{"id":15853,"date":"2023-12-12T09:06:49","date_gmt":"2023-12-12T16:06:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/?p=15853"},"modified":"2023-12-12T15:39:40","modified_gmt":"2023-12-12T22:39:40","slug":"__trashed-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblaze.ca\/?p=15853","title":{"rendered":"Python in Ebook Production"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following is a blog post I originally wrote on behalf of Orca Book Publishers<\/a> for the APLN (Accessible Publishing Learning Network) website<\/a>. I had done a brief online Q&A on behalf of eBound talking about our Benetech certification and there were questions about my python workflow. So I tried to write it out, which was a good exercise in and of itself.<\/p>\n

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In 2022 Orca Book Publishers<\/strong> had a dozen accessible titles that had been remediated via programs with BooksBC and eBound as well as another group that had been created as mostly accessible epubs by outsourced ebook developers. When Orca made a commitment to creating accessibility ebooks the immediate goal was to pursue Benetech Certification with an eye to adopting a born accessible workflow and to start remediating backlist titles.<\/p>\n

Orca has three main streams of books from an epub point of view: highly illustrated non-fiction, fiction with few or no images, and picture books. We started by remediating the fiction titles that were already mostly accessible and bringing them up to Benetech standards.<\/p>\n

Concurrently we brought the non-fiction production in-house to begin to develop a functional accessible workflow. Non-fiction titles usually feature 80 plus illustrations and photographs, multiple sidebars, a glossary, index, and a bibliography.<\/p>\n

In publishing circles a fair amount of time is spent bemoaning the shortcomings of InDesign as a platform for creating good epubs, let alone making accessible ones. With a complex design, you can spend a lot of time and effort prepping an InDesign file to export a “well-formed” file and still end up with a \u201cmessy\u201d end result. Instead, Orca\u2019s approach was to ignore InDesign as much as possible, export the bare necessities (styles, ToC, page markers etc.), clean out the junk in the epub it produces using a series of scripted search and replaces, and then rely on post-processing to produce well-formed, accessible epub in a more efficient manner.<\/p>\n

To that end we started building two things: a comprehensive standard structure and its accompanying documentation for an Orca ebook, and a series of python scripts to apply that structure to epubs. These scripts needed to be robust enough to work with both new books and to remediate older titles that spanned everything from old epub2\u2019s to mostly-accessible titles that didn\u2019t quite meet Benetech standards.<\/p>\n

Python in Epub production<\/h2>\n

Python was the obvious choice for these tasks. Python is a programming language suited for text and data manipulation that is highly extensible, with thousands of external libraries available, and has a focus on readability. It comes already installed with Mac OSX and is easily added to both Windows and Linux.<\/p>\n

Python is easy to learn and fairly easy to use.\u00a0 You can simply write a python script in a text file e.g.:<\/p>\n

print<\/span>('Enter your name:'<\/span>)<\/code>
\nname = input<\/span>()<\/code>
\nprint<\/span>('Hello, '<\/span> + name)<\/code><\/p>\n

Then save it as script.py and run it using a python interpreter. As a general rule writing and running python scripts from within an IDE (integrated development environment) like Visual Studio<\/a> Code<\/a>, a free IDE\u00a0 created and maintained by Microsoft, makes this pretty simple. Using VS Code allows a developer to easily modify scripts and then run them from within the same application.<\/p>\n

Regular Expressions<\/h3>\n

The other important part of the process and well worth learning as much as they can about \u2014 even if they don\u2019t dive into python \u2014 is regular expressions (regex). This a system of patterns of that allow you to search and replace highly complex strings.<\/p>\n

For instance if you wanted to replace all the <p><\/code>\u2019s in a glossary with <li><\/code>\u2019s:<\/p>\n

<p class=\"glossary\"><b>regular Expression<\/b>: is a sequence of characters that specifies a match pattern in text.<\/p><\/code><\/p>\n

You could search for:<\/p>\n

<p class=\"glossary\">(.*?)<\/p><\/code><\/p>\n

where the bits in parentheses are wildcards…and replace it with:<\/p>\n

<li class=\"glossary\">\\1<\/li><\/code>.<\/p>\n

For each occurrence found, the bit in the parentheses would be stored and then reinserted correctly in the new string.<\/p>\n

Once you start to use regexes you\u2019ll quickly get addicted to the power and flexibility and quite a few text editors (even InDesign via grep) support regular expressions.<\/p>\n

Scripting Python<\/h3>\n

With these two tools you can write a fairly basic script that opens a folder (an uncompressed epub) and loops through to find a file named glossary.xhtml and replace the <p class=\"glossary\"><\/code> tag and replace it with a <li><\/code> \u2014 or whatever else you might need. You can add more regexes to change the <title><\/code> to <title>Glossary<\/title><\/code>, add in the proper section epub:type\u2019s and roles and more. Since InDesign tends to export fairly regular epub code once you clean out the junk, if you create a standard set of styles, it means you can easily clean and revise the whole file in a few key strokes.<\/p>\n

Taking that one step further, if you ensure that the individual files in an epub are named according to their function e.g about-the-author.xhtml, copyright.xhtml, dedication.xhtml etc. you can easily have custom lists of search\/replaces that are specific to each file, ensuring things like applying epub:types and aria-roles is done automatically or you could edit or change existing text with new standardized text in things like the .opf file.<\/p>\n

If you build basic functions to perform search and replaces, then you can continually update and revise the list of things you want it to fix as you discover both InDesign and your designer’s quirks, things like moving spaces outside of spans or restructuring the headers. If you can conceptualize what you want to do, you can build a regex to do it and just add it to the list.<\/p>\n

You can also build multiple scripts for different stages of the process or expand into automating other common tasks. For instance the Orca toolset currently has the following scripts:<\/p>\n