Re: An ePub editor

Here are some excerpts of a post I made to another listserv.  I thought 
that those here interested in ePubEditor might me interested in these 
comments as well.

I have two target audiences for ePubEditor: people who have created an 
e-book in HTML format, and now want a quick and easy way to turn it into 
an ePub, and people who have ePubs that do not display well on their 
devices because of "over-styling" and who want to clean up those ePubs 
for their own purposes.

When you start the program some of the menu items are disabled, because 
no publication has been selected. If you select File->New, ePubEditor 
will start a new publication in the directory/folder you specify. At 
this point, the current tab will be the Manifest table (new as of 10/23/11).

The "Manifest" table will show a list of all the files that will be 
included in the publication. When you start a new ePub, you should see 
three files, ebook.css, toc.html, and cover.jpg. All three of these 
files should be marked with a red "stop" symbol indicating that while 
they are listed in the manifest, they do not exist on the file system. 
You can remove them from the manifest, or better yet you can create 
them. Once the files exist (and the window is refreshed) the red "stop" 
will turn to a green "check."

On this same tab there is an "Add" button. When you press this button, a 
file system browser will appear and allow you to add any file to the 
package. On this same tab there is an "Edit" button. When this button is 
pressed, ePubEditor attempts to launch the editor associated with the 
declared media-type. The association between Media-types and editors are 
stored in the properties file associated with the program, 
ePubEditor.ini. On my computer, text and text/css point to TextPad 5, 
image/jpeg points to IrfanView, and application/xhtml+xml, text/html, 
and text/x-oeb1-document all point to Microsoft's Visual Web Developer 
Express (that's the free one). By default, the only editor included in 
the properties file is "C:\Program Files(x86)\Windows 
NT\Accessories\wordpad.exe".

The Manifest shows all files that will become part of the publication, 
but only files listed in the "Content" will be presented to the reader. 
Order is unimportant in the Manifest, but items in the Content will be 
presented in the order they are listed. Therefore, on the Content tab 
there are buttons to move content up and down.

Metadata about the book can be entered or edited on the "Authors and 
Contributors" tab, or on the "Properties" tab. Every ePub must have at 
least on identifier which is globally unique, a title, and a language 
attribute.

Once your publication is internally consistent you may save it as an 
ePub. Caution: if you have opened an ePub, and press "Save" your 
previous file will be replaced. If you're discovering the capabilities 
of the program, be sure to use "Save As..." and put your new file in 
some other location.


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