ePUB comic test

[Jellby]

Hi, this is a test of a comic in ePUB format. It's only the first 6 strips of Krazy Kat available from the Comic Strip Library. Since reading the whole page at the same time would be hard in 6" readers, I decided to put each panel on a separate page, this has the advantage of not seing what'll happen in the story until you reach there. A small image of the whole page is shown at the beginning of each strip, it is an image map where each panel links to the large version, but I don't know if any ePUB reader supports image maps.

Comments? Suggestions?

P.S. I've just tried with ADE and only the first and last items of the TOC are working, I can't see why

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by Jellby

P.S. I've just tried with ADE and only the first and last items of the TOC are working, I can't see why

Unless I'm missing something, the TOC works fine in ADE. I can click on every entry from 23 April to 28 May and it jumps to the correct comic.

[Vista SP1 64bit; also, ADE v1.7.1.1085]

[gwynevans]

Works here too, but it might be that if the ADE's not got a big enough window, jumping to some pages just shows the header then there's a page split, so it appears blank?

[Jellby]

Strange, it works fine now. The window was big enough, it was just the TOC links doing nothing, but it seems it was a temporary problem.

Do you think this is a good system for comics, at least for these comics?

[Jellby]

I think it was a problem with the anchor names starting with a number (that's not allowed).

This is a larger file with more strips... Any comments? Is it worth to continue with this "project"?

[Jellby]

No one?

[Jaro]

I have used sony eBook library to get it into my prs 505. It looks very nice.But the second part-some pictures have grey background.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by Jaro

I have used sony eBook library to get it into my prs 505. It looks very nice.But the second part-some pictures have grey background.

Can you tell me which ones? I feel the PNG support in the ADE engine (which Sony uses) is not complete, and I tried to optimize the size of the PNGs without reducing the quality...

[Jaro]

page 2 the good one is 12
page 5 the good one is 18
page 8 no one picture is without grey
page 13 the good one is 5
page 16 the good one is 11
page 18 no one picture is without grey
Its readabile and the gray backgroud difer in intensity.

[Jellby]

I think the problem appears when an image has less than 16 (?) colours, and I'm sure it's a bug in ADE, at least other browers and image viewers have no problem displaying those images.

Now, how should we report this to Adobe? (Peter?)

[ralphsnart]

There's a ePUB comic book test here.

[Anders]

Very interesting initiative. I have tried to find comics for ebooks some time.

I have made a epub of one of my comics. It is a "pantomime" comic, i.e. without words (that is how we call it in swedish, not sure you say that in english). Anyway it works fine in my prs300. I will publish it here on the site when I work out how to do that.

Generally speaking I think the japanese "manga" format should work fine on eReaders. No need to change the layout as it is already pocket book size.

Keep on the good work.

[Anders]

I finally understood how to attach files. So here goes my epub comic. I made it from the template on http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/tutorial.asp

If anybody wants to try it, I will be glad to get comments. It works fine on my prs-300. But as it has one of the smaller screens on the market, I would be interested to hear how it goes on bigger screens.

I will also try using the templates from Jellby and ralphsnart in this thread to see if it looks better

[charleski]

Looks good.
You might want to wrap the images in svg so that they scale and keep their aspect ratio whatever the aspect of the reader. Since your comic pages are all 449x649, try replacing the code of the body with
<svg version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" width="100%" height="100%" viewBox="0 0 449 649" preserveAspectRatio="xMidYMid meet" >
<image width="449" height="649" xlink:href="images/h01.jpg" />
</svg>
(Obviously change the 'h01.jpg' to point to the right image in each case.)

There are a few things you need to tidy up:
1) Change the encoding directive in your xhtml files (it's the first line) from
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
to
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
2) Remove all the unneeded files (toc blank.ncx etc), and definitely remove page-template.xpgt
3) Your xhtml files need a <title> element in the head, even if it's just blank, so add
<title />
to the heads of them all.
4) Your xhtml files don't actually load the css file and define all their styling information individually. You certainly want to change that. Remove
<style type="text/css" title="override_css">
@page {padding: 0pt; margin:0pt}
body { text-align: center; padding:0pt; margin: 0pt; }
div { margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt; }
</style>
and replace it with
<link rel="stylesheet" href="stylesheet.css" type="text/css" />
You'll probably want to put the @page and body definitions in your stylesheet file.
5) You don't actually have a toc.ncx file. You need one, even if it only contains one navpoint. The media-type declared for it in the opf needs to be "application/x-dtbncx+xml"
6) The opf file needs to include all the jpegs in the manifest section.

[Anders]

Thank you Charleski for having a look at it, and for all the advises.

I will try to make the changes this week-end. I am new to this. So far I just use other epub as templates and hope for the best. Really appreciate your help.