Authoring EPUB from Djot formatted source with the SEED.html app

[stewarthaines]

I found my way to Djot today from lobste.rs where I was looking for discussions related to EPUB tooling.

I can't tell you how excited I am to use djot in my EPUB authoring tool.

If you click the link below your browser will open an app I'm calling SEED.html which is a work-in-progress tool for authoring EPUB books. The hash fragment in the url will cause the linked .epub file to be downloaded and opened ready for editing.

The SEED.html app converts plain text chapter content into well-structured xhtml in an EPUB package. All within the browser. All without installing anything, downloading anything or uploading your content from your device to a remote service.

The app also stores the plain text source files inside the EPUB package and - even more unusually - stores the javascript library and ad-hoc scripts for converting the sources also in the EPUB. So it's quite self-contained which is flexible, but also means there's a bit of fiddling to get a book / project set up.

In the last few months I've configured projects with various javascript markdown libraries, as well as textile, org syntax and asciidoc. It's been great to quickly try different solutions for various reference/book projects.

(I really like textile, and was looking forward to using org syntax for some things, but I don't think I'll need to.)

The javascript djot library meets all the use cases I've identified so far, produces clean semantic xhtml suitable for EPUB content and performs in the browser as well as anything I've tried.

Below is a link to a sample SEED.html project that is configured with djot. You can download a valid EPUB 3 file by clicking the Package EPUB button in the lower left of the ui.

https://stewarthaines.com/epub/SEED.html#https://seed-samples.pages.dev/Djot%20Sample%20-%20Stewart%20Haines%20-%202026-01-13.epub

There are more editable samples that use different library combinations at;

https://stewarthaines.com/epub

I've been writing about my experiments on an old-school blogspot blog over here;

https://blog.stewarthaines.com

Thanks for sharing this amazing library!

[stewarthaines]

There's a new home for the SEED.html app. Development continues and djot's place is firmly entrenched as the recommended plain text format for authoring EPUB 3 publications. (Other formats continue to be supported, but no longer recommended to new users.)

The app is now hosted at

https://readitinabook.com

The links in the post above are still live but I won't be updating the app there - it's part of the historical record now :). ReaditInaBook today has SEED.html v0.18.0 (built-in epubcheck and axe-core accessibility feedback, surprisingly good pdf generation from single source, full form-based metadata editing including accessibility fields).

If you're interested to run the static html version locally it's also on npmjs as seed-html

$ npx seed-html

That will prompt you to install the dependency, then bring up your default browser and open the SEED.html app.

Thanks @jgm and others for making djot so useful.