What exactly are Standard Ebook's "advanced epubs"?

[ownedbycats]

Here's a link to that specific book's css files: https://github.com/standardebooks/fr...r/src/epub/css

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by robin_reala

I’ve just built and extracted the kepub for that book and logo.png is in there and referenced correctly. cover.png isn’t, but cover.jpg is and is referenced from the manifest with a cover-image properties.

Potentially you’ve got an older version? We do find and fix bugs, and the corpus is republished when that happens.

I just downloaded the kepub of The Black Star Passes. This copy is slightly different from the older copy. However, it's still not good. When I opened it in Sigil, I got a popup about unmanifested files (see attached image) and when I opened it, the manifest did not have the two .png image files mentioned in it.

I did make an error in my original message. The missing files were logo.png and titlepage.png, cover.jpg was present. The content.opf lines regarding the image files in the newly downloaded copy are below:

    <item id="cover.jpg" href="images/cover.jpg" media-type="image/jpeg" properties="cover-image"/>
    <item id="logo.svg" href="images/logo.svg" media-type="image/svg+xml"/>
    <item id="titlepage.svg" href="images/titlepage.svg" media-type="image/svg+xml"/>

I edited the content.opf file to correct the two entries to png from svg:

    <item id="cover.jpg" href="images/cover.jpg" media-type="image/jpeg" properties="cover-image"/>
    <item id="logo.png" href="images/logo.png" media-type="image/png"/>
    <item id="titlepage.png" href="images/titlepage.png" media-type="image/png"/>

And then the logo and titlepage worked.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Here's a link to that specific book's css files: https://github.com/standardebooks/fr...r/src/epub/css

The CSS is a right mess and not compatible for ADE 2.0.1. It's not compatible with the version of RMSDK using on Kobo Readers. So calling it compatible is an out and out lie.

[robin_reala]

DNSB: good spot! I’ve replicated, and filed it at https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/issues/384

JSWolf: we don’t attempt to support ADE on Kobo. Our opinion is that the Kobo-specific renderer produces higher quality output. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t fix ADE support for other platforms, so I’ll grab down a copy of ADE 2.0.1 as suggested and see what we can do to improve the rendering there. Thanks for the feedback.

[robin_reala]

…although having gone looking, it seems like 2.0.1 was replaced by ADE 3.0 in 2014? I don’t know the ADE landscape that well, but typically 7 years feels like a decent run. Is your hardware tied to a version that old?

[acabal]

Alex, SE Editor-in-Chief here.

The "advanced" epubs are epub3 files that basically assume your ereader is as fully-featured as a modern web browser. They use advanced CSS selectors, SVGs where possible, and make other assumptions for an "ideal" ereader that are basically not true for most/all ereaders on the market today. They're just the ebook's zipped up Git repo source without further modification. If you visit an ebook's SE web page you'll see an option to read the book in your browser, and that file is also the (mostly) raw ebook source as present in the Git repos.

The "compatible" epub takes the "advanced" epubs as the base, then applies various compatibility affordances to make them actually usable on most of today's ereading devices. Selectors are simplified into classes, MathML and SVGs are converted to PNGs, additional compatibility CSS is inserted, and so on. Unlike the "advanced" epubs, the "compatible" epubs should look good in most modern ereaders.

AFAIK the only ereader to do a passable job on the advanced epub is iBooks, and even then it's not perfect. Desktop web browsers render them perfectly but of course a web browser isn't really an "ereader" per se.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by robin_reala

…although having gone looking, it seems like 2.0.1 was replaced by ADE 3.0 in 2014? I don’t know the ADE landscape that well, but typically 7 years feels like a decent run. Is your hardware tied to a version that old?

Some people still consider ADE 2.0.1 as the baseline for testing epubs. This is mainly due to quite a few older ereaders using RMSDK where the version of RMSDK is no longer being updated.

If you haven't already picked up a copy of ADE 2.0.1, the link to download it from Adobe's site is: http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/..._Installer.exe .

[acabal]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Advanced ePub is rubbish. It's not needed at all. It's just going to confuse a lot of people. What Advanced ePub is is ePub3 with no backward comparability. There's no need for it since the content is the same as the Comparable ePub. There is nothing advanced about it.

