Quote:
Originally Posted by andym
There are plenty of tools for converting to html, or for checking and validating the (x)html (and IIRC an epub validator is on the way). To me what would be most useful would be a tool that would producing the other package contents once you have a valid xhtml file.
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My thinking on this is: Not counting the XHTML content itself, there are only a handful of needed files which comprise an epub. These files all have a very well defined structure that is very much the same from one epub to another. This would make some type of templating system very possible.
Assuming you already had valid XHTML 1.1 content, filling in some form with certain meta information about the ebook (along with the reading order) would allow automatic creation of these other files and then the packaging into a Zip archive. Of course, the use of either an ISBN, a UUID or some other identifier would also have to be handled and perhaps generated.
BTW, you can break up the ebook into multiple chapters/sections and in fact, this is recommended. You could use one large XHTML file for the entire book, but this may not render (or page) as fast. If one file is used, you could still provide the navigation points (navpoints) needed by using bookmarks inside the document, instead of linking to separate files.