<manifest> elementThe <manifest> element is a required part of the epub spec. This should usually be generated by the print-manifest-and-spine tool and copy-and-pasted into the content.opf file. It must be in alphabetical order, which is handled for you by the print-manifest-and-spine tool.
The <manifest> element is a required part of the epub spec. This should usually be generated by the print-manifest tool and copy-and-pasted into the content.opf file. It must be in alphabetical order, which is handled for you by the print-manifest-and-spine tool.
<spine> elementThe <spine> element is a required part of the epub spec that defines the reading order of the files in the ebook. You can use the print-manifest-and-spine tool to generate a draft of the spine. The tool makes a best guess as to the spine order, but it cannot be 100% correct; please review the output and adjust the reading order accordingly.
The <spine> element is a required part of the epub spec that defines the reading order of the files in the ebook. You can use the print-spine tool to generate a draft of the spine. The tool makes a best guess as to the spine order, but it cannot be 100% correct; please review the output and adjust the reading order accordingly.
content.opf is the file that contains the ebook metadata like author, title, description, and reading order. Most of it will be filling in that basic information, and including links to various resources related to the text.
The content.opf is standardized. Please see our extensive Metadata Manual for details on how to fill out content.opf.
As you complete the metadata, you’ll have to order the spine and the manifest in this file. Fortunately, Standard Ebooks has a tool for that too: se print-manifest-and-spine. Run this on our source directory and, as you can guess, it’ll print out the <manifest> and <spine> tags for this work.
If you’re using a Mac, and thus the badly-behaved Finder program, you may find that it has carelessly polluted your work directory with useless .DS_Store files. Before continuing, you should find a better file manager program, then delete all of that litter with the following command. Otherwise, se print-manifest-and-spine will include that litter in its output and your epub won’t be valid.
As you complete the metadata, you’ll have to order the spine and the manifest in this file. Fortunately, Standard Ebooks tools for that too: se print-manifest and se print-spine. Run these on our source directory and, as you can guess, they’ll print out the <manifest> and <spine> tags for this work.
If you’re using a Mac, and thus the badly-behaved Finder program, you may find that it has carelessly polluted your work directory with useless .DS_Store files. Before continuing, you should find a better file manager program, then delete all of that litter with the following command. Otherwise, se print-manifest and se print-spine will include that litter in its output and your epub won’t be valid.
find . -name ".DS_Store" -type f -delete
Since this is the first time we’re editing content.opf, we’re OK with replacing both the manifest and spine tags with a guess at the correct contents. We can do this using the --in-place option. If we have to update the manifest or spine later, we can omit the option to print to standard output instead of altering content.opf directly.
se print-manifest-and-spine --in-place .
+
+ se print-manifest --in-place .
+ se print-spine --in-place .
+
The manifest is already in the correct order and doesn’t need to be edited. The spine, however, will have to be reordered to be in the correct reading order. Once you’ve done that, commit!
git add -A git commit -m "Complete content.opf"