[Editor Plugin] EpubCheck

[ryder]

I guess I'm an oldschool reader who doesn't care about new fancy css styles. But thanks to everybody for their insights. I appreciate it. For non-fiction books I would rather keep the original epub, because there might be a need for a table of contents, but for novels I don't see the point for that, except if you are in a book club and try to read a specific chapter together. There is just one thing which I don't get at all: this whole formatting stuff should be basics for the ereader industry, but it seems they're still struggling with it. If you take a kobo with stock firmware you will get a messed up format shown on the ereader unless you try to patch the firmware or the epub with calibre. Just talking about hyphenation or wasted space after a chapter. There should be no need to convert epubs at all

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ryder

I guess I'm an oldschool reader who doesn't care about new fancy css styles. But thanks to everybody for their insights. I appreciate it. For non-fiction books I would rather keep the original epub, because there might be a need for a table of contents, but for novels I don't see the point for that, except if you are in a book club and try to read a specific chapter together. There is just one thing which I don't get at all: this whole formatting stuff should be basics for the ereader industry, but it seems they're still struggling with it. If you take a kobo with stock firmware you will get a messed up format shown on the ereader unless you try to patch the firmware or the epub with calibre. Just talking about hyphenation or wasted space after a chapter. There should be no need to convert epubs at all

The things mentioned that may be missing are not fancy. They are plain old code. Fancy is something like dropcaps.

[ryder]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The things mentioned that may be missing are not fancy. They are plain old code. Fancy is something like dropcaps.

Ok, so now I know you can call me oldschool officially, because I didn't know about drop caps before your post. After googling it, I saw what you meant. I came across those drop caps in the first book of "a song of ice and fire" and my first thought was: wtf? So I went straight to calibre and removed them by converting the epub. I find the idea bizarre that a single letter is as big as 3 or 4 lines and also messing up my hyphenation. If you have the choice between good hyphenation and those big letters beginning every new chapter, what would you choose? I mean the hyphenation goes through the whole book and those big letters are just for about 15 seconds until you tap or swish to the next page. Or what is it exactly that some people like those fancy things? I know that the eye is pretty much involved in that topic, but the reading flow is more important for me than that

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ryder

Ok, so now I know you can call me oldschool officially, because I didn't know about drop caps before your post. After googling it, I saw what you meant. I came across those drop caps in the first book of "a song of ice and fire" and my first thought was: wtf? So I went straight to calibre and removed them by converting the epub. I find the idea bizarre that a single letter is as big as 3 or 4 lines and also messing up my hyphenation. If you have the choice between good hyphenation and those big letters beginning every new chapter, what would you choose? I mean the hyphenation goes through the whole book and those big letters are just for about 15 seconds until you tap or swish to the next page. Or what is it exactly that some people like those fancy things? I know that the eye is pretty much involved in that topic, but the reading flow is more important for me than that

The thing is, by editing the code by hand, you get to do things your way and make sure it's correct.

[ryder]

Originally Posted by Karellen

I don't know. I can't see what the error is. Nor can I really see the code in the body of the chapter.

Hey, now I had the time to look further into the topic of errors of an epub. Here is an example how the conversion from epub to mobi and back to epub again can work. As you can see in the first picture there are 24 errors found by calibre and many more by epubcheck. The calibre errors are about invalid ids, the epubcheck finds errors of validation (the value of the attribute “id” is invalid. It has to be XML-name without a colon) (Col: 87 ERROR(RSC-005) and errors with attribute style is not allowed. Has to be dir, lang, version or xml:lang. (Col: 72 ERROR(RSC-005))

After the conversion from epub to mobi and from mobi back to epub you can see that the calibre errors are gone, but epubcheck finds other validation errors (took a screenshot of them). As you can see in the file preview window those ugly blank lines are gone so the reading flow is much better. But are those validation errors a dealbreaker or just something which could be ignored? Just want to understand more about epub errors. Thanks a lot.

