EPUB Builder

Note: This project is still in development and is not yet ready for use.

EPUB Builder is a TypeScript environment-agnostic library for building EPUB files. It provides a modular pipeline architecture for generating EPUB files with rich metadata, hierarchical chapter management, and customizable content structure.

Rationale

Recently I found myself in need of a modern, maintained, and flexible EPUB generation library for a project I was working on. I searched for existing solutions, but most of them were either outdated, incomplete, or not flexible enough for my needs. So I decided to build my own.

This is very much a work in progress, and I'm still figuring out the best way to implement certain features. If you have any suggestions or feedback, please feel free to open an issue or a pull request.

Features

These are some of the features that EPUB Builder aims to provide:

• 📚 Complete EPUB Generation: Automatically generates EPUB files with all required structure and metadata, ensuring compatibility with standard EPUB readers.
• 🔄 Modular Pipeline Architecture: Uses a flexible, step-based pipeline for rendering, allowing easy customization, addition, or removal of specific processing steps.
• 📝 Customizable Template Rendering: Renders core EPUB files (e.g., content.opf, toc.ncx) using popular templating engines like Mustache or EJS, with the option to switch or add other engines.
• 🧩 Data Transformation Per Step: Customize the view for each rendering step, isolating only the relevant data (e.g., spine nodes for navigation), which improves performance and focus.
• 📋 Comprehensive Metadata Management: MetadataBuilder allows easy creation of structured metadata fields such as title, author, language, publisher, and identifiers, with validation for EPUB compliance.
• 🗂️ Organized Content Structure: Structured types for chapters, fonts, images, and CSS ensure consistency, extensibility, and type safety throughout the EPUB.
• ✨ Dynamic Template Loading: Load customizable templates from a specified directory, allowing flexibility in defining the look and layout of the EPUB’s content.
• 🖋️ Logging: Integrated logging with adjustable levels (info, warn, error) and optional metadata, providing real-time visibility and debugging information for each stage of the rendering and packaging process.
• 🛠️ Error Handling and Debugging: Custom error types and detailed logging messages simplify troubleshooting by pinpointing errors in specific templates or processing steps.
• 📦 Standards-Compliant EPUB Packaging: Uses @zip.js/zip.js to compress and structure EPUB files in a ZIP format, adhering to EPUB’s directory and file organization requirements.
• 🌐 Browser and Node.js Compatibility: Designed for use in both Node.js and web environments, including support for the Origin Private File System (OPFS) for secure, browser-based storage.

Concept

Building an EPUB consists of two steps.

1. Define the view model: This is the data structure that represents the content of the EPUB. It consists of metadata, chapters, and other content nodes.
2. Build the EPUB: This is the process of converting the view model into an actual EPUB file.

Installation

Clone the repository and install dependencies using npm:

git clone https://github.com/MichielvdVelde/epub-builder.git
cd epub-builder
npm install

Example

See src/example.ts for an example of how to use this library.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.