Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Standards, and Adhering to them

Many a times during various phases of my career, I have faced many situations where I have hated to work with standards. Today as I see it, Standards are a must. be it eBook Production, Publishing or Secure Document Management.

So many times I have had this question in mind, everyone is talking about creation of eBooks, Workflows, however I have seen no one talking about Section 508 compliance, or any certification of Production for authenticity of content. For eg. in Singapore any document that is digitized or is digitally created, and needs to be produced in court, needs to be certified under the Evidence Act of Singapore.

In the US documents that are produced need to be compliant to the Section 508 for making the content available for the physical impaired people.

My question, is it that difficult to comply to standards. Today ePUB is sweeping everyone of their feet, however it is a standard by itself.

So many people talking about ePUB and the readers on which they can be read on, not one note have I seen about making it available to the physically impaired people. I may be wrong as I cannot read or see the billions of notes that are being made all over the world, but certainly I am not seeing them in the main stream.

For me all standards compliance is very important. Today there are standards that have been made flexible for certain sectors, people should be taking advantage of this and should increase the number of audience/readers, to their works.

Standards are the way to go.... for me atleast.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

ePUB Packaging

Umpteen times I have seen, heard or read, about how to package an ePUB.

A Wikipedia link actually details about the ePUB format as well as the packaging: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB

However what it does not explain is the answer to the question: I selected all my files and created a zip out of it, renamed it as .epub but still it doesnt work?

Here is the structure of the ePUB package (right out from the Wikipedia article).

--ZIP Container--
mimetype
META-INF/
container.xml
OPS/
book.opf
chapter1.xhtml
ch1-pic.png
css/
style.css
myfont.otf
If you have created a zip and it has all the above components and still it does not display as an ePUB file. These are the things that probably have gone wrong.

1) You have created a zip of the folder containing the files. If this is the case get inside the folder, select all files and create the zip.
2) You have done the right thing with creating the zip file, yet it does not display the ePUB file, perform this action,
  • Ctrl + A to select all
  • Click once on mimetype to de-select it
  • Click mimetype to select it
  • then create the zip
Whenever you open the zip file using Winzip or Winrar the mimetype must be the first file. And yes don't zip the folder zip the contents of the folder (after making sure all the necessary components, ie files and the content within the file is as per the standard)

VY