Editing and creating EPUB files

[holyschist]

I recently picked up a used Sony PRS-600 to try out ereaders properly, and so far I like it. However, I have noticed that EPUB files converted from PDF annoy the hell out of me, because they have hard page breaks, which do not coincide with ereader pages on my preferred font size. So I have two questions:

1) What's the easiest way to edit EPUB files created by someone else to add a table of contents, fix formatting issues and typos, etc.?

2) What's the easiest way to create basic EPUB files from scratch, if one felt inclined to do so? (No images, no fancy formatting.)

I could do it entirely by hand, but that seems less than efficient--I'd rather generate the file automatically and clean up by hand if necessary. I'm using a Mac, current operating system, and I do have Adobe InDesign (CS3), but that sounds like it might be overkill. Free is good.

Has anyone tried Sigil or eCub? Have another favorite EPUB editor/creator?

Also--does anyone happen to know how the PRS-600 handles epub ebooks that were originally created from HTML that had non-Roman unicode characters (e.g. Chinese)? I know I am going to run into this on occasion. Do ebooks with non-Roman characters have to be PDFs to display correctly?

Thanks!

Comments

[quivo]

I've generally been used to creating ePubs by hand and only opening them in Sigil for epubcheck and so forth, but I can definitely recommend you try out a file in Sigil and see how that works. The UI and workflow is fairly simple to get along with, as far as I remember. Editing ePubs 'by hand' i.e. unzipping the file and editing its contents in a robust text editor is only as efficient as your macros and general familiarity with that text editor can make you, and if you're not comfortable with directly editing XML and XHTML, it would be better to just go with Sigil.

As far as the character question, I really have no idea, sorry. Maybe try searching the Mobileread forums? If anyone knows how to deal with that, they'll probably have posted about it there.

[holyschist]

I'm comfortable with directly editing XHTML, and could pick up XML quickly, but I haven't done anything before that required macros for efficiency, so that would be new.

[quivo]

Honestly, heavy use of find-and-replace usually fixes the problems I usually come across when editing fanfic files in HTML-- macros are just an example of the sort of thing that can make such editing a bit faster. Like inverarity said, you do tend to end up needing to edit epub files by hand in certain cases.

In your case, the hard page breaks created in the PDF->ePub conversion will probably be easier to take out by finding the offending tags in the html source and find/replacing them out. Sigil lets you edit the html files directly, IIRC, so you would probably be able to switch between editing out formatting errors and typos in their WYSIWYG mode, and taking out page breaks in the other.