ReSpec to EPUB
Typescript program to convert W3C documents, produced by ReSpec, to EPUB 3.4.
Single documents vs. Collections
The conversion can:
- Convert a single HTML source produced by ReSpec.
- Convert a single HTML source that must be pre-processed by ReSpec to get its final formats; the program pre-processes the source on the fly.
- Convert and combine a “collection“ of HTML sources (to be pre-processed or not) into a single EPUB 3 document.
(The on-the-fly conversion via ReSpec is done by running the W3C’s Spec Generator service. Alas!, that service may be down or slow, and this package has no control over that…)
Package usage
Command line usage
There is a simple command line interface to run the script. See the the separate documentation on cli for details and examples.
Run a service via HTTP
There is also the possibility to start a simple server to generate EPUB 3.4 instances on request. See the separate documentation on the server for details and examples of HTTP requests.
The server has been deployed on the cloud at W3C using the https://labs.w3.org/r2epub
URL. A browser interface to drive this server is also available. (Note that the server running on W3C is also used to generate an EPUB version of a document based on respec directly from the respec export
facility.)
Use as a typescript package through an API
The program can be run from deno
(relying on the jsr package @iherman/r2epub
). See the separate documentation on the API for details and examples of the API usage.
Environment variables
-
PORT
orR2EPUB_PORT
: the port number used by the server; failing these the default (i.e., 80) is used. (PORT
takes precedence overR2EPUB_PORT
.) -
R2EPUB_LOCAL
: no URL-s onlocalhost
are accepted, unless this environment variable set (the value of the variable is not relevant, only the setting is). For security reasons this variable should not be set for deployed servers and its usage is advised for local testing purposes only. -
R2EPUB_MODIFIED_EPUB_FILES
: A number of W3C specific files (logos, some css files) had to be adapted for EPUB 3 usage, and are retrieved from a separate site. At the moment,https://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/r2epub/
is used as a base URL for those files. If the environment variable is set, its value is used as a prefix for the copy of the files on the local file system and the files are read directly from the disc.(The local clone of the distribution has a copy of all the necessary files, too, and can be used for local testing via
localhost
. Some server may have problems with a burst of access to the same base URL resulting in run-time error, hence the advantage to use this local alternative to setup.)
Usage
Once installed locally, follow specific instructions based on your needs/interest below:
Command Line
deno run -A r2epub.ts
starts the command line interface.
Server
deno run -A serve.ts
starts up the server locally.
Externally accessible entry points
r2epub can also be used as a library module both to TypeScript and to Javascript. A simple example In Typescript (using deno
) is as follows:
import * as r2epub from 'jsr:@iherman/r2epub'; import * as fs from 'node:fs'; // The creation itself is asynchronous (the content has to be fetched over the wire). // The result is the class instance encapsulating an OCF (zip) content const url :string = "http://www.example.org/doc.html", const args :r2epub.Options = { respec : false, config : {} }; const ocf :r2epub.OCF = await r2epub.convert(url, args); // The zip file is finalized asynchronously; it is a Buffer or an ArrayBuffer, depending on the run-time environment const content = await ocf.get_content(); // Get the content out to the disk fs.writeFileSync(ocf.name, content);
The same can be done in node.js
by installing the r2epub
package from npm
. (See warning in the introduction.)
See the detailed specification of the API elements. The top level functional entry point to the package is convert.
Copyright © 2025 Ivan Herman (a.k.a. @iherman).