As for well formatted. Not at all.They have huge paragraph spaces and the section breaks are a full line going across the entire page. Then we have the text left justified. And the cover is not programmed to be displayed. So the first page is a titlepage. They look awful because they are awful. They really need to fix the formatting.

OK, I figured out why the formatting is so bad. It's because they have error(s) in the CSS and in that case. ADE ignores the CSS. This is why there formatting is lousy. They need to make the CSS actually valid. RMSDK (ADE) is the most used for displaying ePub and if they are going to botch the CSS, they may as well shut down until they learn CSS.

SE Editor-in-Chief here.

ADE is the IE6 of ereaders. There isn't a whole lot we can do to make things look nice there. Fortunately fewer and fewer devices are shipping with ADE. Kindle of course uses their own renderer for mobi/azw3, and Kobo uses a very good Webkit-based renderer when using kepub files (but importantly, it defaults to ADE when using plain epub, versus kepub, files--that's why we tell people to transfer the kepub files to Kobo readers and not the regular epubs, otherwise ADE will make the ebooks look bad!).

Our CSS does not have errors. It is perfectly valid CSS and our epubs are perfectly valid epubs that pass epubcheck. The problem is ADE, which is an old and bad renderer that should be abandoned as fast as possible.

[acabal]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Some people still consider ADE 2.0.1 as the baseline for testing epubs. This is mainly due to quite a few older ereaders using RMSDK where the version of RMSDK is no longer being updated.

If you haven't already picked up a copy of ADE 2.0.1, the link to download it from Adobe's site is: http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/..._Installer.exe .

Unfortunately we're not going to be able to offer a whole lot of support for ADE 2.0.1, which looks like it's from 2012. Our compatible epubs should hopefully look somewhat acceptable on them, since in the "compatible" epubs we replace advanced CSS selectors with class selectors. But don't expect to be able to use our "advanced" epubs (which don't look good on today's software, let alone software from 2012) on any version of ADE this century.

I sympathize with people who bought into platforms that no longer offer updates. The ereader device space is one with little competition and even less technical enthusiasm, so options are limited and it can be frustrating to spend a lot of money on a device that just a few years later is stuck with obsolete software. But our project aims at modern standards, produced at a volunteer-time pace, so the amount of effort we can put in to supporting 8-year-old software that was bad even in 2012 is limited.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by robin_reala

DNSB: good spot! I’ve replicated, and filed it at https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/issues/384

JSWolf: we don’t attempt to support ADE on Kobo. Our opinion is that the Kobo-specific renderer produces higher quality output. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t fix ADE support for other platforms, so I’ll grab down a copy of ADE 2.0.1 as suggested and see what we can do to improve the rendering there. Thanks for the feedback.

I have to disagree that KePub produces better quality output. RMSDK (ADE) on a kobo can produce better quality output. But regardless, there are Readers out there what use RMSDK such as Sony Readers and the eBooks would not display properly

One other issue is that the CSS has the eBook being left justified. It should be full justified because Kobo does not support hyphenation with left justified eBooks.

[acabal]

Originally Posted by DNSB

I just downloaded the kepub of The Black Star Passes. This copy is slightly different from the older copy. However, it's still not good. When I opened it in Sigil, I got a popup about unmanifested files (see attached image) and when I opened it, the manifest did not have the two .png image files mentioned in it.

I did make an error in my original message. The missing files were logo.png and titlepage.png, cover.jpg was present. The content.opf lines regarding the image files in the newly downloaded copy are below:

This was a bug in our build chain, which I've now fixed. Thanks for bringing it up. The next version of our toolset should be released this week hopefully, and then the entire corpus will be rebuilt to fix this. Fortunately it doesn't seem to affect the actual reading experience.

[acabal]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I have to disagree that KePub produces better quality output. RMSDK (ADE) on a kobo can produce better quality output. But regardless, there are Readers out there what use RMSDK such as Sony Readers and the eBooks would not display properly

One other issue is that the CSS has the eBook being left justified. It should be full justified because Kobo does not support hyphenation with left justified eBooks.

