Smashwords and ePub format question

[Toxaris]

Flightcrew checks more than threepress and the error descriptions are usually much more usable and understandable.

It looks that the epub generator from smashword does not follow specs though.

[cantovento]

My problem is similar to yarndog's. I get 52 times the same error message from epubcheck:

ERROR: van-oerknal-tot-oorbevolking.epub/tmp_6b25f4347228bfd9dd9d03c78e4d7602_Vez7s1.chapha ck.fixed.fc.tidied.stylehacked.xfixed_split_001.ht ml(1879): attribute "width" not allowed here; expected attribute "abbr", "align", "axis", "char", "charoff", "class", "colspan", "dir", "headers", "id", "rowspan", "scope", "style", "title", "valign" or "xml:lang"

My question: It should be easy to fix since it's 52x the same thing, but where do I find the 52 errors in the epub file?

[Toxaris]

It looks like an error in images. Run the file through FlightCrew, it is much better than epubcheck, and then check the errors. It should be more clear what the problem is.

If the problem is really the same problem over and over, a well-phrased search and replace should fix it.

[cantovento]

Sorry, I forgot to say that I wrote my book in WORD1997-2003. In accordance with smashwords instructions , I removed all formatting, then manually re-formatted the headings in 4 levels, then bookmarked about 200 headings and linked them to a TOC. After sending it through Meatgrinder, all formats were shipped except Amazon and Apple. When a website says "will be shipped, I believe it. Shipping to Apple is said to be on Thursdays, so I waited 4 Thursdays. Only after querying Smashwords did I learn that you have to validate the converted epub file through epubchecker.

The doc contains 27 images. I have reformatted them all and republished. When I'm through the Smashwords rigmarole I'll run the epub file through FlightCrew and report the result here.

Dank je wel!

[cantovento]

After re-aligning all images & making a few other improvements, I uploaded my doc to Smashwords and passed the resulting epub thru Epubchecker & FlightCrew. The Epubchecker error msgs are still exactly the same, FlightCrew's are just as unintelligible to me, e.g:

This resource is reachable but not present in the OPF <manifest>

This resource is reachable but not present in the OPF <spine>

This resource is present in the OPF <manifest> but is not reachable (it's unused)

then it gets worse...
The msgs in FlightCrew will not copy & it's too much garble to transcribe manually.
Some have N/A under line, others have numbers.
How can I find which line is which?
Isn't there no software that will give understandable error msgs for plain people like me?

[DaleDe]

It is saying you have an extra file or perhaps more than one in your ePUB document that should not be there. Change the extension of you ebook to .zip and then open it and take a look at the structure and see it there is an unusually named file. Sometimes Calibre can stick a bookmark file in the archive which will cause this error. Once you fix it then you can change the extension back to .epub. Note if you have 7zip then you can just open the archive without having to rename the extension.

Dale

[yarndog]

I did hear from Mark Coker from Smashwords. It appears meatgrinder did not pick up some table tabs in my doc document. I fixed that problem. In addition when I quoted a person I used the Quotations style in LibreOffice. When this got converted to epub the Quotations style got converted to <blockquote> tags and meatgrinder didn't like them. My solution was to just change my quotes that used Quotation style to Content 5 style, and just tell that style to italicize. Once I did this, in addition to fixing the table problem, my book made it through meatgrinder and epub checker, and has been shipped to Apple. Yippee! Mr. Coker mentioned they are changing the way a user is notified of epub errors. They do understand the current system is too mysterious in terms of a user knowing if they have epub errors by having to check whether their book shipped/not shipped.

[yarndog]

I did hear from Mark Coker from Smashwords. It appears meatgrinder did not pick up some table tabs in my doc document. I fixed that problem. In addition when I quoted a person I used the Quotations style in LibreOffice. When this got converted to epub the Quotations style got converted to <blockquote> tags and meatgrinder didn't like them. My solution was to just change my quotes that used Quotation style to Content 5 style, and just tell that style to italicize. Once I did this, in addition to fixing the table problem, my book made it through meatgrinder and epub checker, and has been shipped to Apple. Yippee! Mr. Coker mentioned they are changing the way a user is notified of epub errors. They do understand the current system is too mysterious in terms of a user knowing if they have epub errors by having to check whether their book shipped/not shipped. Just by fixing the blockquote problem got rid of most of the errors alone. Threepress cranks out so many errors for every occurrence of a problem.

