DE.
• From within DE drag the book(s) to your reader – In my case I dragged them to PRS-600.

And that’s it.

Overdrive eReader App for iPhone and Android

OverDrive are a digital distribution company who provide ebooks to all libraries. They also have their own app which is available for both Apple and Android devices.

As I don’t have an Android device I’ll be doing this tutorial with my iPod Touch, but the procedures should be the same on Android systems.

Download the “OverDrive Media Console” app from iTunes (or Android Market Place).

Once downloaded;

• Launch the app and click on the “Get Books +” button (top right).
• On the next screen click the “Add a Website +” button.

You’ll then be taken to the OverDrive website where you can search for your library. In my case, I searched for “Manchester Public Library” – searching for “Manchester UK” or “Manchester Great Britain” generated no results, so if you don’t find your library on the first go, try a different search.

• Select your library from the list.
• Clicking the link under the “Library Systems” heading – you’ll be taken to that library’s website.
• Sign in to your library account, find a book to checkout.
• When you click the download button you will be taken back to the OverDrive app.

As this will be the first time you’ve used OverDrive, you will be asked to sign in with your Adobe ID. Once done, you can proceed with the download and start reading your new book.

The OverDrive app is perhaps not the best eReader out there, but the fact that it makes getting books from a library to your device very easy, it can be a better option for many people.

I hope this tutorial helps and if you come across any issues that need sharing, please leave a comment and I’ll update the article.

Whether you call them categories, subjects or genres, how you label your book is vitally important, perhaps especially so in these times of the digital marketplace. Being placed correctly in ebook stores and libraries can help in both regular searches and with discovery techniques such as “Similar Titles”.

The EPUB format has been developed to allow your work to be properly tagged with as many subjects as is necessary to describe the title correctly, allowing any ebook reading system to categorise your books appropriately.

If you’re creating your EPUB files manually then you’ll need to open the .OPF in your favourite text editor. Then inside the metadata tags you can add your subject tags.

Here are some example entries;

<dc:subject>Fiction</dc:subject>
<dc:subject>Comedy</dc:subject>
<dc:subject>Satire</dc:subject>

You can add as many subjects as you like, though it’s probably best to keep things focused–adding 50 tags will be just as bad as adding none.

The arbitrary keyword or phrase used inside the subject tag hasn’t been standardised by the IDPF, but I’d recommend using the BISAC, LoC (Library of Congress) or other standardised system.

At this point you probably think there’s nothing more to be said on the topic, however…

eReaders Don’t Use All Provided Genres

When you send your EPUB out into the wild you’ll be somewhat disappointed to find that many eReaders don’t display every subject you placed in the OPF file, if any at all.

There are no IDPF requirements stating that a reading system must use any or all of the subject tags for categorisation and if it does use them, then you’ll find that it’s usually just the first entry. In the example above this would be Fiction. Still, we should take the time to add appropriate genres now as you can fully expect that future eReaders will utilise them more fully.

So, along with choosing the correct genres to describe your work I’d also recommend you list them in an appropriate order, and with the understanding that at this time, only the first entry will likely be used to categorise your book.

There are a number of people in the eBook world who really know their ePub format – luckily for us they enjoy sharing this knowledge among the community. One of these such people is Bookworm developer, Liza Daly.

There’s a lot of a misconception around the ePub format with the belief that it is not a very advance format to work with, this is certainly not the case. Being based on several web standards, ePub can do pretty much whatever those standards can do themselves.

In a recent blog post, Liza conducted an experiment to include a HTML5 <video> in an ePub file, which she accomplished by using out-of-island XML mark-up. Okay, so this is something of a hack, and very few ePub readers will render the content (although Bookworm does), but this just goes to show there’s some power in the ePub standard.

All you ePub developers out there might want to keep an eye on Lizas blog as she will be sharing lots of ePub tips throughout this month.

In my last post I talked about the epubBooks Project and how I plan to convert Project Gutenberg .txt eBooks to the ePub format and how I will make these eBooks available for download from ePubBooks.com.

I already have in place a converter to transform the PG .txt files to a TEI Master Format and also an XSLT script to convert these into XHTML. The final task now is to create a converter for TEI to the ePub format.

Before I attempt to write this converter I will need to have a much better understanding on how a book is laid out inside the ePub OEBPS Container Format (OCF) .zip archive. So I set about taking my XHTML output file and breaking it up into the appropriate parts ready to be packaged in to an .epub file.

On the whole this went fairly smoothly, although I did encounter a couple of issues, which I’ll explain at the end of this article.

A great way to understand how to make your own ePub Book is to download and examine a pre-existing book. My reference book was Jon Noring’s submission of “My Ántonia” by Willa Cather, found on the IDPF website.

After unzipping and examining the contents everything looked straight forward, so went ahead and started editing Jon’s file into my own.

OPS

My first task was to split up the all-in-one XHTML file into separate chapters, title page, footnotes, etc., thus creating the OPS files. During this I added the appropriate header and footer (using My Ántonia as the guide), making sure I also included the correct link to the CSS file and giving each its own title.

As XHTML 1.1 can be used directly within an ePub document there was nothing to change within the text itself.

