ePub

TODO: This page is work in progress and an update to the current pages Epub and Epub_Sample. (See: To-Do List)

< XML | Export | Old ePub docs | Old ePub Sample >

The ePub facilities of ConTeXt are based on its Export of XML/XHTML. Make sure you get useful export output from your project before you try ePub.

Documentation about ePub

• Wikipedia entry with some examples
• Open Packaging Format (OPF) 2.0.1 specs; contains also information about NCX
• ePub3 ISO/IEC TS 30135-1:2014 (Buy specs for 118 CHF?)
• ePub Check validator (most validation tools are based on this)

Minimal ePub

If you already ran ConTeXt on your project and got the file structure as described in Export, you can run mtxrun --script epub --make minimal to get a structure like:

minimal.epub
minimal-epub
├── META-INF
│   └── container.xml
├── OEBPS
│   ├── cover.xhtml
│   ├── images
│   ├── minimal-div.html
│   ├── minimal.opf
│   ├── nav.xhtml
│   ├── styles
│   │   ├── minimal-defaults.css
│   │   ├── minimal-fonts.css
│   │   ├── minimal-images.css
│   │   └── minimal-styles.css
│   └── toc.ncx
└── mimetype

• .epub: The epub file is just a zipped version of the directory structure.
• mimetype: contains only "application/epub+zip"
• container.xml points to the root file "minimal.opf"
• cover.xhtml is the cover image shown by ePub readers
• -div.html: your content
• .opf: list of all resources, this keeps the "book" together. See also OPF specs.
• .ncx: table of contents

Compressing the structure

The file structure outlined above gets packaged into a ZIP archive with the .epub extension.

• mimetype must be the first directory entry of the archive.
• You must not use "extra file attributes", e.g. from MacOS (AKA resource forks) or NTFS; use the X parameter of zip.
• You don’t want some other lurking files like MacOS’s .DS_Store directory information or PDF images; exclude them from recursive packaging.

   EPUB=minimal.epub
   zip -u9X  $EPUB mimetype
   zip -u9X  $EPUB META-INF/container.xml
   zip -u9rX $EPUB OEBPS -x OEBPS/.DS_Store OEBPS/Text/.DS_Store OEBPS/Images/.DS_Store "*/.DS_Store" "OEBPS/Images/*.pdf"

TODO

Write about

• Cover
• ToC
• Readers
• Styling
• Images
• Better workflow