[yarndog]

I got an error for each occurrence of <blockquote>. I just used find and replace to replace each one of those <blockquotes> and the large morass of errors went away.

[Toxaris]

<blockquote> is an allowed tag for epubs... It just should be inside <p> tags.

[DrDln]

Originally Posted by cantovento

My problem is similar to yarndog's. I get 52 times the same error message from epubcheck:
ERROR: van-oerknal-tot-oorbevolking.epub/tmp_6b25f4347228bfd9dd9d03c78e4d7602_Vez7s1.chapha ck.fixed.fc.tidied.stylehacked.xfixed_split_001.ht ml(1879): attribute "width" not allowed here; expected attribute "abbr", "align", "axis", "char", "charoff", "class", "colspan", "dir", "headers", "id", "rowspan", "scope", "style", "title", "valign" or "xml:lang"
My question: It should be easy to fix since it's 52x the same thing, but where do I find the 52 errors in the epub file?

I seem to have similar problem. Please share if you find the solution. I will do the same. Here is my dilemma.

Nine of my 12 guides pass the epub test. One of them I fixed yesterday only. Below are the error messages that I get with other 3 guides. Any idea what do these mean!

I will continue to work on these. Most of these errors perhaps are link and image related. The major work is to locate them.

I will appreciate any clue on how to find these errors or to know what these mean.

1. <<ERROR: the-power-of-breathing.epub: The file tmp_56e5d5dbe37ad7496a77581a2e5789e3_VW6W9h_html_m 5b32798a.png does not appear to be of type image/png>>

2. <<ERROR: art-of-stress-free-living-eastern-and-western-approach.epub/tmp_90dd12c32a5b750b5645fd483b9830eb_aTzujH.ch.fix ed.fc.tidied.stylehacked.xfixed_split_011.html(38) : attribute "width" not allowed here; expected attribute "abbr", "align", "axis", "char", "charoff", "class", "colspan", "dir", "headers", "id", "rowspan", "scope", "style", "title", "valign" or "xml:lang" >>

3. << ERROR: HHL-epub.epub/tmp_6c6543aa0c591fd11631fa8ca3bcaedb_G67JJi.ch.fix ed.fc.tidied.stylehacked.xfixed_split_014.html(207 ): attribute "height" not allowed here; expected attribute "abbr", "align", "axis", "char", "charoff", "class", "colspan", "dir", "headers", "id", "rowspan", "scope", "style", "title", "valign" or "xml:lang"

Thanks in advance for your help.

[LaoTseu]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

<blockquote> is an allowed tag for epubs... It just should be inside <p> tags.

This is a very surprising statement to me. So far as I know, <blockquote> can be use as first child of <body> and do not need to be enclosed by <p>.

The following code validate with http://validator.w3.org/

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
  <title>title</title>
</head>

<body>
<blockquote>
  <p>test</p>
</blockquote>
</body>
</html>

Maybe you meant that when using strict HTML/XHTML, <blockquote> can only contain block-level elements like <p> so

<blockquote>
text 1
text 2
text 3
</blockquote>

is invalid for strict XHTML whereas

<blockquote>
<p>
text 1
text 2
text 3
</p>
</blockquote>

is valid.

[Toxaris]

I have to check, but it looks that you are right. I wrote it down in the wrong order apparently...

[DrDln]

Finally, all of my 12 guides pass ePub validation. But two of 12 are still pending approval for some reason.

[DrDln]

I have all 12 books passing the ePub test. But I got a new problem with one of the books. I have done the suggestion in message below. But still have a problem. Any help will be highly appreciated. Here's the message that I get:

" #2 Your book contains some possibly corrupt formatting. If you take a look at the EPUB, you'll notice there are slight font size differentiations. This is caused by your mix of inconsistent on-screen formatting. One option is to do a CTRL-A and change everything to Normal style, then modify the style to enforce the characteristics you want. ||| When you're finished correcting your book, go to Dashboard: 'upload new version' to upload the new version. Thanks. "

Thanks in advance for your help.