Inspiring

Question

eCan Crusher gone? What alternative?

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
December 28, 2023
2 replies
1985 views

Hello there,

I am in need of inspecting an EPUB which—you guess—is giving me issues with being uploaded to Apple Books (yes, I'm doing the same thing, the same process that worked until yesterday, and it is giving me a stupid error of "too big image" when they are all SVGs and they've been set up with a script to Export Tag and to keep original format).

The tool I used on the Intel Mac, eCanCrusher, is said to be a closed project as of March 2022 on its GitHub page. Is it still being actively developed? Is there an alternative?

I'm now on an Apple Silicon Mac, though that should not be a problem per se.

Thank you!

EPUB

This topic has been closed for replies.

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emin.roblack

Participant

I just hit a similar wall and found this little open-sourced software that did the trick 👌

https://sigil-ebook.com/sigil/download/

It is also present in homebrew: https://formulae.brew.sh/cask/sigil#default

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

The OP mentioned Sigil. It's widely used but I have many reservations about both its approach (the obsolete "lego" or "build-a-bear" approach to book development), and as the OP notes, it's not a flawless app even when used in simple modes.

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emin.roblack

Participant

Don't know about possible issues but I managed to replace a cover and remove several chapters without causing issues for Apple books so that's something.

It is a tad hardcore as you neet to remove chapters rather manually so not perfect but 🤷‍♂ It works 😅

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

As far as I know, the only truly valid EPUB validator is epubcheck, which is a bit of a pain to use since it's a command-line tool. It's 100% standards-compliant, though, and somewhere between most and all other 'validators' use it as the engine, wrapped in various UIs and with "helpful" if nonstandard checking added.

The raw check is to open the EPUB and look in the images folder. If what you say (and have said over time) is true, there should be NO images in there except perhaps a few things like logos and decorations. (I am not sure if that's where SVGs are stored, but you should be able to look down the list and see if any of them are anomalous.

And FXL EPUB remains a real pain to diagnose and fix after export. I know you have your reasons for using it.

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InélsòreAuthor

Inspiring

Eventually I used the app "The Unarchiver" to open the EPUB and look inside it.

InDesign apparently adds a bunch of blank PNGs during export, and some of them are just huge in resolution (not in size!), and Apple already generously (*cough*) updated the pixel count from 4mi to 5.6mi.

In the Conversion page of the EPUB export dialog, I've set the conversion to PNG and the resolution to 72ppi. Since they are blank PNGs, this didn't change their appearance, but reduced their resolution enough to have the test pass.

Since the "pagina EPUB checker" app is crashing on launch on macOS Sonoma (and the devs I've written to are not replying to my queries), I've been using this portal: https://www.epubvalidation.com/

Still, the test passed there, and not on Apple Books, because Apple adds a few custom rules...

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Well, we've established over time that your project requirements — FXL, with content requiring high resolution, and to Apple Books — is a difficult road. I would have thought you'd ironed out the workflow by now, though. 😛

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