MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - news to epublishing, but not to publishing in general

sadhu44 · 09-04-2012, 05:44 AM

I do volunteer work with a small publishing firm in Kandy, Sri Lanka. I have been doing page layout (typsetting) for years. Now the publishing firm would like to put much of its book online for free distribution in various e-book formats. We already make them available in html and pdf formats. We want to add epub and mobi to the list.

I ran into this ominous gem in the calibre manual:

"calibre does not guarantee that an EPUB produced by it is valid. The only guarantee it makes is that if you feed it valid XHTML 1.1 + CSS 2.1 it will output a valid EPUB. calibre is designed for ebook consumers, not producers. It tries hard to ensure that EPUBs it produces actually work as intended on a wide variety of devices, a goal that is incompatible with producing valid EPUBs, and one that is far more important to the vast majority of its users. If you need a tool that always produces valid EPUBs, calibre is not for you."

Well, luckily I do my web stuff in xhtml 1.0 strict, so am I correct in assuming there's no need to worry?

-Sadhu!

09-04-2012, 05:44 AM	#1
sadhu44 Member Posts: 13 Karma: 10 Join Date: Sep 2012 Location: Sri Lanka Device: none	news to epublishing, but not to publishing in general I do volunteer work with a small publishing firm in Kandy, Sri Lanka. I have been doing page layout (typsetting) for years. Now the publishing firm would like to put much of its book online for free distribution in various e-book formats. We already make them available in html and pdf formats. We want to add epub and mobi to the list. I ran into this ominous gem in the calibre manual: "calibre does not guarantee that an EPUB produced by it is valid. The only guarantee it makes is that if you feed it valid XHTML 1.1 + CSS 2.1 it will output a valid EPUB. calibre is designed for ebook consumers, not producers. It tries hard to ensure that EPUBs it produces actually work as intended on a wide variety of devices, a goal that is incompatible with producing valid EPUBs, and one that is far more important to the vast majority of its users. If you need a tool that always produces valid EPUBs, calibre is not for you." Well, luckily I do my web stuff in xhtml 1.0 strict, so am I correct in assuming there's no need to worry? -Sadhu!