Tobi and DAISY 2.02 full text, full audio

Although the current version of Tobi is primarily a DAISY 3 production tool, we aim to provide support for legacy reading systems that still depend on the DAISY 2.02 format. The recommended workflow is to run the DAISY Pipeline "DAISY 3 to DAISY 2.02" script against the fileset exported by Tobi. We recently wrote a short blog post on that subject.

It is worth noting that this Pipeline script is still in beta, so it is fair to expect some shortcomings. One known limitation listed in the "Input Requirements" section of the script documentation (i.e. "The first par of each zed smil file must be a heading") happens to be problematic in some cases when the initial DTBook XML is generated by the "Save As DAISY" addin for Microsoft Word (this production scenario has not been checked with the Open Office addin yet).

When the DTBook contains multiple docTitles ; typically, inside arbitrary levels of the XML document (which is valid as per the 2005-3 DTD ) ; the conversion to DAISY 2.02 fails. This has been discussed on the Tobi forum already. An easy workaround consists in manually replacing the docTitles inside the DTBook levels with appropriate headings (e.g. h1). Alternatively, it seems that the DTBook "fixer" Pipeline script could help, as it is successfully used internally by the Save As DAISY addins when producing full-text full-audio books.

We are currently evaluating ways to support these various edge cases. In the meantime, please let us know (via the forum) how you are getting on with DAISY 2.02 full-text full-audio production using Tobi. Many thanks for your feedback! Regards, Daniel