OPS 2.0 Publication of "My Ántonia" Now Available

[IDPF]

The following sample OPS 2.0 file was submitted to the IDPF by Jon Noring of DigitalPulp Publishing. We thank Jon for this submission and welcome others. A full description of the file from Jon is below [Note: as of 03-May-2007 this epub has been updated to the second draft after feedback from several people. Thanks especially to Garth and Peter]:

From Jon Noring, DigitalPulp Publishing:

Everyone,

DigitalPulp Publishing is pleased to release its second draft OPS 2.0 Publication of Willa Cather's "My Ántonia." This book is being freely distributed in the new IDPF OCF Container as a zip-conforming "epub". It may be freely downloaded from the IDPF web site (thanks Nick!) at:

http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops/samples/myantonia.epub

Of course, I welcome feedback on this draft Publication, regarding both conformance to the OPS 2.0, OPF 2.0, and DTBook/NCX specs, as well as recommended improvements. It may be viewed using the latest Adobe Digital Editions beta, and hopefully soon OSoft's dotReader. It may also be unzipped (just open it with a zip utility) and the individual XHTML files rendering in a web browser.

This Publication includes some of the bells and whistles supported by OPS/OPF 2.0. Here's the main ones that come to mind:

1) NCX included!

This NCX includes both a Table of Contents and a List of Illustrations. (Note that the content documents are XHTML 1.1, not DTBook, so this might be the first "blessed" use of NCX for non-DTBook content documents. George?)

2) Out-of-spine content, with multiple content documents in the spine.

(The 'linear="no"' attribute value is applied to two of the spine <itemref>.)

3) Guide included.

4) Pretty extensive Dublin Core metadata.


Notable OPS features not used in this draft version of the Publication:

1) Islands (most everyone knows how I feel about Islands! The only Island I'm interested in is the Big Island of Hawaii.)

2) SVG (the nature of this work did not require SVG media.)

3) Embedded fonts (if Adobe will assist, maybe I will tweak this Publication to embed a nice font. I love Adobe Garamond!)

4) Tours (deprecated anyway...best invoked in the future through NCX or whatever will be its equivalent.)

5) DTBook Content Documents. (The XHTML 1.1 documents use strict structural markup, so they are, in spirit, comparable to DTBook documents.)

6) Fallbacks (no need for any.)

Look forward to your comments!

Jon Noring
DigitalPulp Publishing

[b.wolterding]

This may be only a little detail, but the myantonia.epub file does not fully conform with the OCF 1.0 specification.

By the specification, the introductory "mimetype" file of the container must hold the string "application/epub+zip", without whitespace. In this case, however, its content is "application/epub+zip<carriage return><line feed>".

Applications which check the mime type header for validity may not recognize the file as valid. (For example, Esciurus rejects it in the current version.)