I am generating a multi-chapter eBook for Kindle Fire by first generating a well-formed xhtml-based EPUB 3.0 format file and then converting the .epub file to .mobi w/ Kindle Previewer and/or kindlegen. The generated .mobi file transfers properly to the Kindle and looks entirely correct. The problem is that my generated file never produces the "Learning Reading Speed" status at the bottom or the actual estimate of reading time. The reading speed feature never seems to get activated for any .mobi file generated with kindlegen. I'm aware that status area cycles through various features/statuses by pressing the status area on the reader screen and am certain that the feature is never activated.
I have generated an alternate version of the .mobi file using Calibre and the reading speed feature is enabled, however the format of the output file is heavily altered and is not consistent with the kindlegen format.
What is the key to generating a Kindle .mobi file with kindlegen that supports the reading speed feature?
I finally discovered the answer, which is that the generated .mobi file needs two tags manually added, 113 ASIN and 501 CDEContentType = EBOK, in the correct primary header of the .mobi file.
The tag information is published elsewhere, but often overlooks that a kindlegen generated .mobi file can have two versions of the same book embedded within the .mobi file, each with a primary header. If the tags are added to the first primary header (typically a v6 header) but not the second primary header (typically a v8 header), the Kindle device will not recognize the tags.
In my case, the tags needed to be added to the second primary header which allowed the Kindle device to treat the file as a book rather than a document. Most .mobi tag editors reference the first primary header only, which can cause confusion. Alternately, the .mobi could be split into two files in which case the tags could be manually added to the primary header of the relevant post-split file.
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I am using VFR reader to display my pdf's. I need to extract the Table of Contents on a button click and display it in a tableview then it should lead to the respective pages while tapping on each.
Parsing the PDF Table of Contents is actually not extremely hard. You can use a tool like Apple's PDF "Voyeur" to see the structure or something like Adobe Acrobat's Preflight Browser:
You see that the "Outline" is a fairly simple tree that can be parsed using the various CGPDF* functions. The challenge here is to also parse the destination/action type. PDF doesn't make things too easy and doesn't give you a page number, instead usually you will find a linked named destination. This can be resolved by cross-referencing another table, it's best to look this up in the PDF spec. This is of course just one of the options, it can also be that the destination is one of the > 10 action types that rage from GoTo over named actions (e.g. Next Page) to JavaScript (e.g. this.pageNum = x). In the image above you see a classical GoTo action with the longer string being the named reference.
There are also some other special cases, notably for older latex documents and some pages from the PDF 1.1 spec that did things a bit differently, so be careful about implementing all corner-cases of the PDF spec to not get surprises later on.
Outlines sometimes also include URI actions, so at least implement that type as well. And they can also have font styles and color, so you won't ever get bored. Been there, done that in our commercial PSPDFKit PDF SDK for iOS and Android.
Are there any good SDKs available on iOS that will not only display a PDF, but will show it as it is downloading from a web source? It is perfectly fine to use a paid for library as long as it is commercial-friendly.
To clarify, the SDK must be able to show partial files as they are downloading, whether I provide the stream or otherwise. I would like to avoid CGPDFScannerRef due to how low level it is -- I have tried FastPdfKit as well but it will only show the whole PDF after it has been fully downloaded. Any ideas?
PDF is a structured format that consists of different types of data blocks such as TOC, text, fonts, colors, annotations and information about these blocks is saved at the end of the file. So this makes it impossible for CGPDFDocumentRef to open the pdf without all the data available.
However you can get around this limitation by linearizing the PDF file so that the metadata information will be put at the beginning of the file. I'm not sure but I think you can then use CGDataProviderCreateSequential in combination with CGPDFDocumentRef to parse a partially downloaded PDF file.
Due to timing constrains, I have developed a web application where a lot of language-specific strings have been directly hard-coded to large HTML/Javascript static files. Due to poor coding, code and content have not been properly separated.
To achieve quick and dirty localization, I am looking for some kind of text editor that would allow to "tag" the local elements of a file and turn them into "custom fields". These fields could then be stored in some resource file and translated independently from the shared structure, to generate multiple localized versions of the file.
I realize that I could do this myself through a "simple" templating mechanism, for instance by keeping a shared root file containing fields like {%welcome_message%} and a csv file for field translations, and then generate localized files.
But is there a text editor that could do this in a fast, user-friendly way ? For instance where we could see/modify the custom field values (as well as the root parts) directly when editing a file ?
What would be great for instance, would a a text editor feature/plugin allowing some kind of parallel file editing by distinguishing "root" and "localized" parts in a set of files.
(Note : currently I am using diff/merge tools to achieve this kind of results, but it will become increasingly cumbersome as we add more languages).
I think this could help you in parallel file editing http://www.sublimetext.com/.
I understand the basic of Document Interaction Programming and UIDocumentInteractionController and I've got it working in my app. However I'm having trouble with specific details of using custom file types. I can't find this addressed in the Apple docs anywhere.
