problem with error RSC-005

[Gregg Bell]

I took a short Word .doc, turned it into an .odt in LO then turned that into an .html and opened that in Sigil. When I ran the Epub check I got this:



I couldln't figure out what it wanted. Thanks.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

I took a short Word .doc, turned it into an .odt in LO then turned that into an .html and opened that in Sigil. When I ran the Epub check I got this:



I couldln't figure out what it wanted. Thanks.

I don't think you can have a naked guide section.
Set the starting semantics (semantics fills in the guide entries) or remove the unused tags

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

I took a short Word .doc, turned it into an .odt in LO then turned that into an .html and opened that in Sigil. When I ran the Epub check I got this:
<image deleted for repetition>
I couldn't figure out what it wanted. Thanks.

It wants reference items between the <guide> and </guide>. They may be useful if you are uploading to Kindlegen where you can define the cover, TOC and start of reading location. Most epub reading systems disregard them.

Sample from content.opf in a book I was recently editing:

  <guide>
    <reference type="toc" title="Table of Contents" href="Text/part0001.xhtml"/>
    <reference type="text" title="Beginning" href="Text/part0004.xhtml"/>
    <reference type="cover" title="Cover" href="Text/titlepage.xhtml"/>
  </guide>

Personally, the few times that error has come up, I've simply copied/pasted the above lines and then edited the hrefs. It's easier for me than right-clicking on multiple files and adding the appropriate semantic.

Edit: If you are feeling really bored, here's the link to the Epub 2.0.1 spec item: Section 2.6: Guide

[DiapDealer]

That error is actually pretty new. Whatever version of EpubCheck came with the previous version of Doitsu's plugin didn't flag the empty guide element as an error in epub2. It's a little odd that it does flag it as an error given the wording of the spec:

Within the package there may be one guide element, containing one or more reference elements.

Reading Systems are not required to use the guide element in any way.

It's (the guide element) deprecated (and completely optional) in epub3.

EpubCheck doesn't bark at all if the guide element is left out entirely, but of course Sigil adds it back in during its parsing. I wonder what changed to make them start flagging empty guides in epub2? That basically renders Sigil's default blank epub2 as invalid right out of the gate.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

That error is actually pretty new. Whatever version of EpubCheck came with the previous version of Doitsu's plugin didn't flag the empty guide element as an error in epub2. It's a little odd that it does flag it as error given the wording of the spec:

Emphasis added.

From how I read the spec, no guide element is fine. If you have a guide element, it must have at least one reference element. The only three references I worry about are the ones mentioned as being used by Amazon and then only for books that will be uploaded to Amazon.

[DiapDealer]

I understand why they may not want an empty guide section, I just don't understand why now (the end of Nov 2018). It wasn't an error until EpubCheck 4.1. The wording of the 2.01 spec hasn't changed, so why, suddenly, has their interpretation of it? Sigil's created tons of epubs with empty guide items that all passed EpubCheck cleanly up until nearly the end of 2018. It doesn't make sense a lot of sense to me. But then, it clearly doesn't have to.

[KevinH]

This was only an error under epub3. Code was addd to OPFParser.cpp to skip xml generation of an empty guide but only for epub3. So something changed the epub2 interpretation un epubcheck.

See src/ResourceObjects/OPFParser.cpp

if ((m_guide.size() > 0) || (m_package.m_version.startsWith("2"))) {
    xmlres << "  <guide>\n";
    foreach(GuideEntry ge, m_guide) {
      xmlres << ge.convert_to_xml();
    }
    xmlres << "  </guide>\n";
  }

So we could remove the check above for epub2 that allows empty guide items.
That said, epubcheck should not be changing how it checks epub2 after the fact unless it is a bug (and it was not under epub2).

[Gregg Bell]

Thanks a lot guys. I deleted the guide tags but when I saved it they came back. So I added a Copyright Page and a Title Page and saved and then I had that stuff in the guide tags and Epub Check was happy. (And so was I. )

[KevinH]

BTW, this change to epubcheck was made because of this bug report:

https://github.com/w3c/epubcheck/issues/663

So we will need to remove empty guide elements for epub2 as well. This will probably impact plugin code that generates the opf on the fly as well.

I will look into making those fixes in time for our next release.

KevinH

[KevinH]

FWIW, I just pushed fixes for this to remove empty guide elements for epub2 (already happened under epub3) so that Sigil generates empty epubs that will pass epubcheck 4..

So this should be fixed in master.