Question about Flightcrew errors

[Bookripper]

Ok, I "cleaned up" a very big book. when I check it with flightcrew, it gives mention of Thousands of errors, going from "element A is not allowed for content model" to "this ops document is reachable but not in present in the OPF", and many more. But it actually looks very nice when I open it with FBreader, Calibre, and my E-reader. I restrain myself to changing covers, deleting custom fonts, images and altering the layout of some pages (making text bold, adding another blanc space,.... simple things). I never mess around with the stylesheets.
So my question is: why do I have thousands of errors, when everything looks and works fine?

And why does my edited book look perfect when I get so much errors?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Bookripper

So my question is: why do I have thousands of errors, when everything looks and works fine?

And why does my edited book look perfect when I get so much errors?

Because there's invalid xhtml present. Browsers and other readers may be more tolerant of invalid code. But invalid code is still invalid... no matter how it might render.

Element tags have to be lower-case: <a> not <A>. If it's for your own personal use and you're happy with the way it works, then don't worry about the errors. If you want to distribute the book to others and wish to have the best possible chance of it working correctly on a wide variety of devices/apps... then look into fixing the errors.

[JSWolf]

In order to get help, you'll have to post the error messages and the code that goes with them so we can see what's what.

[theducks]

Another common reason is you can't have just any old element, naked: 'a', 'br'

<blockquote> <a> is invalid

[DiapDealer]

Just deleting custom fonts and images from the epub without consideration for existing links to them (not to mention still likely being manifested) would explain a lot of the errors as well. Frankly, if that's what you're doing, you're not editing the epub so much as wounding it.

[Bookripper]

"editing" is the wrong choice of word indeed. I just want to clean up my library, a lot of the books available (for instance on [pirate site deleted - MODERATOR) are inferior conversions to begin with anyway.
I did about 600 books in total over the last months, before I discovered the flightcrew function (I thought it was on "auto-control" or something and that everything was OK as long as the check "V" was lit green). The ones I checked (almost all of them) do work fine with the Calibre epub reader, on my android device (FBreader) and on my Bookeen Odyssey HD. Even though I have errors in every book.
To give all the errors would be impossible. Fixing them all also. They mostly just refer to pages, fonts,... that don't exist any more.
So basically, I need to learn how to programme Stylesheets...


Edit (a real one :-) ): In my defence: I just did a random Flightcrew check on my "original" epub files, before I started "chopping them up", and most of them already have many, many errors. I just checked 15 books, and only 1 book had no errors. The book with the thousands of errors on which I started the topic, came with thousands of errors....

[Notjohn]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Frankly, if that's what you're doing, you're not editing the epub so much as wounding it.

Ouch!

[cghipp]

Can epubs be edited in Dreamweaver? Or perhaps converted to html and then edited? It's been many years since I used it on a regular basis, but one of the "perks" of a program like that is that you can update links on the fly.

[JSWolf]

Please don't help Bookripper with his eBook issues. I can tell you for a fact that the place he mentioned were he gets a lot of his books is a pirate site. All you are doing is helping him clean up eBooks (that someone else messed up) that he stole.

[HarryT]

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Thread closed.