ePub creation tools : what's missing ? wishlist / dialogue

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by Valloric

Only source view --> editing in Notepad

RegExes are important and should be included. I'm not sure if they'll make it to the first release (which is probably a few months off), but they're something that is definitely on the list.

You're so clever! But hey, you ARE right on that one!

I guess I just was trying to get rid of application jumping. If you do 4 to 5 books a day in 4 different formats, you tend to get lazy.

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by =X=

If the developers on this group would really like to build an end all ePublishing tool I'd like to see us create a Plugin around Open Office, an excellent Word Processing tool.

I hate depending on other people's code. Also, to me this is supposed to be fun and challenging. I also don't want to depend on something like Word (which people have to buy first) or OpenOffice (which is a resource hog). Both are made for entirely different things.

I've stated my goal: something like BD for epubs, without the suck and with better features. Further down the line, the goal is to extend it to export most of the other ebook formats.

And who said anything about making a be-all-end-all editor for the publishing industry? When did that come into play? The target audience should be MobileRead members and other ebook enthusiasts. Naturally, the more people who like it and use it, the better.

If anyone wants to create a plugin for some pre-existing editor, great. The more editors we have, the higher the chances one of them won't suck.

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

And I would urge you to consider makeing the panes vertical since most ebook readers are vertically oriented and in any case most people prefer to read text in narrow columns

I prefer horizontal, but I'll make it switchable to vertical. I'm writing this down.

Zelda, this is a very useful thread.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Valloric

Zelda, this is a very useful thread.

i am thrilled to see the response it's getting, and i really can't wait to see what tools will come out of it.

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by =X=

Right now the direct of this thread is geared towards format shifters not editors or writers. But the demand for a good editing en ePublishing tool is there I’ve had serveal athuors. conatct me thanking me for the BookCreator tool and how it facilitates their eBook creation process withouth having to get down and dirty in the code.
=X=

Actually "format shifters" have to do a lot of editing if they want to create good books

[=X=]

Originally Posted by Valloric

I hate depending on other people's code. Also, to me this is supposed to be fun and challenging. I also don't want to depend on something like Word (which people have to buy first) or OpenOffice (which is a resource hog). Both are made for entirely different things.

something like BD for epubs,

Understand. A couple points.
I never mentioned using somebody's else code, so I don't understand where you are make such a statement.

If you are referring to using somebody's else product, there isn't a tool here that isn't using another persons product.

Writing everything from scratch might sound fun but it is daunting and long endeavor, also remember you idea of fun might not necessarily mean the same for others.

Originally Posted by mtravellerh

Actually "format shifters" have to do a lot of editing if they want to create good books

So you do want a feature rich WYSIWYG editor? Or would you be happy editing with a tool lie emacs/VI. ( Note Noting wrong with the latter I use VI all the time either for righting software or before importing html code generated from pdftohtml into Word.) I'm just not clear on the point your making is all.

=X=

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by =X=

Understand. A couple points.
I never mentioned using somebody's else code, so I don't understand where you are make such a statement.

If you are referring to using somebody's else product, there isn't a tool here that isn't using another persons product.

Um... if you're building a plugin for an existing application, your code directly depends, by definition, on code someone else wrote. The code of the application your plugin is plugging. So Book Creator directly depends on Microsoft code: if they make certain changes that break your application, you can try to work around that, but that's it.

And since Book Creator (I believe) uses Calibre to actually create LRF, EPUB and other formats, it also depends on code Kovid writes (even though it's not a Calibre plugin). So if Kovid makes an unfortunate mistake in his, say, LRF output code, your application's LRF output breaks.

Book Creator is an amazing application for people who want a Word plugin. I don't. I'm sure a lot of people do.

Originally Posted by =X=

Writing everything from scratch might sound fun but it is daunting and long endeavor, also remember you idea of fun might not necessarily mean the same for others.

I've never said I'd be writing everything from scratch. Do I look insane? I hope not. I plan on using as much GPL code as I can get. But stable GPL code, like wxWidgets, Webkit etc. Everything I don't really need I don't plan on using. I can't use Calibre, because it would defeat the whole purpose of the editor, which is eliminating the converter from the equation and having output on your display that is as near to final as you can get. Also, it's a dependency I don't need. Epub is an open standard, and I can write code that outputs it myself.

And although my primary objective is to create a useful epub editor, my second objective is to create a library of clean, fast, portable and very well documented C++ code for outputting ebook formats, starting with epub. Others can then use that code to create other editors, converters or whatever.

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by =X=

So you do want a feature rich WYSIWYG editor? Or would you be happy editing with a tool like emacs/VI. ( Note Noting wrong with the latter I use VI all the time either for righting software or before importing html code generated from pdftohtml into Word.) I'm just not clear on the point your making is all.

