jough / tools

The Standard Ebooks toolset for producing our ebook files

About

A collection of tools Standard Ebooks uses to produce its ebooks, including basic setup of ebooks, text processing, and build tools.

Installation

Several dependencies must be installed before you can use these tools. On Ubuntu 16.04, you can install everything with:

sudo apt install python3-pip xsltproc libxml2-utils xmlstarlet libxml-xpath-perl recode html-xml-utils python3-cssselect python3-regex python3-pip librsvg2-bin libimage-exiftool-perl python3-lxml zip epubcheck calibre
sudo pip3 install pyhyphen roman titlecase beautifulsoup4 smartypants
sudo python3 -c "exec(\"from hyphen import dictools\\ndictools.install('en_GB')\\ndictools.install('en_US')\")"

# Install required fonts
mkdir -p ~/.fonts/
wget -O ~/.fonts/LeagueSpartan-Bold.otf "https://github.com/theleagueof/league-spartan/blob/master/LeagueSpartan-Bold.otf?raw=true"
wget -O ~/.fonts/OFLGoudyStM.otf "https://github.com/theleagueof/sorts-mill-goudy/blob/master/OFLGoudyStM.otf?raw=true"
wget -O ~/.fonts/OFLGoudyStM-Italic.otf "https://github.com/theleagueof/sorts-mill-goudy/blob/master/OFLGoudyStM-Italic.otf?raw=true"
sudo fc-cache -fv

You can also install the dependencies locally via pip:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Tool descriptions

• british2american

  Try to convert British quote style to American quote style in DIRECTORY/src/epub/text/.

  Quotes must already be "typogrified"--i.e. curly.

  This script isn't perfect; proofreading is required, especially near closing quotes near to em-dashes.

• build

  Build an ebook from a Standard Ebook source directory.

• build-cover

  Build an ebook cover a Standard Ebook source directory and place the output in DIRECTORY/src/epub/images/.

• build-kobo

  Convert files in a Standard Ebooks source directory to be Kobo-compatible.

• clean

  Prettify source files in a Standard Ebook source directory, including canonicalizing XML and minifying SVGs. Note that this only prettifies the source code; it doesn't perform typography changes.

• create-draft

  Create a skeleton of a new Standard Ebook.

• dec2roman

  Convert a decimal number to a Roman numeral.

• endnotes2kindle

  Convert epub-friendly endnotes to Kindle-friendly popup endnotes.

• find-mismatched-diacritics

  Find words with mismatched diacritics in Standard Ebook source directories. For example, 'cafe' in one file and 'café' in another.

• find-unused-selectors

  Find unused local.css CSS selectors in Standard Ebook source directories.

• hyphenate

  Insert soft hyphens at syllable breaks in an XHTML file.

• interactive-sr

  A macro for calling Vim to interactively search and replace a regex on a list of files.

• make-url-safe

  Make a string URL-safe.

• modernize-spelling

  Modernize spelling of some archaic words, and replace words that may be archaically compounded with a dash to a more modern spelling. For example, replace "ash-tray" with "ashtray".

• ordinal

  Print the ordinal for one or more integers.

• prepare-release

  Calculate the ebook's word count, and update content.opf and colophon.xhtml with release and modified timestamps.

• print-manifest-and-spine

  Create a <manifest> and <spine> tag for content.opf based on the passed Standard Ebooks source directory and print to standard output.

• reading-ease

  Calculate the Flesch reading ease for a Standard Ebooks source directory.

• reorder-endnotes

  Increment the specified endnote and all following endnotes by 1.

• roman2dec

  Convert a Roman numeral to a decimal number.

• semanticate

  Apply some scriptable semantics rules from the Standard Ebooks semantics manual to a Standard Ebook source directory.

• simplify-tags

  Simplify some HTML and CSS to be more compatible with crappier reading systems (ADE I'm looking at you...)

• split-file

  Split an XHTML file into many files at all instances of <!--se:split-->, and include a header template for each file.

• titlecase

  Convert a string to titlecase.

• toc2kindle

  Flatten ToC to be at most 2 levels deep for Kindle compatibility. Generally only used by the build script and not called independently.

• typogrify

  Apply some scriptable typography rules from the Standard Ebooks typography manual to a Standard Ebook source directory.

• unicode-names

  Display Unicode code points, descriptions, and links to more details for each character in a string. Useful for differentiating between different flavors of spaces, dashes, and invisible characters like word joiners.

• update-asin

  Change the ASIN of a mobi/azw3 file.

• word-count

  Count the number of words in an HTML file and optionally categorize by length.

• view-modified

  Check all author directories in the current or specified directory to see if there are changes that need to be committed.

What a Standard Ebooks source directory looks like

Many of these tools act on Standard Ebooks source directories. Such directories have a consistent minimal structure:

.
|-images/
|--cover.jpg
|--cover.source.jpg
|--cover.svg
|--titlepage.svg
|-src/
|--epub/
|---css/
|----core.css
|----local.css
|---images/
|----cover.svg
|----titlepage.svg
|---text/
|---content.opf
|---onix.xml
|---toc.xhtml
|--META-INF/
|---container.xml
|--mimetype

./images/ contains source images for the cover and titlepages, as well as ebook-specific source images. Source images should be in their maximum available resolution, then compressed and placed in ./src/epub/images/ for distribution.

./src/epub/ contains the actual epub files.