TEI Converter for EPUB Developers

We are seeing more and more tools for creating ePub files being developed and the latest to join the throng is the tei2epub converter from threepress.org. This one however is aimed more for developers than the end user, unlike the BookGlutton ePub API.

tei2epub is being developed by Liza Daly and is written in XSLT, although it does utilise a little Python. I know nothing about Python but from what I can make out this is mainly for creating the actual files and final .epub container (which is actually just a renamed .zip file).

This converter really interests me as I already have my own converter (pg2tei) for creating TEI documents from plain text files, as found on Project Gutenberg. I recently started teaching myself XSLT so will follow the development of this for sure!

I don’t have a Python processor installed so haven’t ran any files through this, though I have taken a quick look at the source code and it looks quite straight forward. I believe this uses the official stylesheets written by TEI, so the tei2epub converter should be quite simple to follow, even for those of us whose XSLT skills are not yet well developed.

If you’re interested in both TEI and ePub then this is certainly going to be useful to add to your toolkit.

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Author: Michael Cook

Founder of epubBooks.com - Free ebooks. Founder of Drablr.com - a self-publishing service dedicated to 100-word Drabble fiction.

7 thoughts on “TEI Converter for EPUB Developers”

  1. Many thanks for the update Liza, and also the pointer to your own gut2tei converter. I’ll be having a good look over that come the weekend.

  2. If it’s gnarly TEI you want then you should probably sign up to the TEI-L mailing list, I’m sure there would be some very willing people who would be more than happy to provide you with all the gnarl you need :)

    If there is anyone out there who has some down and dirty TEI files for Liza to experiment with then pop along to threepress.org/contact, there is an email address where you to contact Liza directly.

  3. Thanks for the recommendation, Mike.

    I’ve just updated that blog post to reflect the fact that I’ve moved the repository and downloads for tei2epub to a new project in Google Code meant to house standalone epub tools: http://code.google.com/p/epub-tools/

    There is a slightly updated version of the tool bundled here: http://epub-tools.googlecode.com/files/tei2epub-0.2.zip

    My test TEI documents are also converted from Gutenberg’s content, although I went directly from books marked up here in the Gutenberg DTD to TEI, rather than starting from plain text. That stylesheet is available here: http://code.google.com/p/threepress/source/browse/trunk/data/xsl/gut2tei.xsl

  4. What I’d really love are some gnarly (but valid) TEI documents to work with. The XML versions of the Gutenberg files are so lightly tagged that it’s difficult to extract any interesting metadata from them, and I’d like to see what Digital Editions does with tables, embedded figures, and the like that have come through the TEI-HTML stylesheets.

  6. Thanks for the comment and link to the article Keith. I actually made a post on the DocBook converter yesterday but no fret, it’s always good to read what others are saying.

    When I was researching which format to use as my master, I learned O’Reilly were using DocBook, I just didn’t know in what context. It’s certainly interesting to hear that you are using it in your regular book production pipeline.

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