jats2epub
Create validating ePub publications from journal articles marked up using the NISO JATS xml tagset.
This package was created in a project to create a new, xml-based workflow to publish OpenAccess articles in electronic journals in the ePub format.
As input it takes an article tagged in the Journal Archive Tag Suite (JATS) XML format, and optionally a folder with extra content to be copied into to the epub-structure (such as images). As output an ePub file and html-file is generated and optionally also a .mobi file converted from the epub file.
You might be interested in reading about this project in the article that is published in Code4lib: EPUB as publication format in Open Access journals: Tools and workflow. By Trude Eikebrokk, Tor Arne Dahl and Siri Kessel, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences. Read the article at Code4lib: http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/9462
This package uses XML Calabash (XProc processor) to process an XProc pipeline, process-jats.xpl that in turn transforms the xml-document in stages using a mix of xslt and xproc steps. Since a full automation can't be done in XProc yet, calling the XProc pipeline has been wrapped in a script. For windows, a .bat batchfile and for linux a shellscript. By running the command: jats2epub path-to-xmlfile path-to-folder[optional], the whole process is automated. Please see html readmes for more information.
The xslt-scripts used in this package are created by Tor-Arne Dahl, Trude Eikebrokk and Eirik Hanssen at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences.
The windows batch-files, GNU/Linux shellscripts, and the xproc-pipeline are written by Eirik Hanssen.
This package also uses xslt stylesheets developed by Piez Wendell for National Library of Medicine, stylesheets that are part of the JATS tools package. These scripts from the JATS tools package are located in the assets\jats-xslt folder.
This package is hosted on github: https://github.com/eirikhanssen/jats2epub
ssh-clone url: git@github.com:eirikhanssen/jats2epub.git
Author and maintainer of this readme and the jats2epub package on GitHub is Eirik Hanssen, Oslo and Akershus University
Contact: eirik dot hanssen at hioa dot no
Releases: 0.9 pre-release. This is the working version that was ready at the time of submitting the article.
Current: Several improvements have been made: Code has been cleaned up for better readability and several bugs have been fixed. It is now easier to troubleshoot, because all intermediate documents are saved in output_working folder after each run. To preview html-file that will be used for upload to html fulltext, just open output_working/60-webversion.html. All href/src links to stylesheets and images have been altered to work from this location.
Future possible additions to the project:
- Further code cleanup: Some issues have been fixed downstream instead of upstream. (A problem that has been fixed by modifying the erronous document instead of preventing the error from happening in the first place). It would be better to make sure the error didn't happen in the first place: - Problem with empty namespaces. - Problem with using element-citation elements for book-chapter type references.
- Implement a module to generate PDF from the base xml-file by using XSL-FO and ApacheFOP. This was in scope for the original project proposal, but has been put on hold for now. The journals provide PDF which they have converted from the .docx version of the article. Later with time permitting, a PDF-module could improve the consistency of the generated PDFs.
- Enhancements to html fulltext display:
- In the web browser context: When hovering above a footnote reference or a cited reference in the text, display a popup with the full contents of the footnote / reference in question. This could be implemented using JavaScript/CSS.
- Generate a clickable linked list with a table of contents (TOC) based on the document layout for easier navigation. The linked list TOC could be accessible as a drop-down menu with fixed CSS positioning. This could be implemented using JavaScript/CSS.
- ePub enhancements:
- review ePub css based on WAI guidelines for readability. Speficically look at line height and space between pharagraphs/tables.
- Look at css for displaying tables.