Thank you for sharing these ePubs.

I'd strongly suggest that you use the open-source epubcheck validator (release 1.0.5 or later) to try to ensure that the ePubs you're producing follow the machine-enforceable elements of the ePub specification: http://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/

From looking at the epubcheck results, it looks like you're falling into a few common traps:

* The mimetype MUST be the first file in the archive (you're not ensuring that) and MUST be STORed rather than compressed (you are doing that)

* ePub (OPF) content MUST be valid against either DTBook or XHTML 1.1 (Strip @name, @width, and @clear and you'll be close)

* The stylesheet for your cover.html uses a fully-qualified URL rather than a relative file reference

It's come to my attention that I'm not actually resolving all the external references correctly. I'll try to fix that.

Thanks, Keith. I'll try to fix these errors as quickly as I can.

Curious as to why the RelaxNG spec made the cut, but not DocBook v5.0 or DocBook Publishers specs?! ;-)

Nice work, BTW. Cool stuff!

I'm not sure if this is the reason for Norm not converting the Publisher's spec, but when I pointed the tool to the spec on OASIS, I got only a cover.html file and no other content. I suspect there's some magic needed for OASIS specs, since I was able to generate (minus covers, since I'm not on a mac) the w3c xproc spec with no problem.

Norm, how did you process the OASIS specs? Did it take some extra steps?

We've recently been making conversions of W3C standards to print (as 6"x9" paperback books) -- e.g. The XML 1.0 Standard (5th Edition) and The XPath 2.0 Standard.

Although the main part of the conversion works well (we used XHTML -> LaTeX with a custom Ruby-based converter) we found that quite a lot of hand-tweaking was needed to get high-quality final output. For example, rotating very wide tables and formal grammars in the XPath standard to landscape, and dealing with other line-breaking issues.

I don't know how well these parts of an EPUB file would render on current devices with smaller screen sizes, but with a larger display it would be less of an issue.

I also like to have W3C specifications in ePub format and indeed the consistent layout the W3C uses is an advantage. For the conversion I use the following process:

- Open the spec with FireFox and save it to the desktop - Import the result in OpenOffice.org and export it to ODT

- Open the result again in OpenOffice.org

- Modify the styles "Heading 2" and "Heading 3" to give them a page-break before, which produces segments that are manageable by e-readers.

- Export to ePub with ODFToEPub.

Here are some examples:

XPath 2.0

XSLT 2.0

Here is also an example of an OASIS spec, which was produced directly from the ODT version:

ODF 1.1

Werner.