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Create an empty epub in calibre or vellum or any other editor that will create epubs for you; then unzip it and edit it raw. You can do the same thing with a p

Create an empty epub in calibre or vellum or any other editor that will create epubs for you; then unzip it and edit it raw. You can do the same thing with a professionally published epub. In either case, you can rip out the metadata files (opf, ncx, etc.) and create templates from them, which you can reuse in your own projects without beginning in an epub editor or generator. You still probably want to run an epub through checking before you publish it, to make sure the metadata is consistent with the contents, and that you're not violating epub[23] rules (unless you know the standard perfectly as it applies to to subset you're using, and you never make any mistakes), but you don't have to be using any bloated tooling during the main phase of writing and editing the book.

chrisfinazzo 6y ago
That would work, up until I actually try to re-zip the contents. Last I looked at the spec, it requires things to be done in a particular order (as @tyingq's link indicates) and although I've used pandoc to convert some other documents, coming up with the proper incantation to feed into it seems like more trouble than just doing it yourself. More to the point, things like my Oral Defense required certain elements to be on a given page (e.g, p.1-2 were front matter and the text began on p.3) and I don't know if that kind of control is possible in pandoc. With regard to validation, there used to be a web form at validator.idpf.org which let you upload a finished book and it would scan for errors, but that page seems to be gone. I don't doubt that epubcheck works, it's just a shame that it requires a huge download to enable its functionality and one which doesn't really play well in macOS. I'm perfectly ok with doing the creation and editing by hand, but come on, this is a UNIX system (!) and the absence of a better command line tool for validating output is imho inexcusable.

chrisfinazzo 6y ago

That would work, up until I actually try to re-zip the contents. Last I looked at the spec, it requires things to be done in a particular order (as @tyingq's link indicates) and although I've used pandoc to convert some other documents, coming up with the proper incantation to feed into it seems like more trouble than just doing it yourself. More to the point, things like my Oral Defense required certain elements to be on a given page (e.g, p.1-2 were front matter and the text began on p.3) and I don't know if that kind of control is possible in pandoc. With regard to validation, there used to be a web form at validator.idpf.org which let you upload a finished book and it would scan for errors, but that page seems to be gone. I don't doubt that epubcheck works, it's just a shame that it requires a huge download to enable its functionality and one which doesn't really play well in macOS. I'm perfectly ok with doing the creation and editing by hand, but come on, this is a UNIX system (!) and the absence of a better command line tool for validating output is imho inexcusable.