EPUB tools

In this chapter we introduce the available tools to support the process of creating an EPUB publication. Accessibility website of the Publications Office of the European Union: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/accessibility TRANSCRIPT (shorten) There are many tools available that support the process of creating an electronic publication, known as an EPUB. Basically, these can be sorted into the following four categories. ‒ Text-processing programs, such as LibreOffice, capable of exporting documents to EPUB format, although you might need to fine-tune your EPUB to make it accessible. ‒ E-book file format converters, such as Calibre. With this tool you can use Word as the base for your publication. ‒ Native WYSIWYG EPUB editors offer the most user-friendly experience for editing an e-book. For example, Sigil. ‒ Code editors, such as BBEdit. This approach requires the most know-how, but offers the greatest level of control. LIBREOFFICE: File, Export As and Export as EPUB. A dialogue box opens requesting some parameters and metadata information: version 3; split at every level 1 heading; and Reflowable. We can select an image as a cover image: JPEG, PNG or SVG format. The metadata block allows for the configuration of the unique identifier, title, author, language and date of creation. The title was not used at the head of the document. The level 1 heading was not exported as such. The image has lost its alternative text. The list is now a set of paragraphs. Exporting from LibreOffice: quick result, but poor quality. You might need to invest additional work into the result to get a properly accessible file. CALIBRE is an open-source software with a rich set of features related to e-books. We add a new book created in Word. In Edit metadata we can edit the title, its short version, the author and its short version. If your document belongs to a series, you can add the title of the series and the sequence number of the document. We choose a different cover. You can add and manage some tags, enter a unique identifier for your publication (ISBN), creation date, publishing date, publisher, language and comments to your book. To export it, click Convert books. The input format DOCX is on the left. On the right we can choose the output format: EPUB. The Look and feel options can change the default fonts, text, layout and styling behaviour. The Heuristic processing scans a book and tries to repair common problems automatically. This may influence line wrapping, automatic heading detection and correction or styling. We leave this deactivated. With Page setup, we can optimise the layout for specific readers. We choose the default profiles. Structure detection allows us to set additional information to build the structure of the document: we want to have a new page at every level 2 heading. The Table of contents can be created automatically using the headings of levels 1, 2 and 3. We press OK. Once finished, the EPUB format is added to the formats list. We click on the EPUB text and the document opens. We are satisfied with the result. Calibre is an excellent tool for managing e-books. SIGIL is an open-source EPUB e-book editor, which organises the EPUB bundle and its resources. PageEdit can edit the web-based content using a WYSIWYG approach. Here we open the e-book we have just created. We can edit the source code and create code for headings, paragraphs and lists. There is a button to forward our page to the external XHTML editor. Once we press this button, PageEdit starts, offering us a real WYSIWYG editor. The toolbar in the editor has the same functions than Sigil and a code inspector to edit and view the resulting code in parallel. Once we save our changes in PageEdit, the code gets updated in Sigil. In this way, we can jump back and forth between Sigil and PageEdit to update the book’s content. Sigil is a reliable and easy-to-use tool, but it has its limits: it is not possible to add alternative text directly when managing the images, and the metadata editor does not show the information that makes the e-book discoverable. CODE EDITORS require expert knowledge.