=X=

Well, I wasn't talking about me specifically at all. And my point was that sometimes converting a text to a readable ebook is involving a lot of editing.

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by mtravellerh

(sorry for my perverted thinking)

When I do proofreading, I prefer to have the window panes side by side

Originally Posted by Valloric

I prefer horizontal, but I'll make it switchable to vertical. I'm writing this down.

Zelda, this is a very useful thread.

I prefer window panes vertical for proofreading, especially when each pane is looking directly at the same line.
But there ought to be no problem in giving either option?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by =X=

I've yet to work with a tool that worked well when the user was allowed to modify the source as well as work in a WYSIWYG environment. Either the user is forced to work with both modes or has to choose one view. In other words most of these editors tend to favor one style of edition or implement both poorly.

I like BD's approach - a WYSIWYG editor, with a separate "tool" for viewing and editing the underlying HTML of a region of selected text for "problem" situations. That, for me, is an excellent way of working. I do not like working directly in HTML - not because I don't understand it (I write websites as a part of my job), but because the tags get in the way of seeing the layout of the text.

[Xenophon]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I like BD's approach - a WYSIWYG editor, with a separate "tool" for viewing and editing the underlying HTML of a region of selected text for "problem" situations. That, for me, is an excellent way of working. I do not like working directly in HTML - not because I don't understand it (I write websites as a part of my job), but because the tags get in the way of seeing the layout of the text.

Take a look at the LyX editor for TeX files. It provides exactly that sort of interface -- with the caveat that the on-screen view is representative of what you'll get rather than exactly what you'll get. You still need to look at the final output.

Anyway, LyX provides both direct insertion of raw TeX (it shows up on-screen as evil-red-boxed-text) and direct editing of the underlying TeX source when necessary.

Xenophon

[=X=]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I like BD's approach - a WYSIWYG editor, with a separate "tool" for viewing and editing the underlying HTML of a region of selected text for "problem" situations. That, for me, is an excellent way of working. I do not like working directly in HTML - not because I don't understand it (I write websites as a part of my job), but because the tags get in the way of seeing the layout of the text.

Yes the HTML editor is something BD did well and it did a great job displaying the HTML in the WYSIGYG editor. However my experience with the editor was terrible. I found doing anything but the most trivial was extremely difficult.

It was actually Patricia that gave me the idea to write a BookCreator, she mentioned all her editing work was in Word then imported it to BookDesigner. I thought what a great idea, so when I created BookCreator all I wanted was a template with some marcos to make the editing easy. Then import it to BD.

Eventually it's grew to building it's own formats.
=X=

[Komenor]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

DESIRED FEATURES

1. epub files must be valid (html tidy, epub check...) and conform to best practices.

2. the editor should be able to accept multiple html / xhtml flows and create one document with a hierarchical TOC. It should also be able to accept one html flow and semantically parse the hierarchy of the document (part, chapter, section...) according to the tags used (h1, h2, h3, etc.), creating logical divisions for a properly structured epub document and a hierarchical TOC, the way that feedbooks does.

3. It should be able to handle images and relatively advanced css markup (dropcaps, for instance).

4. Ideally, it should be accessible even to users with no knowledge of html / css code with a full wysiwyg UI, although advanced options should be available if you do know the code (direct code editing should be possible), again similar to the feedbooks interface.

I'll probably have more to add later but i've got to go for the moment, so i'll stop here and open the discussion. What do you want from an editor ? i'll be looking forward to seeing what comes out of this !

It must be very interesting (and relatively hard ) to write a small XHTLM editor with basic functions. I think about something like the interface used for writing the messages in this forum or like that : http://www.kevinroth.com/rte/demo.htm. To be sure to be complient with XHTML format, the source code should not be shown/editable to/by the user. Zelda, do you think that a thing like that, integrated in an ePub generator tool, can be useful ?

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Komenor

It must be very interesting (and relatively hard ) to write a small XHTLM editor with basic functions. I think about something like the interface used for writing the messages in this forum or like that : http://www.kevinroth.com/rte/demo.htm. To be sure to be complient with XHTML format, the source code should not be shown/editable to/by the user. Zelda, do you think that a thing like that, integrated in an ePub generator tool, can be useful ?

yes, possibly, although i think the source code should be accessible to users who know what they are doing. i prefer to check my source and write most of my code myself ; that should be possible.

[Komenor]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

yes, possibly, although i think the source code should be accessible to users who know what they are doing. i prefer to check my source and write most of my code myself ; that should be possible.

Ok, but if the user can edit the source code, it's harder to certify the quality of the ePub output. We can use Tidy, of course, but it is an additional pre-requirement to the application...