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. 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.
As you complete the metadata, you’ll have to order the spine and the manifest in this file. Fortunately, Standard Ebooks has 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
Since this is the first time we’re editing content.opf, we’re OK with replacing both the manifest and spine elements 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.