Possible replacement for EPUBCHECK

[Kayadelenium]

epubveri 0.9.18 is out — four false positives, all found here rather than reported.

The one to upgrade for: a manifest item declared text/html in an EPUB 2 book. Calibre emits these. We treated them as foreign resources, so one real book drew 91 bogus OPF-043 plus a handful of RSC-010/OPF-032. epubcheck warns once (OPF-035) and carries on validating the document — now so do we.

That one cuts both ways: those documents were never being checked at all, so a book of yours may now show new errors that are real — broken links inside them were silently skipped before.

Also fixed:
- A valid TIFF named .png was reported as a corrupt image. It's a wrong extension (PKG-022), not corruption.
- Two extra RSC-005 on ARIA id references — one in EPUB 2, where epubcheck checks nothing, and one duplicate in EPUB*3.

Binaries: github.com/veripublica/epubveri/releases/tag/v0.9.18
Browser demo: veripublica.github.io/epubveri

As always — if our output disagrees with epubcheck's on one of your books, both logs as plain text is the most useful thing you can send.

[Doitsu]

@Kayadeleniu:

I noticed that there still discrepancies between epubveri and EPUBCheck for DNSB's second scrambled book.

epubveri does not flag epub2-only metadata attributes with an opf prefix. For example:

<dc:identifier opf:scheme="calibre">urn:uuid:33f269c3-cb0c-4cab-b952-526cf2a8cad3</dc:identifier>

I also have a suggestion:

Since you apparently develop epuveri and epubsana in parallel, IMHO, it'd be helpful if epuberi displayed an ADV message whenever it finds an issue that epubsana can fix.

[Kayadelenium]

epubveri 0.9.19

New release: https://github.com/veripublica/epubv...es/tag/v0.9.19

Doitsu — the report from page 13 is fixed. Thank you for sending epubcheck's output next to ours; that pair of files turned this into a twenty-minute diagnosis instead of a guess. The book drew 13 findings from epubcheck and 7 from epubveri, and all six we missed were the same thing: a book converted from EPUB 2 keeps opf:role, opf:file-as and opf:scheme on its Dublin Core elements, and EPUB 3 replaced all of those with <meta refines>.

The cause turned out to be worse than a missing rule. epubveri's model of an EPUB 3 <metadata> element was completely permissive, so no attribute on any metadata element was being checked at all — it was a missing question rather than a wrong answer. That surface now follows the EPUB 3 package schema, including the part that is easy to get wrong: xml:lang is valid on dc:title and an error on dc:language, because those two elements take different attribute lists.

Five more EPUB 2 rules where XHTML 1.1 is stricter than HTML5 and epubveri was too permissive: ol@start, ol@type, li@value, data-* attributes, and an empty <tr> or row group. They all come from modules that OPS 2.0.1 does not include — the same reason align and clear are already errors.

And one in the other direction, which matters more: epubveri was reporting CSS-001 (direction / unicode-bidi) on EPUB 2 books. epubcheck applies that rule only to EPUB 3, so this was a real false positive on valid EPUB 2 markup. Fixed.

Where the numbers come from, for anyone who wants to judge them: on epubcheck's own test corpus, 606 of 607 expected message IDs match exactly, with no false positives across 355 should-be-clean cases. On a local corpus of 346 real books cross-checked against epubcheck 5.3.0, 339 agree on the reported ID set exactly, and there is no ID that epubveri reports and epubcheck does not. The remaining differences are all in the other direction — things epubcheck catches and epubveri still misses.

Downloads for 8 platforms are on the release page; the Linux musl builds need no toolchain and run on any distro. Also cargo install epubveri, or @veripublica/epubveri-wasm on npm for the browser.

If you hit a disagreement with epubcheck, the most useful thing you can send is exactly what Doitsu sent: epubcheck's output and epubveri's, for the same book. It beats a description by a mile and costs you almost nothing.

[Kayadelenium]

epubveri 0.9.20 is out

https://github.com/veripublica/epubv...es/tag/v0.9.20

Same-day follow-up to 0.9.19, and a smaller post because the changes are smaller: nine fixes, eight of which came from diffing epubveri's output against epubcheck's over a local corpus of 346 real books, one book at a time.

Two of them were epubveri reporting too much, which is the half worth naming:

- A remote font in a shared stylesheet was reported once per document that linked the sheet — one @font-face produced 19 findings on a ten-document book where epubcheck produces*2.
- A reference to a resource that is declared in the manifest but missing from the container drew a second error on top of the right one.

The rest close gaps in the other direction: a reference to a container file that no manifest item declares (including inside SVG, which was silent entirely), remote resources in EPUB 2, unencoded spaces and empty hosts in URLs, and dc: metadata that Calibre fills with unescaped markup.

Where it stands against epubcheck 5.3.0 on those 346 books: 343 agree on the reported message IDs exactly, and there is no ID that epubveri reports and epubcheck does not. The remaining differences are all in the other direction — things epubcheck catches that epubveri still misses, plus two that are epubcheck's own artefacts.

- cargo install epubveri,
- 8 prebuilt binaries on the release page,
- or try it in the browser with no install: https://veripublica.github.io/epubveri/