01-04-2013, 10:47 AM | #1 |
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Epubcheck 3
Now that epubcheck 3 has been released, are there any plans to incorporate it into Sigil and FlightCrew?
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01-04-2013, 11:02 AM | #2 |
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What does ePubCheck 3 do for ePub (not ePub 3) that FlightCrew doesn't?
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01-04-2013, 11:23 AM | #3 |
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It is more stringent and now detects infections by that itunes.plist junk amongst other things. Flightcrew and the validation in Sigil are long overdue for revision as they have been unreliable for a while.
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01-04-2013, 11:46 AM | #4 |
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What makes more sense:
Incorporating an epub3 validator in an app that still primarily produces epub2 books? Or continue to use an epub2 validator and make allowances for the handful of epub3 features that some retailers are cherry-picking? I for one believe that it makes absolutely no sense to incorporate an epub3 validator into a primarily epub2 system. It's not like xhtml or css where using a stricter spec won't really hurt. You're talking apples and oranges. Most everything would fail validation miserably employing epub3 rules. |
01-04-2013, 12:16 PM | #5 | |
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Quote:
I agree that epub3 is immature and I have no intention of making any epub3s any time soon. Epubcheck 3 is a more accurate validator for epub2 than whatever Sigil uses now. It is also what distributors will be using. Its no good telling Apple (for instance), when they reject your book, that their validation procedure is wrong and your epub is right because it passed the lame validation in Sigil. And FYI this has already happened to me. So don't tell me that it doesn't make sense, tell the distros that are already using epubckeck3. |
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01-04-2013, 12:23 PM | #6 |
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I guess it depends on how many files you are willing to hand correct and how fussy your vendors are. Our distributor is using 3.0RC-2, and catching errors that 3.0b5 is missing (the validator built in to the Oxygen editor). Our files are produced by our typesetting vendors, and I don't have time to correct every one. I need to make sure our files aren't rejected by the distributor. So that means I have to hold my suppliers to the strictest standards.
Last edited by MacCruiskeen; 01-04-2013 at 12:26 PM. |
01-04-2013, 01:00 PM | #7 |
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What you can do is run your ePub through FlightCrew and fix all the errors and then run it through ePubCheck 3.0 and fix any additions errors and then done.
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01-04-2013, 01:30 PM | #8 | |
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The whole point of Sigil is its a dedicated epub editor that is supposed to save time and produce distribution-ready books without having to faff around. It would be nice if we could rely on the built-in validator and reduce the number of steps in our workflow. I can understand why the dev team didn't incorporate any of the betas or RCs but now there is a finalised, stable release it may be time to use the current validator. |
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01-04-2013, 01:47 PM | #9 | ||
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The point you're missing is that if the various distributors are going to start cherry-picking what's appropriate and what's not in their particular flavor/mutation of epub, then they need to have their own publishing software that ensures compliance ... and commercial creators probably need to use it (if they don't want to get their hands dirty tweaking Sigil's output for all the various distributors, that is). Heck they may even have to pay for it. It's silly to think that Sigil is ever going to be able keep track of all the ever-changing idiosyncrasies that the various distributors are introducing into their submission demands. They'd never get anything else done. And I'm sure the fragmentation is only going to get worse before it ever gets better. So while I can sympathize with your plight, I don't think expecting an open-source software project to voluntarily choose to morph into a be-all-end-all validator for hordes of fragmented ePub-ish commercial distributors to bail you out of that plight is the way to go. Quote:
Last edited by DiapDealer; 01-04-2013 at 01:53 PM. |
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01-04-2013, 02:19 PM | #10 |
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To repeat DiapDealer's point:
Sigil is supposed to produce (and check) valid ePubs, from the point of view of the specs. If a distributor/publisher/whatever decides to require or prohibit additional features, even if it's called "Apple", then that's their problem (and the problem of whoever chooses to deal with them). That doesn't mean Sigil (or any other program) is perfect, it has bugs and limitations. If you see any particular fault with the validator, (as in accepting an ePub that doesn't conform with the spec, or flagging one that does), please report it. |
01-04-2013, 07:57 PM | #11 |
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Epubcheck is written in a way that is inherently incompatibile with Sigil. The only way to use Epubcheck within Sigil is to call Epubcheck as a command line app and parse the text output.
On top of that to include Epubcheck Sigil would have to require the Java runtime because Epubcheck is written in (you guessed it) Java. This would require users to install a runtime that is a few hundred MB in size to use a single feature. Bundling a large runtime in order to run an external app is not going to happen. Any time for epub 3 validation is better served by working on Flightcrew which is designed to be used as a library and can work in a large number of programming languages, unlike Epubcheck. |
01-05-2013, 07:59 AM | #12 | ||
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Question properly answered by someone who actually knows what he's talking about.
Quote:
Thankyou for the consice clarification of the technical issues involved. Quote:
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01-05-2013, 08:46 AM | #13 |
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For ePub (not ePub 3), what does ePubcheck find for errors/warning that FlightCrew does not? If there was such a lit, then these checks could be added to FlightCrew.
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01-05-2013, 01:59 PM | #14 |
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The epubcheck validation tools does find more errors than Flight Crew, amongst others the itunes.plist-thingie (I think Sigil strips those out silently, so of course the built-in FlightCrew won't find it), and unusable links in the ncx.
But the point is, that the distributors and resellers - whether we like it or not - use the "official" epubcheck, not flightcrew. So I have made an attempt to make it as easy as drag-and-drop (in windows), which I just published in the ePub forum . It's a windows batch-thing, but similar tools should be easy to implement in OSX and Linux, I think. Feel free to play around with it Regards, Kim |
01-07-2013, 03:15 AM | #15 | ||
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Quote:
Quote:
So, to me, it's easier to do fundamental ePUBchecks with FC in Sigil, and then just drop the book on the most recent ePUBcheck, or, whatever ePUBcheck the specific distributor is using (like 1.1). |
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