Blank pages when opening this epub

[ghostyjack]

I've downloaded Trollslayer from the the Black Library free books and unfortunately the first two pages are blank. They appear fine in ADE but not in EPUBReader.

Link to Free books page is:
http://www.blacklibrary.com/Getting-...Downloads.html

[theducks]

Originally Posted by ghostyjack

I've downloaded Trollslayer from the the Black Library free books and unfortunately the first two pages are blank. They appear fine in ADE but not in EPUBReader.

Link to Free books page is:
http://www.blacklibrary.com/Getting-...Downloads.html

I just looked at the book in Sigil:

The first 2 pages are rendering Correct in Sigil and EPUBReader.
The reason: No textual or Image content in the Body of "FrontCover.html" or "title.html"

I am guessing ADE is skipping pages that do not have visible content
I am guessing that someone forgot to insert the image links (both images exist in the package) and were fairly easy to fix With Sigil (Current sigil does not allow re-using a image that exists in the package. I past a dummy image into place then switch to Code View and change the filename to the one in the package+ add a text value to the alt entry.

[ghostyjack]

That's just it, ADE isn't skipping the pages, it is in fact showing both the cover page and the second page with a title on it. EPUBReader shows them as blank pages.

If the textual or image content isn't there, how on earth am I seeing it then?

[ghostyjack]

I load it into Sigil and I agree, there is no ontent on the first two pages.

But im I unzip the file and read the HTML files directly, there in infact content to the pages; SVG data pointing at those image files.

This is all too wierd for me as two of my main epub software show blank first two pages (sigil even shows no content), but ADE correctly renders them.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by ghostyjack

I load it into Sigil and I agree, there is no ontent on the first two pages.

But im I unzip the file and read the HTML files directly, there in infact content to the pages; SVG data pointing at those image files.

This is all too wierd for me as two of my main epub software show blank first two pages (sigil even shows no content), but ADE correctly renders them.

Bingo! SVG

Sigil and some readers probably don't do SVG. (Sigil tends to 'tidy' (code) things up, which is why I did not see them .

[ghostyjack]

Well that would explain it then. I'll raise a defect with Valloric as Sigil shouldn't be deleting SVG code.

As for EPUBReader, I thought Firefox could handle SVG, unless of course EPUBReader blocks access to the SVG rendering function.

[mikelv]

Originally Posted by ghostyjack

I've downloaded Trollslayer from the the Black Library free books and unfortunately the first two pages are blank. They appear fine in ADE but not in EPUBReader.

I checked the epub. Firefox doesn't display the svgs, because of the file extension of the html page in which they are embedded. The pages are named *.html, if you rename them to *.xhtml, the svgs are displayed. In my opinion it should also work with the html extension, but I don't know what the Firefox developers reason for this behaviour is .

I checked additionally the svg code:

<svg:svg viewBox="0 0 600 800">
<svg:image xlink:href="images/9781841541006_FrontCover.jpg" 
transform="translate(0 0)" width="600" height="800" />
</svg:svg>

Why does the author not use a simple <img> tag for this? If I were him, I would do this anyway, because I guess that there are many epub reader out there, which don't support svg.

[ghostyjack]

Now that is odd behaviour, I'll have a go at manually adjusting the epub and I think I'll drop The Black Library a quick mail about this and see if they are aware about this book as the others work perfectly fine.

I agree about the image tag, until SVG support is improved across a wider range of reading devices, them <img> is a much better option.

Thanks Guys for looking at this.

[Valloric]

As I replied to the issue, the problem is caused by the namespace prefixes. So just remove the "svg:" start of every element and it will work correctly in Sigil (and Sigil will also render the SVG).

The underlying bug is with Tidy.

[ghostyjack]

I mailed the Black Library regarding this and they have responded saying the following:

"Thank you, we have been reviewing our eBooks process and indeed will not be including SVG images in the future."

So hopefully we wont see this issue cropping up any more from them.