[kovidgoyal]

epubcheck errors are mostly useless and can be safely ignored unless you want to sell your epub through some service that uses epubcheck, in which case you have to placate epubcheck

[thiago.eec]

Originally Posted by ryder

Hey, now I had the time to look further into the topic of errors of an epub. Here is an example how the conversion from epub to mobi and back to epub again can work

Just about the conversion: I think an EPUB > EPUB conversion would be more appropriate. It would fix the same things, but would be safer then EPUB > MOBI > EPUB.

[ryder]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

epubcheck errors are mostly useless and can be safely ignored unless you want to sell your epub through some service that uses epubcheck, in which case you have to placate epubcheck

Thanks, that was also my thought. I am not a seller, just a reader. Great program by the way.

There is just one thing which is not working for me with calibre. If I convert epub to mobi and back to epub, the option justify text is always checked, but when I put the layout to justify on my clara 2e the chapters of the ebooks are always on the left, not in the middle. Just when I choose the option off the chapter title is in the middle again. I don't know if this has something to do with the conversion or my clara reader. Maybe I just need to find the code for keep chapter title always in the middle or something like that.

[ryder]

Originally Posted by thiago.eec

Just about the conversion: I think an EPUB > EPUB conversion would be more appropriate. It would fix the same things, but would be safer then EPUB > MOBI > EPUB.

I tried that. But unfortunately it didn't solve all problems. I had a book with 24 errors before and after epub to epub there were still 23 errors. So not useful for me. Only if I go through mobi the errors are gone completely. I don't have many options on when I convert ebooks, just text justification and erase blank spaces. Do you delete the original_epub format after converting epub to epub?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ryder

I tried that. But unfortunately it didn't solve all problems. I had a book with 24 errors before and after epub to epub there were still 23 errors. So not useful for me. Only if I go through mobi the errors are gone completely. I don't have many options on when I convert ebooks, just text justification and erase blank spaces. Do you delete the original_epub format after converting epub to epub?

IMHO, it's time to learn HTML/CSS to be able to edit your eBooks. Problem is, garbage in, garbage out. If you can fix the code, the you won't have a problem.

[theducks]

All conversions will use the Original_format if it exists
This is so you don't stack fail onto fail.
OTOH if you fix things in the converted EPUB, but do another conversion, you will lose those because the Original will be used as the conversion source.

You are if you don't learn (and use) HTML + CSS
There is NO magic bullet fix just as there is no single way to get text placed (although, some are really nasty lookin code)

And sometimes you are fighting the device, not bad/sloppy code.

KEPB will run words together if the CSS for that style has set letter-spacing (It seems it 0's the space character).

Just because the code is Valid, does not mean it will work on all devices.

[ryder]

Originally Posted by theducks

(It seems it 0's the space character).

I don't know what you mean by that, but I figured it out why the chapter title is not in the middle. When I choose the "remove spacing after paragraph" option, calibre takes the chapter and puts it to the left like it's the first word of the chapter, then comes the first word, so calibre indents it with the usual 1,5em like it's the second paragraph.

But how can I change the space character, so that calibre will not touch the chapter title at all? Thank you very much for your help

[theducks]

I comment out ALL letter-spacing: lines in the CSS If I plan on using KEPUB.
CSS search

(letter-spacing:\s+.+?;)

CSS replace

/* \1 */

(I like to leave 'notes' of the mods I did to others work)

ADDED
If you don't use KEPUB, the standard EPUB to the device works fine on Kobos

FWIW I tried other kinds of spaces. It is the Kobo that messes up, I looked at the book code ON THE KOBO and it was good

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by ryder

…
When I choose the "remove spacing after paragraph" option, calibre takes the chapter and puts it to the left like it's the first word of the chapter, then comes the first word, so calibre indents it with the usual 1,5em like it's the second paragraph.

Only if the chapter headings use <p> and not <h1>…<h6> etc.

Originally Posted by ryder

But how can I change the space character, so that calibre will not touch the chapter title at all? Thank you very much for your help

Letter spacing is a command to the rendering engine, there is no actual spacing character used.


Some ebooks need manually edited.

[JSWolf]

Once you learn HTML/CSS and have had enough digging into the code of ePub, you really get to know what you want to do and it usually does not take all that long to fix up an eBook.

I did a lot of learning HTML/CSS from diving into the code of ePub eBooks.