How to programmatically convert HTML to epub?

Question

Can I do this conversion with any programming language or library?

Did you wind up settling on a process? Looking for a PHP solution myself. — Saiboogu, Dec 24 '10 at 13:50
I think you are interested in this: https://github.com/Grandt/PHPePub — Jerry Jacobs, May 06 '12 at 22:10
After try different programs, I think this is much better: http://www.juliansmart.com/ecub Though it is not open source. — Sam Liao, Mar 24 '11 at 14:55

eb1 · Answer 1 · 2015-09-11T15:24:16.167

The short answer is yes, it can be done in any programming language.

Basic steps:

Convert your HTML to XHTML (+ CSS). This can be done in your program or through an XSLT file.
Copy your files (XHTML, CSS, any images and fonts) into a directory structure that follows the format.
Zip the directory structure up and name the archive with a ".epub" extension.

Some web sites to help you get started:

A good tutorial for what's in an epub file (and how to create one yourself) can be found here: http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/Introduction.shtml. I used this to get started myself.
Specs for the .epub standard are here: http://www.idpf.org/
A validator for .epubs can be downloaded from here: https://github.com/IDPF/epubcheck

June 2015 Note: The epubcheck validator has moved from google code to GitHub; note the new URL.

score 16 · Answer 2 · edited May 03 '19 at 05:50

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Calibre supports a wide variety of input formats, including HTML, and a wide variety of output formats, including EPUB, but it's not "a programming language or library". Are there specific reasons you desire a programming-based approach rather than a free-standing tool? If so, maybe Python and ebookmaker.py, for example, could help you.

edited May 03 '19 at 05:50

Ry-

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answered Aug 11 '10 at 02:45

Alex Martelli

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I want to automatise a process. – Juanjo Conti Aug 11 '10 at 03:08
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calibre can be run from the command line – mmmmmm May 16 '12 at 15:16
Agree..I've used it from the command line myself, integrated with some bash scripting. Good for small-ish books. My larger pubs created by Calibre never pass validation. – Paulb Nov 09 '13 at 18:35
Unfortunately Calibre does not support ePub 3.0. – arlomedia May 10 '14 at 10:06
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@arlomedia It does now – Xodarap777 Dec 14 '18 at 20:25

score 3 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:33

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A late reply, but I found the Python 3-based ebookmaker to be of value, at least after I contributed a pull request to remove a UTF-8 BOM. One problem with it appears to be that it uses brittle regular expressions to parse HTML, but I guess I'll have to report it there.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:33

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answered Mar 22 '13 at 21:04

Shlomi Fish

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skreutzer · Answer 4 · 2014-03-24T19:25:14.683

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I just started to implement such a tool in Java (OpenJDK compatible): html2epub. In order to get rid of manually editing the config file, I'll probably start a separate tool to generate the config file from any given directory (however, it would still be necessary to determine the order of the XHTMLs in the EPUB - for non-programmatical use, developing a GUI helper tool could be considered, for a fully flexible programmatical solution, I haven't come up with an idea yet). Before that, I implemented shell script based converters for custom XML input (hag2epub tools) - in case you're interested, I would probably port them to XHTML input (with a config file for the EPUB metadata or obtaining metadata from the topmost index.html of a directory, if existing).

edited Mar 24 '14 at 19:25

answered Jan 07 '14 at 17:01

skreutzer

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if you would license it under Apache 2.0 it would be way to go for many people, as its under AGPL i cannot use it. its pitty :( – To Kra Oct 14 '15 at 07:00
Could you please tell me how the AGPL could possibly blocking you from using it? – skreutzer Oct 19 '15 at 22:58
cannot use AGPL in commercial product – To Kra Oct 21 '15 at 08:26
That's simply not true. To the contrary: being usable in a commercial context or as a commercial product is an important right free software grants its users, so does the AGPL too. – skreutzer Oct 22 '15 at 20:31

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 11 '10 at 02:54

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Here's pdf to epub, I know that's not what you're after, but it's a start.

The calibre package may have what you want

answered Aug 11 '10 at 02:54

cofiem

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score 1 · Answer 6 · answered Sep 30 '10 at 19:33

I am using the following library from Aspose - http://www.aspose.com/categories/.net-components/aspose.words-for-.net/default.aspx

In just two lines of code I am able to do html to epub conversions. Using this currently in a production system.

Document doc = new Document(_sourceFilePath);

doc.Save(_destinationFilePath, SaveFormat.Epub);

score 0 · Answer 7 · answered May 18 '11 at 02:15

I have the same issue previously, necause I want to read some webpage content offline on my iPad. I have no idea and I am not a computer savvy. There are calibre or stanza blabla....

But for me they are just formats converters and I need a ePub book creator which will allows me to combine many desired documents together to read. Then I found a bookish html to ePub converter, I save the html page from web then convert with it. It's a quite good tool for me now.

How to programmatically convert HTML to epub?

7 Answers7