distro bugs, epubcheck

Posted Apr 11, 2025 8:55 UTC (Fri) by davidgerard (guest, #100304)
Parent article: Catching up with calibre

> However, I've used the packages supplied by Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and other distributions for the many years that I've used calibre and have not found them to be any buggier than the upstream version.

The Ubuntu 20.04 package version didn't work. Like, it literally just didn't work. They pulled a prerelease from Debian and then just ... left it stuck there! https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2020-Octob...

It's worth noting that Calibre epubs don't pass epubcheck. Goyal says that Calibre is meant to support the widest range of ebook readers and that requires going outside the letter of the epub standard.

But the hazard for authors is that passing epubcheck is required by the Apple store and hence by the Draft2Digital store. https://itunespartner.apple.com/books/support/9-prepare-book

Various proprietary tools create compliant epubs that pass epubcheck.

I haven't come up with a way around this apart from horrible HTML hand-editing, see https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2020/11/05/calibre-e... for my past misadventures.

Pandoc has at various times produced compliant epubs and noncompliant epubs.