Tobi User Guide—Tobi and EPUB: Upgrading a DAISY Book to EPUB

Tobi User Guide—Tobi and EPUB: Upgrading a DAISY Book to EPUB

Tobi lets you upgrade existing DAISY books to EPUB 3 books using DAISY Pipeline 2 in the backend, which is a Java based application. You will, therefore, require Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and DAISY Pipeline 2 installed on your machine to take advantage of this feature.

Download and Install Java Runtime Environment 7.0

Download and install DAISY Pipeline 2

DAISY to EPUB Conversion

The following steps outline the process for upgrading your existing DAISY books to EPUB using Tobi:

  1. Click File->DAISY to EPUB 3 in the menu bar or press Shift+Ctrl+C. Pipeline 2 will start running as a command prompt application and Tobi will display the progress information in a separate dialog box. If some errors occur during the process, they will be notified in the command prompt application. Please refer to the section Pipeline Errors.
  2. Tobi will open a dialog to browse for the DAISY book that has to be converted.
  3. Select the manifest file of the book (with .opf or .xml extension) and click Open. Note: if the OPF file (DAISY full-text, full-audio book) is selected, it will be converted to EPUB 3 media overlays. If XML file (DTBook document) is selected, it will be converted to an EPUB 3 text-only book.
  4. Tobi will start the conversion process, which may take some time but the progress status will continue to be displayed in a dialog box.
  5. After conversion, Tobi will give you the choice of creating a Tobi project for the converted publication.
  • Click Yes if you wish to import the converted EPUB publication into Tobi for modifications.
  • Click No to view the converted EPUB publication. In this case, Tobi will give you an option to perform EPUBCheck. If you choose Yes, the publication will be validated as per EPUB 3 specifications.

Tobi will display the directory where the EPUB publication is stored. Note: you can modify the converted publication any time later in Tobi.

Pipeline Errors

Occasionally, there may be errors while running pipeline on some machines due to OS settings or memory insufficiency. The two most common errors and the process of rectifying them are:

Error 1: Could not reserve enough space for object heap to start JVM

Tobi uses 1 GB memory to run pipeline, which will result in an error if the available memory is less than this. You can reduce memory usage in the application preferences of Tobi as follows:

  1. Open the Preferences dialog of Tobi by clicking Tools->Preferences on the menu bar or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1.
  2. In the Find edit box, type pipeline to look for the entry Pipeline2JavaMem.
  3. The entry can be selected in the list of preferences. Keyboard users can press Tab.
  4. Change the value of the entry from 1G to 512M. Keyboard users can do the same by pressing Tabtwice.
  5. Click on the OK button to commit the changes.

Error 2: JAVA_HOME is not set

Some versions of Windows require you to set the Java home variable explicitly, which can be done by:

  1. Identify the path of JRE on your machine. Ideally, it should be C:/Program Files/Java/jre1.7.0_13, where 1.7.0_13 is the version number of JRE installed on your system.
  2. Right-click the My Computer icon on your desktop, and select Properties.
  3. Use Ctrl+Tab to move to the Advanced tab.
  4. Click on the Environment Variables button. The Environment Variables dialog will now be displayed.
  5. Under System Variables, click New. The New System Variable dialog will appear.
  6. In the Variable name edit box, type JAVA_HOME.
  7. In the Variable value edit box, copy the full path of JRE folder (identified in step1).
  8. Click OK to set the variable.
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