RH7 project upgraded to RH8 won't output .epub

[Guest]

I want to make a project available as an epub edition. I've upgraded to RH8 and imported the epub generator script and the zip programme. When I open my project (which was created in RH7) I upgrade it so it will work in RH8. I run the script and generate an epub file but on that is only 560kb big, which seems small for my project. If I try to open it it crashes Adobe Digital Editions.

I can create a new test project of a few pages and get this to work, so it is clearly not the installation but the project that is the problem.

My question is, how do I find out what is causing the conversion to fail? My project is quite complex with lots of images, footnotes, internal links and pop-ups so I don't really want to have to recreate the whole thing in RH8.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Have you tried generating any other forms of output like WebHelp or AIR Help? If they have issues too, it might help you narrow down where the project is choking at.

[Guest]

Thanks for replying. I did try that and, though it took quite a while, I was able to output webhelp, which worked.

[MergeThis]

Recreating? No. Reconfiguring? Absolutely.

Keep in mind that much of what you listed will be too large and complex for potentially really, really small screens. What you'll probably need to do is conditionalize many of those elements (large images and popups, footnotes, etc.) that you will then exclude from the epub generation.

Good luck,

Leon

[Willam_van_Weelden]

Hi,

I agree with Leon. Especially popups/dropdowns and script behaviour should be excluded from epub generation. Also, try opening the epub with Sigil (http://code.google.com/p/sigil/).This may help you sniff out the problem. (The online manual also provides info on the epub file format.)

Greet,

Willam

[Guest]

I understand. There's no way my project (which is in fact a book when you come right down to it) would work particularly well on a small screen. Unfortunately, without the images and pop-ups it wouldn't work either. I think we were assuming that it would be read on ebook readers, Kindles and ipads, which would have a screen size which would allow these features to work. As an experiment I downloaded a number of medical textbooks to my Kindle. Wow! So many of them are awful - ugly and difficult to work with. How Amazon get away with charging so much for so little amazes me.

Time for a rethink, I think.

[MergeThis]

That's what we do best, here...send people away to rethink!

As you rethink the project, you might reconsider tailoring the content for epub so that it could actually be quite useful for those users viewing on a smaller screen.

Actually, this rethinking could be a beneficial two-way street: the epub formatting might prompt you to reformat across the board, thereby producing a leaner primary output. Think about it. As I like to say about extensive DHTML & JavaScript elements: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

Good luck,

Leon