OPF

Once I had all my separate OPS parts I went ahead and started editing the ePub OPF file.

Again using Jon’s example as a guide, I entered all the book information (Title, Author, etc..) into the meta tags – an important tag to note is the dc:identifier. For this you will need to create a unique identifier for the book/document. You can use anything you like here (including an ISBN number) as long as it is completely unique. As this is just a test file I used the epubbooks.com domain name, the date and the time. (This ID will also be used in the NCX file.)

Once I was happy with the data I went on to the manifest section and listed all the files used in the publication; cover, title page, introduction, chapters, footnotes, CSS Style Sheets, images and finally the NCX file.

The spine section lists the reading order for the book and was pretty straight forward.

NCX

Next I edited the NCX (Navigation Center eXtended) file. This provides the Reading System with the TOC listing and navigation links. Each entry is given an ID, PlayOrder, Label and filename. ID’s should always be unique and the ‘PlayOrder’ starts at “1″ with no gaps in the sequence.

There are couple of important points to take note on here. The ‘Unique ID’ created in the OPF file (dc:identifier) needs to be included in this meta section. You will also need to adjust the <meta name="dtb:depth" content="1"/> value.

If you have an eBook with just chapters then the depth will be “1″. If you have an eBook that has Books, Chapters and Sections, then Book is Level 1, Chapters are Level 2 and Sections are Level 3. The more sections you have within your TOC the more ‘depths’ you will need to state.

Footnotes

All the final editing needed was to set up links for the footnotes. As I’m storing the footnotes in a separate file I marked up the entry in the spine with linear="no" as this should be considered an “auxiliary” file.

Now all that was needed was to add the filename to the a tag in the footnotes.xml file, which in this case became chapter001.xml#fn-place-1 and In the chapter001.xml file I added a link to the footnote file, footnotes.xml#fn-1.

Creating the .epub file

There’s a couple of rules to follow when creating your .zip (ePub) file.

• mimetype must be the first file in the .zip
• No compression is to be used on this file.

Once you have this file in place then you can then go ahead and add the rest of the content, just make sure you retain the directory structure.

Problems and further research

One thing to remember is that filenames are case sensitive. Make sure you use the same case as stated in your OPF and NCX files, otherwise they will not be displayed.

When I created my XHTML version I had each TOC entry linking to the appropriate chapter, if you clicked on the chapter heading you would be transported back to the TOC entry. When using DE on my desktop computer there did not seem to be a need to use linking back to the TOC, but until I get myself a Sony Reader or BeBook I won’t be able to test exactly how this works on a dedicated reader.

epubcheck

Although my .epub eBook displays perfectly well in Adobe DE, it does however fail on many points when tested against the epubcheck tool. Most of these seem related to undeclared entities (ndash) and some undefined fragment identifiers. I guess I’ll just need to get stuck into the specifications and see where I’m going wrong – I don’t think these are going to be major issues though.

I hope article has provided a nice overview on creating an ePub eBook. I still need to clean up these epubcheck errors but once that’s done I can get on with writing the XSLT conversion script. I will likely do a follow up article covering what was need to validate against epubcheck and I will try and write some more detailed articles on creating both the OPF and NCX files.

Andrew Savikas over on the O’Reilly TOC has written a nice tutorial on how to read your O’Reilly ePub formatted books on the iPhone using Stanza.

One thing to note about this is that he was only successful in doing so when using his MacBook Pro, he was unable to say the same about the process using Windows.

After reading his article, I have to say the whole thing seems really easy!

Andrew did bring up one of Stanza’s failings, “A lot of the formatting isn’t (yet) supported by Stanza, including lists and tables. The text appears, but without bullets or clear indentation.” Perhaps it’s understandable about tables but I am surprised that lists are not yet supported. However, the app is still in beta and we know that Lexcycle are working hard on improving it.

One thing Andrew noted in his post was that O’Reilly are also looking into releasing their titles as individual iPhone Apps. I’m not convinced by this approach myself, but hey, for you iPhone users it will if nothing else give the proper formatting that O’Reilly intended

Okay, there’s a long way to go before ePub is a format that all devices can read properly, however it’s great to see that the industry is still moving forward.

I created this site because there are very few blogs, mailing lists and other resources on the ePub standard. I wanted to try and bring together the few that there are in one handy place, in the hope to make this information easily available.

I am no ePub expert myself so I’m continually searching for new information and resources to help me learn. One very useful tutorial I found was the ‘Epub Format Construction Guide’.

Not only is this guide about creating ePub documents, it also gives some nice insights into the compliance of the ADE (Adobe Digital Editions) reader, still the most conformant reader at this time. A couple of surprising things about ADE v1.0 is that it does not support certain CSS attributes. Two big surprises were; text-transform and text-align: justify.

The tutorial itself is more like an “annotated example”, if you just wish to construct an ePub document in a quick hassle free way then this will help tremendously. Once nice thing I like about the guide is that it highlights the areas which need to be altered on a per project basis.

In the future I’m hoping to find more detailed tutorials so if you need more in-depth information, you’ll just have to reference the IDPF specifications.

You can read the ‘Epub Format Construction Guide’ at www.hxa7241.org.