The Standard Ebooks project has a toolset that will help you produce an ebook. The toolset installs the se command, which has various subcommands related to creating Standard Ebooks. You can read the complete installation instructions, or if you already have pipx installed, run:
The Standard Ebooks project has a toolset that will help you produce an ebook. The toolset installs the se command, which has various subcommands related to creating Standard Ebooks. You can read the complete installation instructions, or if you already have pipx installed, run:
pipx install standardebooks
The toolset changes frequently, so if you’ve installed the toolset in the past, make sure to update the toolset before you start a new ebook:
pipx upgrade standardebooks
@@ -197,9 +197,9 @@ proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll
Works often include footnotes, either added by an annotator or as part of the work itself. Since ebooks don’t have a concept of a “page,” there’s no place for footnotes to go. Instead, we convert footnotes to a single endnotes file, which will provide popup references in the final epub.
-The endnotes file and the format for endnote links are standardized in the semantics manual.
+The endnotes file and the format for endnote links are standardized in the semantics manual.
If you find that you accidentally mis-ordered an endnote, never fear! se reorder-endnotes will allow you to quickly rearrange endnotes in your ebook.
If a work has illustrations besides the cover and title pages, we include a “list of illustrations” at the end of the book, after the endnotes but before the colophon. The LoI file is also standardized in the semantics manual.
+If a work has illustrations besides the cover and title pages, we include a “list of illustrations” at the end of the book, after the endnotes but before the colophon. The LoI file is also standardized in the semantics manual.
Jekyll doesn’t have any footnotes, endnotes, or illustrations, so we skip this step.
Use se semanticate to do some common cases for you:
se semanticate .
se semanticate tries its best to correctly add semantics, but sometimes it’s wrong. For that reason you should review the changes it made before accepting them:
git difftool
- Beyond that, adding semantics is mostly a by-hand process. See our semantics manual for a detailed list of the kinds of semantics we expect in a Standard Ebook.
+Beyond that, adding semantics is mostly a by-hand process. See the Standard Ebooks Manual of Style for a detailed list of the kinds of semantics we expect in a Standard Ebook.
Here’s a short list of some of the more common semantic issues you’ll encounter:
Semantics for italics: <em> should be used for when a passage is emphasized, as in when dialog is shouted or whispered. <i> is used for all other italics, with the appropriate semantic inflection. Older transcriptions usually use just <i> for both, so you must change them manually if necessary.
Semantics for italics: <em> should be used for when a passage is emphasized, as in when dialog is shouted or whispered. <i> is used for all other italics, with the appropriate semantic inflection. Older transcriptions usually use just <i> for both, so you must change them manually if necessary.
Semantics rules for chapter titles.
@@ -245,10 +245,10 @@ proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry JekyllWords or phrases in foreign languages should always be marked up with <i xml:lang="TAG">, where TAG is an IETF language tag. This app can help you look them up. If the text uses fictional or unspecific languages, use the “x-” prefix and make up a subtag yourself.
Semantics for poetry, verse, and song: Many Gutenberg productions use the <pre> tag to format poetry, verse, and song. This is, of course, semantically incorrect. See the Poetry section of our semantics manual for templates on how to semantically format poetry, verse, and song.
Semantics for poetry, verse, and song: Many Gutenberg productions use the <pre> tag to format poetry, verse, and song. This is, of course, semantically incorrect. See the Poetry section of the SEMOS for templates on how to semantically format poetry, verse, and song.
After you’ve added semantics according to the semantics manual, do another commit.
git add -A git commit -m "Semanticate"
+ After you’ve added semantics according to the Standard Ebooks Manual of Style, do another commit.
git add -A git commit -m "Semanticate"
<title> elementsIf you commit non-public-domain cover art, you’ll have to rebase your repository to remove the art from its history. This is complicated, dangerous, and annoying, and you’ll be tempted to give up.
Contact us first with page scans verifying your cover art’s public domain status before you commit your cover art!
-Cover images for Standard Ebooks books have a standardized layout. The bulk of the work you’ll be doing is locating a suitable public domain painting to use. See our complete art manual for details on assembling a cover image.
+Cover images for Standard Ebooks books have a standardized layout. The bulk of the work you’ll be doing is locating a suitable public domain painting to use. See the Art and Images section of the Standard Ebooks Manual of Style for details on assembling a cover image.
As you search for an image, keep the following in mind:
Titlepage images for Standard Ebooks books are also standardized. See our the art manual for details.
+Titlepage images for Standard Ebooks books are also standardized. See our the Art and Images section of the Standard Ebooks Manual of Style for details.
se create-draft already created a completed titlepage for you. If the way it arranged the lines doesn’t look great, you can always edit the titlepage to make the arrangement of words on each line more aesthetically pleasing. Don’t use a vector editing program like Inkscape to edit it. Instead, open it up in your favorite text editor and type the values in directly.
The source images for both the cover and the titlepage are kept in ./images/. Since the source images refer to installed fonts, and since we can’t include those fonts in our final ebook without having to include a license, we have to convert that text to paths for final distribution. se build-images does just that.
se build-images .
se build-images takes both ./images/cover.svg and ./images/titlepage.svg, converts text to paths, and embeds the cover jpg. The output goes to ./src/epub/images/.
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.
The content.opf is standardized. See the Metadata section of the Standard Ebooks Manual of Style 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 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> elements 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