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• • September 3, 2014 at 4:16 pm #70408
    James Collins

    Participant

    Hi,
    I’m pretty knew to ID and epubs so when an author was referred to me for help with epubs, I agreed to work for free, at least to begin with, since I need the experience to gain knowledge.

    He is the author and contracted with a different person to turn his MS Word file into epubs for uploading to Kindle, Nook, and iBooks. The person who did the conversion says the epubs are “perfect.” Well, they upload to Amazon and B&N for Kindle and Nook OK, but keep getting rejected by iBooks because the chapter files have spaces and other unauthorized characters (a dash) in them. I have no idea how the first person turned the original Word files into epubs – whether with ID or some other program.

    Is there a way to modify the chapter files to meet iBooks requirements without having to basically start over and convert the Word file(s) to ID and then to epub with no spaces in the chapter and other file names (for iBooks)?

    Thank you for any help on this.

  • September 10, 2014 at 12:13 pm #70517
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    James,

    One way, which I have playing with the last few days, is using Oxygen XML Editor. It allows you to, without unzipping the ePub, modify the ePub file (it even has ePubCheck built in so you can make sure its valid). You might try opening up your ePub, adding underscores or hyphens in place of spaces in the file names and in the links found in the toc.ncx, content.opf, and the table of contents HTML files and then just save your changes, run validation, and then you should be done. It might be tedious but probably better than starting over. If you are comfortable with zipping and unzipping your ePub, you might also try finding a script that you can replace the spaces in the file names with underscores/hyphens, and either modifying the links by hand or running a regex on each file or files (using TextEdit, Sublime Text, or another text editor found under this list https://www.digitalbookworld.com/resources-going-from-indesign-to-ebook/#editing) to replace those spaces in the hyperlinks.

    Oxygen XML download: https://www.oxygenxml.com/download.html
    Using Oxygen XML to edit your ePub: https://www.oxygenxml.com/xml_editor/epub.html

    Sigil might also work, I’ve heard it does some weird things to code (it has WYSIWYG functionality for those who dont know HTML/CSS), but I’ve never used it.
    Sigil: https://code.google.com/p/sigil/

    Best of luck to you!

  • September 16, 2014 at 12:14 pm #70625
    James Collins

    Participant

    Thanks very much, A.A.!

    I downloaded Oxygen XML and was able to figure out how to modify the files, TOC, etc fairly easily. I do greatly appreciate the recommendation as it’s a very good program.

    Unfortunately, the author in the meantime found another person to help him who took the original Word file and did all the work to convert to ePub again. I know her and she does really great work so it successfully uploaded to all sites.

    Again, thank you for the Oxygen links – very helpful and increased my knowledge and skills.

  • September 18, 2014 at 6:21 pm #70666
    Aaron Troia

    Participant

    No problem James, I’m glad to hear that worked for you!

  • September 25, 2014 at 6:53 am #70749
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    Hey there James, who is the ebook developer your friend turned to? That’d be an excellent resource to have.

    BTW I think you could’ve fixed it by doing batch search-and-replaces, maybe 15-30 minutes work.

    AM

  • September 25, 2014 at 7:17 am #70750
    James Collins

    Participant

    Hi Anne-Marie. The ebook developer is Sandra Williams, https://www.williamswriting.com/.

    I’m not sure where I would have done a batch search/replace, AM. All I had available was the ebook itself (unzipped). I did not have either the original Word or any in-between version, such as ID.

  • September 29, 2014 at 8:25 am #70802
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    You can do batch search/replace on all the files in a folder (such as the expanded epub folder) in many text utilities like Text Wrangler or BBEdit on a Mac, or NotePad++ on Windows.

    Thanks for the referral!

    AM

  • September 29, 2014 at 8:25 am #70803
    Anne-Marie Concepcion

    Member

    You can do batch search/replace on all the files in a folder (such as the expanded epub folder) in many text utilities like Text Wrangler or BBEdit on a Mac, or NotePad++ on Windows.

    Thanks for the referral!

    AM

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