My app uses it's own file types with unique extensions. The files themselves are just plists (xml), but I want the device to treat the files as only openable in my app. Originally I implemented the Document Interaction stuff to treat them as XML while I got it working, but now I want it to treat them as binary files that it needs to hand off to my app.
At the moment, if you have one of my files in an email attachment, iOS first shows the QuickLook (which just spews all the text content of the xml out) before you can choose to Open In. Similarly if one of my files is opened with Safari, Safari just shows the XML and doesn't give you the option to show it in my app at all.
So how do I get iOS to not treat my files as XML? I've changed the "Conforms to UTI" value and "public.mime-type" value in the info.plist, but it seems to have no effect.
Any tips greatly appreciated.
As far as i understand the UIT concept of Apple you cannot just change the file extension to change a potential UIT of the file. If the file contains XML-Data, other apps as well as internal apps might recognize your content and show it internally as XML.
Try to store your Plists with NSPropertyListSerialization NSPropertyListBinaryFormat_v1_0 (then you readble XML)
When you did that without success, why not trying this:
use zlib to compress the XML plists afterwards to a zipped file.
make a "unique" file extensions (<file>.myappname)
this should "hide" other apps and quick view.
Tell me if one of the ways did work for you.
I am trying to develop an iPhone application to read ePub files. Is there any framework available to develop this? I have no idea about how to read this file format. I tried to parse a sample file with .epub extension using NSXML Parser, but that fails.
The EPUB format brings together a bunch of different specifications / formats:
one to say what the content of the book should look like (a subset of XHTML 1.1 + CSS)
one to define a "manifest" that lists all of the files that make up that content (OPF, which is an XML file)
one to define how everything is packaged up (OEBPS: a zip file of everything in the manifest plus a few extra files)
The specs look a bit daunting but actually once you've got the basics (unzipping, parsing XML) down it's not particularly difficult or complex.
You'll need to work out how to download the EPUB, to unzip it somewhere, to parse the manifest and then to display the relevant content.
Some pointers if you're just starting out:
parse xml
unzip
To display content just use a UIWebView for now.
Here's a high level step by step for your code:
1) create a view with a UIWebView
2) download the EPUB file
3) unzip it to a subdirectory in your app's documents folder using the zip library, linked above
4) parse the XML file at META-INF/container.xml (if this file doesn't exist the EPUB is invalid) using TBXML, linked above
5) In this XML, find the first "rootfile" with media-type application/oebps-package+xml. This is the OPF file for the book.
6) parse the OPF file (also XML)
7) now you need to know what the first chapter of the book is.
a) each <item> in the <manifest> element has an id and an href. Store these in an NSDictionary where the key is the id and the object is the href.
b) Look at the first <itemref> in the <spine>. It has an idref attribute which corresponds to one of the ids in (a). Look up that id in the NSDictionary and you'll get an href.
c) this is the the file of the first chapter to show the user. Work out what the full path is (hint: it's wherever you unzipped the zip file to in (3) plus the base directory of the OPF file in (6))
8) create an NSURL using fileURLWithPath:, where the path is the full path from (7c). Load this request using the UIWebView you created in (1).
You'll need to implement forward / backward buttons or swipes or something so that users can move from one chapter to another. Use the <spine> to work out which file to show next - the <itemrefs> in the XML are in the order they should appear to the reader.
Apparently EPUB is "just" an XML format, so if you have an xml parser and the spec it should be okay.
Plus a little tuto? Have fun!
EDIT: you could also read some code here, this is for generating epub, not reading them but the code may be useful.
EDIT again: And see links to related question in the right sidebar, there are some links in the answers to free ebook reader which support ePub.
EDIT 3: You should add a comment when you edit your question so people who answer you can continue the discussion (if you don't comment we're not noticed of your edit).
So, The parsing fail because you didn't read the spec or related questions on Stack Overflow... *.epub file are a zipped folder containing XML file(s), not plain xml.
I read through this tutorial once (free registration required, sorry) and it gave me a great introduction to ePub. deverloperWorks tutorial here
I highly suggest you look at some of the XML processing libraries. If you just want to get specific information out of the XML file, then you can pick the right parsing strategy.
there is an open source project fbreader,
it also support iphone
http://www.fbreader.org/about.php
I'm playing arround to create an epub-framework for iphone apps.
At the moment (I really just startet) i can generate a title page with links to the chapters.
My approach is
Use quickconnect iphone framework as
a layer (maybe i change to phonegap)
which basically allows for javascript
apps as iphone apps
Add the UNZIPed epub as a ressource to the project
Parse the whole thing with a customized version of the epub.js (somewhere on google-code)
Right now I'm looking into pageflip, some kind of gui and minor usability issues (save the current page beingviewed)
I hope that give's you an idea on how to start
Jonathan Wight (schwa) has developed a ObjC solution for parsing and displaying ePub documents on the iPhone. It's part of his TouchCode open source repository.