CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlxmlepub3calibre
finks213
finks213

Reputation: 11

Creating an Epub from scratch

I am making a childen's illustrated books with links on the pages...like a Choose Your Own Adventure book for kids.

I have created a "Book Title" Folder. Inside of that folder is an OEBPS Folder, with the images, html text files, audio, and 'content.opf" file.

There's also the META-INF folder with the container.xml file inside.

folder/
    META-INF/
        container.xml
    mimetype
    OEBPS/
        content.opf
        images
        text
        music
        css

But I can't figure out how to turn it all into an epub. I'm sure the html is right. But Calibre just won't take everything like it should and create it.

Any other ideas or suggestions?

I tried 'adding book' in calibre, and it was supposed to read everything in the Book's folder and compile it into an ebook...but it did not. It seemed to only find image47 and Page 47.html

The Content.opf fille includes this code -

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<package version="3.0" unique-identifier="bookid" xmlns="http://www.idpf.org/2007/opf">
  <metadata xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
    <dc:title>The Rainbow Stone</dc:title>
    <dc:creator>My Name</dc:creator>
    <dc:publisher>Constellation Publishing</dc:publisher>
    <dc:language>en-US</dc:language>
    <dc:description>A magical story about a rainbow stone</dc:description>
    <dc:identifier id="bookid">urn:uuid:550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000</dc:identifier>
  </metadata>
  <manifest>
    <item id="css1" href="Making Smaller Images.css" media-type="text/css"/>
    <item id="css2" href="Size for Images.css" media-type="text/css"/>
    <item id="audio1" href="Rainbow Stone Music.mp3" media-type="audio/mpeg"/>
    <item id="cover" href="Page 1.html" media-type="application/xhtml+xml"/>
    <item id="page2" href="Page 2.html" media-type="application/xhtml+xml"/>
    <!-- add more pages here -->(these went up to page 66)
    <item id="image1" href="image1.jpg" media-type="image/jpeg"/>
    <item id="image2" href="image2.jpg" media-type="image/jpeg"/>
    <!-- add more images here -->(these went up to image 66)
  </manifest>
  <spine>
    <itemref idref="cover"/>
    <itemref idref="page1"/>
    <itemref idref="page2"/>
    <!-- add more pages here -->(these went up to page 66)
  </spine>
</package>

Inside the Meta-INF folder is the container.xml file.

This code is -

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<container version="1.0" xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:opendocument:xmlns:container">
  <rootfiles>
    <rootfile full-path="OEBPS/content.opf" media-type="application/oebps-package+xml"/>
  </rootfiles>
</container>

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1042

Answers (2)

Sylvain Jallard
Sylvain Jallard

Reputation: 1

Late to the party to answer, but if you're still into this kind of projects, Sigil epub editor is a fantastic opensource tool : https://sigil-ebook.com/

Sigil allows you to edit existing epubs or, like in your case, to create an epub from scratch, with the added benefit of scaffolding it for you, so you'd just have to import your xhtml files, images, audio, css, etc. into the document in Sigil, correct paths if necessary (it has great find/replace functionalities, regexp supported), it manages the manifest for you (but you can edit it too). It can also call external tools for e.g. editing the xhtml pages with a visual editor (they also develop PageEdit that can do that).

It has its own epub format checker, and if you need a more serious one, they support EpubCheck and Daisy ACE via plugins. These tools will point you to the file/line causing format/standard compliance errors.

Upvotes: -3

Daktari
Daktari

Reputation: 35

To create an epub file that can be imported into Calibre, the files in your folder directory need to be bundled in a zip file.

Using the zip command:

zip -r name_of_my_book.epub folder

where:

  • -r: travel the directory structure recursively
  • name_of_my_book.epub: name of the epub
  • folder: the directory containing the files to be turned into an epub

Upvotes: 1

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