Requirement of the iPad app is to display an ebook that allows user to edit and save it. Further requirements are like navigation and bookmarks. In precise, just similar to the iBooks app.
My question is, is it possible to edit the .epub file? I believe we can edit .pdf files (As I have seen some apps available on iTunes). I tried searching on google, all I could find out is, how to display ePub file and how to customize the look of ePub file. Any suggestion would be great.
Have a look at
Sigil
Since it's open source, you may be able to tweak it to run on IOS.
Wikipedia's list of ePub editing systems doesn't have an IOS entry yet.
There is an app for editing ePub files, but it's a bit pricey at the moment ($14.99 as of this writing):
Easy ePub Creator Pro (link is to the App Store)
There is also a method that uses GoodReader, but requires several steps to take an ePub file and get it into GoodReader, editable, and then reverse the process after editing. But GoodReader is cheaper than the above option, and many iPad users already have it for other purposes, so I felt it's worth mentioning. The following blog post covers it.
Editing ePub files entirely on the iPad (blog post at "The Bergen Street Paper Co.")
Also, Kurt's answer points out that Wikipedia's list of ePub editors doesn't contain an iOS version, but it's worth noting that there are several entries in that list that run on the web. You might be able to edit your book in Mobile Safari on your iPad. I haven't tried, but it may be worth investigating.
Related
I was thinking about creating an ePub reader. All the ePub files I have seen so far seemed very simple: just text paragraphs with some big font for the title, and some rectangular illustration images. So, I thought ePub provides only simple ways to describe the text content.
But it seems that an ePub file contains lots HTML and CSS. I opened a sample ePub and it contained text in <p> with the class attribute. Does it mean that it can basically be like a website archive? The author can use any advanced formatting/layout feature that are used when creating an HTML website? If so, I would have to implement a whole web browser to create an ePub reader.
Or, is the HTML allowed in ePub are somehow restricted to only certain HTML tags and attributes, like the HTML that is allowed when writing on an online forum.
PS: I did some research on my own after posting this, and my conclusion is that it is the former. I have tried some famous ePub apps on the Android market, and they all seem to be weird in terms of GUI (meaning, probably non-native),and whilst there does not seem to be a definitive way to know whether an app is native or a web-app, one trick was enabling the layout boundary, and those apps do not have boundaries inside the ePub view itself, meaningly it probably is a web-view.
I searched GitHub for ePub viewers, and they all seem to be using JavaScript or a web-view, including this Android ePub viewer.
So, probably those ePub apps are just parsing the meta data files in the ePub format, and for the rendering of the book itself, they are just delegating that to the web-view and using some sort of JavaScript framework to add a UI on the web-view.
If someone knows better, please correct me.
My understanding of previous ePub specs is that it is a web archive of sorts. A compressed archive consisting of metadata, fonts, images, and content.
It used to be that this content was only in a specially-flavored XHTML format, but it looks like they've also added SVG content documents. I've admittedly lost track of the ePub spec changes (I didn't realize they had merged efforts with the W3C), but hopefully the spec links above can give an idea of what's different between a standard html5 web page and what epub expects.
EDIT: I should also mention that a lot of the readers I worked with back in the day had the bad habit of stripping out formatting and just presenting text (not even text with embedded fonts -- a big no-no for non-English texts). Not sure if this was the reader software being "robust" and acting against ePub formatting that would break their app, or something else.
I am creating an RSS Reader ios app for work and I have everything that I need except that when the article is loaded it just loads the mobile view just as it would load when viewing on safari. They want it to look more "native" to the app, meaning just the title, photo and then then the articles text in plain underneath.
This is my first attempt at an app and I am using a project that was open free source code. This project uses MWFeedParser integrated into it which, from what i've read, can accomplish what I need to (I think). Can anyone who has done this before or knows how to do it be kind enough to take me through it? I've asked a similar question before but the answers were vague and still left me stuck.
If it helps, I have uploaded the full project on github here:
https://github.com/cpoti24/RSSReader
Please download it if you wish and run it yourself on xcode if that will help out. If you're able to do it and help me learn how, even better.
Thanks!
Here im hitting my head againt the wall.
My client provided a pdf with buttons(just like buttons,when user tap on button,it will load next page and previous page etc.).
This buttons will work only when we open it in adobe reader.
I tried the QLpreviewview,quickview but it is not working,all what i can do is just to load the pdf in the webview.
Can anyone please help me in how to load an interactive pdf in iOS.
Thanks in advance.
Have a look at PSPDFKit, it is the most advanced framework I've found for PDFs in iOS. They have an impressive list of customers as well.
It is a bit pricy though, but you have the option to get the Source Code too if you need to modify anything. Could be worth it if your client need that kind of performance and other features as well.
(I am not in any way affiliated with PSPDFKit)
The limitations are due to the capabilities (or non-capabilities) of the PDF viewer used.
Currently the leading PDF viewer on iDevices is PDFExpert by Readdle. Adobe Reader for iDevices is weaker, but can deal to some extent with form elements.
For page navigation etc. you might use links instead of button fields (as far as you can live with the capabilities of links, and not use JavaScript). Links are said to be handled properly with many PDF viewers.
You may have to require certain PDF viewers on instructional level, because you don't have control over the viewer used by the actual user. And, as you noticed, many PDF viewers are simply too dumb do deal with active elements.
Another approach would be looking at PDF-to-HTML5 converters, and serve HTML5 from a server.
i have a lots of PDFs forms and i want to put them on iPad and fill them up, then send it by mail. how can i edit this pdf forms in an app? i am very new with xCode and i could use lots of suggestions ...
How can I edit PDF files in an iOS application?
i found this question durring my search and the idea presented here,
"A better idea in my opinion is to create a native UI showing the data contained in the PDF file using the standard Cocoa-Touch UIKit, and create the PDF once the user is done with it so that the user can export it back. That way, you don't have to write a complicated PDF handling code." .. sounds very good just that i dont know how to start ...
Thanks
Basically, what it's saying is create a nib/screen/front end to the PDF that would allow the user to record what data they want in there, then after that run a separate piece of code to write that data into the PDF!
Some links to help you out:
Quartz-2D Programming Guide (QuartzCore Framework): https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/graphicsimaging/conceptual/drawingwithquartz2d/dq_pdf/dq_pdf.html
A tutorial (Although aimed at iOS5)
http://www.raywenderlich.com/6581/how-to-create-a-pdf-with-quartz-2d-in-ios-5-tutorial-part-1
I will say, I can find information on GENERATING PDF files a lot easier/more reliably than editing them... Are the templates you have difficult? It may be worth re-creating them programatically when the data is inputted!
I like to make a eBook app for iOS, something like iBooks, but with some special features. My questions is regarding the epub files. I can unzip them with ZipArchivos and storing each epub in its own folder.
So far so good. The epub's are imported to my app, either by email attachment, Safari or with iTunes Sync. Also this is working well.
When getting a new epub I want to extract several information from it, like title, author, publisher ... and to store this information in CoreData.
Is this possible and if yes, does anyone have a solution for it?
Please have a look at the two discussions liked above.
You might also want to check Readium SDK out (if its licensing terms fit into your project): https://github.com/readium/readium-sdk
There are also "premade EPUB-support SDKs" which you can buy online, but in my experience they are quite poor.
For our own hybrid app Menestrello ( https://readbeyond.it/menestrello/ ), the native iOS part does smart unzipping (via the Objective-Zip library) + basic metadata parsing (title, author, etc.) just to populate the library view. The "real" parsing required when the EPUB is opened in reading view is done in JS. I wrote both parsers (native iOS and JS) from scratch.