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I found this out last week when I bought a Kobo Forma and started converting all of my favourite Markdown documents to epub to stick on there. Calibre even lets you create a TOC by specifying the header regex (#, ##, etc for Markdown), it's great! had to edit a few manually to tweak layout and Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/) has a nice editor for epubs built in.
It's all at a very approachable level, too. I had to write an epub-maker as a necessary component for a project, and it turned out to be ~150 lines of python. You have to make a few indexes in XML and stick them into a zip file, basically.
Hey I did this, too! I forgot until just now :)
https://github.com/phuff/epub_builder
I built it because I wanted to have something that made a daily brief news paper that was personalized and sent to my kindle. It makes an epub and uses kindlegen to convert it to a .mobi. There's a lot of fun epub formatting stuff you can do.
Here's the system that makes the daily newspaper, but it's been so long I'm not sure it's actually functional code outside of my production version:
Hey I did this, too! I forgot until just now :)
https://github.com/phuff/epub_builder
I built it because I wanted to have something that made a daily brief news paper that was personalized and sent to my kindle. It makes an epub and uses kindlegen to convert it to a .mobi. There's a lot of fun epub formatting stuff you can do.
Here's the system that makes the daily newspaper, but it's been so long I'm not sure it's actually functional code outside of my production version:
There's a few JS libraries that allows you to basically have the same functionality, example: https://github.com/futurepress/epubjs-reader/
I'll give a shoutout to some other excellent software.
The first is the "Standard Ebooks"[1] toolset, which is a suite of Python scripts to create, process, and build ebooks in all common formats. The results on the Standard Ebooks site speak for themselves. They're impeccable in every way, and far better than many big name, commercially produced efforts.
How to use: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste...
The second is Sigil, which is a great editor if you prefer to work with a GUI:
How to use: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste...
The second is Sigil, which is a great editor if you prefer to work with a GUI:
I've worked on a ePub parse and renderer and the issues you're describing sound pretty familiar.
The three main components of the ePub (aside from the actual pages) are the TOC, the spine and the manifest. The manifest basically tells you where everything is, the TOC is the table of contents which can link to various pages and the spine gives you the traversal order.
Some mistakes I've seen are using the TOC to traverse the book. Using the spine to traverse the book but not handling hidden pages properly. Not handling two page spread properly.
So yeah the spec is nuanced and it would be easy to make a reader that worked with a lot of books but then had weird issues on another set of books that aren't particularly different.
I recall using this repo (https://github.com/IDPF/epub3-samples) to test specific functionality to make sure it was in line with the spec.
