pagina EPUB-Checker

Standalone “EPUBCheck” application for Windows, macOS and Linux.

With the pagina EPUB-Checker one can easily validate eBooks in the EPUB format. The test mechanisms of the EPUB-Checker are based on the official open-source EPUBCheck EPUB validator.

Features

pagina EPUB-Checker wraps up this tool and offers some additional features like:

• Graphical user interface
• Drag & drop EPUB to validate
• Ability to validate expanded (unzipped) EPUBs
  • Expanded folders are automatically zipped up to an EPUB file upon validation
  • The generated EPUB file will be saved if it is valid
• Localized GUI and errors and warnings:
  • English
  • German
  • French
  • Spanish
  • Japanese
  • Portuguese (Brazil)
  • Russian (messages incomplete)
  • Dutch (messages only, english GUI)
  • Czech (GUI only, english messages)
  • Traditional Chinese (Taiwan) (GUI only, english messages)
  • Turkish (GUI only, english messages)
  • Danish
• Accessibility options: The application is usable with screen readers, offers a high contrast mode, and allows users to increase (or decrease) the font size.

pagina EPUB-Checker doesn't need to be installed and therefore works on portable USB devices as well as on computers with restricted rights.

Download

Please visit our website https://www.pagina.gmbh/produkte/epub-checker/ to download the Windows .exe file, the Mac .app or the Linux .jar.

This is just the source code repository. You won’t find any pre-build binaries here...

License information

Our app and code and all the java sources in de.paginagmbh.* are licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2.0 unless the code comments specify the contrary.

We use the following Java libraries to build our GUI wrapper around EPUBCheck:

• EPUBCheck 4.2.6 (3-Clause BSD License)
• JSON RPC 1.0 (Apache License 2.0)
• Apple Java Extensions 1.4 (Apple License)

To build the EPUB-Checker app, we use the following tools and libraries (among other Maven tools):

• Jarbundler (Apache License v2.0)
• launch4j (BSD license / MIT License)
• universalJavaApplicationStub (MIT License)
• electron-installer-dmg (Apache License v2.0)
• gon (MIT License)

Build the app

In order to build the Linux JAR, the Mac App and the Windows EXE files you just have to run

mvn clean package

from the root directory of this project.

This will build the executables but skip the macOS specific codesigning process by default.

Build requirements

• Java/JDK 8+
• Maven 3.5+

Release the app

Releasing a new version requires the Mac App to be codesigned and notarized. This can be done from the maven packaging process or via GitHub Actions CI on the main branch. The additional maven step will run a bash script (src/build/mac-release.sh) to codesign and notarize the Mac App with our private Apple Developer Certificate. Therefore, this step will only work on our systems or in GitHub Actions CI.

Before the release the version number and release notes should be adjusted in src/main/java/de/paginagmbh/epubchecker/PaginaEPUBChecker.java.

Release requirements

• macOS 10.14+
• Java/JDK 8
• Maven 3.5+
• NodeJS + npm
• Homebrew

App codesigning

Codesigning is done with the default macOS codesign utility

App notarization

App notarization is done with gon, an excellent utility for this job. It will be installed via HomeBrew if it’s missing.

To be able to submit the App for notarization, you need to copy src/build/gon-dmg-config.template.json to src/build/gon-dmg-config.json and fill the apple_id credentials.

DiskImage creation

DiskImage creation is done with the NodeJS utility electron-installer-dmg. It will be installed via NPM if it’s missing.

Build the release locally

To build the .jars, the Windows .exe and Mac .app and to run the Mac-App codesigning and notarization process for distribution locally, you have to enable the skipped-by-default maven task with:

mvn -Dmaven.skip.macSigning=false clean package

With changes to how the generated .jar file is structured internally, and how Apple handles the files for the notarization, at the moment some manual steps are required to arrive at a notarized version of the application.

Build & release with GitHub Actions

To build and release with GitHub Actions CI, just merge a snapshot version from development to main. No need to upgrade the Maven version first or to set a git tag. Just merge to main and CI is doing all the hard work (as defined in .github/workflows/release.yml).

The release distributables are attached to the GitHub Actions build as build artifacts and can be used for distribution on our download server.