Kepub triggers Kobo's Webkit renderer which is miles ahead of anything Adobe has put out. As long as you're using our specially-prepared kepub file on your Kobo and not any other file, it should look much better. If you ignore our suggestion and use some other file, then all bets are off. Of course I'd love it if Kobo used their Webkit renderer on regular epubs (and not just kepubs) but that's Kobo's problem and not ours.

We do not specify text justification except in special formatting circumstances like poetry. I don't know where else you'd be seeing that.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by acabal

Unfortunately we're not going to be able to offer a whole lot of support for ADE 2.0.1, which looks like it's from 2012. Our compatible epubs should hopefully look somewhat acceptable on them, since in the "compatible" epubs we replace advanced CSS selectors with class selectors. But don't expect to be able to use our "advanced" epubs (which don't look good on today's software, let alone software from 2012) on any version of ADE this century.

That's untrue that you cannot get your compatible ePub to work with ADE. The reason your compatible ePub doesn't work is because of error(s) in the CSS. ADE ignores the CSS entirely if it finds an error and ADE has found an error. Your CSS is way much of a mess and too complex for the formatting of the eBooks. Why not just use simple CSS unless the formatting calls for something more complex. You "house" CSS needs to go as it doesn't work. And you

I sympathize with people who bought into platforms that no longer offer updates. The ereader device space is one with little competition and even less technical enthusiasm, so options are limited and it can be frustrating to spend a lot of money on a device that just a few years later is stuck with obsolete software. But our project aims at modern standards, produced at a volunteer-time pace, so the amount of effort we can put in to supporting 8-year-old software that was bad even in 2012 is limited.

I have to say that these "modern" standards are not actually all that well supported. This is why your eBooks do not look good in most ePub reading software INCLUDING KePub on Kobo.

Your advanced ePub could work much better if you just got rid of all the "advanced" stuff that you do not need. The rule in making eBooks is to keep the code as simple as possible and you keep it as complicated as possible. Any professional eBook maker on Mobileread will tell you that your code is lousy.

As for people buying old platforms, a lot of people did not buy old platforms. They bough current platforms that are now not being supported and not everyone has the money to upgrade to a new Reader.

So please stop saying that you have to support the latest standard that are very poorly supported. You code is over-the-top and if you made your code properly your eBooks would work. They do not have to be made to only work with Books on iOS. So please stop say you cannot support ADE 2.0.1. You can if you wanted to. I cannot see most public domain books needing such code as you use. Your code is rubbish and needs to be scrapped and started over from the ground up.

Would you like me to take one of your eBooks and show you what compatible really means as you obviously have no idea what the word compatible means. It's not compatible. So please fix your listing and replace the word Compatible with Incompatible.

[ownedbycats]

[acabal]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The reason your compatible ePub doesn't work is because of error(s) in the CSS. ADE ignores the CSS entirely if it finds an error and ADE has found an error.

Perhaps you are unfamiliar with modern CSS. Again, our CSS is perfectly valid modern CSS. You may even unzip one of our "advanced" epubs and open any of its XHTML files in your desktop web browser to confirm that your browser understands our CSS perfectly. The fact that software from 2012 does not understand it, does not make it invalid. it means you're using software that is too old. I would not expect a website designed in 2020 to render correctly on Netscape Navigator, and we will also not be making our epubs compatible on abacuses.

Additionally, the CSS you're pointing to is from our "advanced" epub, which again you should not be using on any ADE platform. The "compatible" epub is processed to simplify (most) complex selectors to class selectors which just about any ereading system can understand. This resulting CSS in the processed ebook is less readable, but it's not meant to be readable; it has been processed by an automated build chain.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

So please stop say you cannot support ADE 2.0.1. You can if you wanted to. I cannot see most public domain books needing such code as you use. Your code is rubbish and needs to be scrapped and started over from the ground up.

We are a group of volunteers and our time is limited. Instead of being aggressively rude about it, literally calling us liars and insulting the hard work of volunteers who gave it to you for free, you are free to volunteer to improve it yourself. I'm surprised they allow that kind of rudeness on these forums. We would certainly not allow it on our mailing list.