EPUB Metadata Support

[captn3m0]

Feature description

A flag to pass additional EPUB metadata, such as what is supported by pandoc's --metadata flag. This would let us provide details like additional authors/translators/illustrators/publisher/ISBN etc to the generated EPUB file.

Existing workarounds

With some additional tooling - yes.

I generate metadata using epub-metadata-generator, then open the file in Sigil and copy/paste the additional details.

Maybe a --isbn flag that would fetch the metadata using the npm package?

[danburzo]

Hi @captn3m0, thanks for the report! (And sorry for the late reply, I was away from the computer last week).

There is a similar open issue for PDFs, and while for PDF we'd prefer some first-class support from Puppeteer/Chromium, in EPUBs we can potentially embed any metadata.

So I guess it's a matter of deciding what metadata we allow and what the command-line options look like, keeping the following in mind:

• There's already the --title option to specify the publication's title
• The --individual flag will generate one file per input URL — how will the metadata apply to the files?

[captn3m0]

The --individual flag will generate one file per input URL — how will the metadata apply to the files?

Applying everywhere sounds like the better deal, since these are likely common things. For non-common items (such as title), --title can be used for now?

Applying nowhere will result in the same problem - no way to add metadata.

Or as a third alternative, mark --metadata flag as invalid in combination with --individual?

So I guess it's a matter of deciding what metadata we allow

I like the pandoc approach of letting the user pass a valid XML file.

[danburzo]

Closing this for now. It seems unlikely that percollate will develop in the direction of allowing more than the basic metadata already added to PDFs and EPUBs, as it doesn't fit neatly in the scope of this tool.