Saturday, March 13, 2010

Creating Korean eBooks in EPUB format

As far as I know, there aren't a lot of Korean ebooks in EPUB format. However, if you have a Korean literature of any kind, you can create an EPUB file for viewing on a digital reader. Assuming that you have a Korean text file in KSC5601 or UHC character set, you should convert your text file into Unicode encoding. You can do so with iconv.


iconv -f UHC -t UTF-8 oldtext.txt > newtext.txt

Open the new Unicode-encoded text in Sigil, edit it and save it as an EPUB file. Now you should add Korean fonts into your EPUB file. I recommend the following fonts.


  • H2GTRM.TTF
  • H2GTRB.TTF

Then, edit content.opf in your EPUB file so that the manifest section contains the following:


<item id="h2gtrm.ttf" href="fonts/h2gtrm.ttf" media-type="application/x-font-truetype"/>
<item id="h2gtrb.ttf" href="fonts/h2gtrb.ttf" media-type="application/x-font-truetype"/>

Start Sigil again and open your EPUB file. Select the dual editing mode and insert the following CSS definitions into the HTML header.


  @font-face {
font-family: HYGothic-Medium;
font-weight: normal;
font-style: normal;
src: url(../fonts/h2gtrm.ttf);
}
@font-face {
font-family: HYGothic-Bold;
font-weight: bold;
font-style: normal;
src: url(../fonts/h2gtrb.ttf);
}
a {
color: inherit;
text-decoration: inherit;
}
em, i {
font-family: HYGothic-Medium, sans-serif;
font-weight: normal;
font-style: italic;
text-decoration: underline;
}
strong, b, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
font-family: HYGothic-Bold, sans-serif;
font-weight: bold;
font-style: normal;
}
body {
font-family: HYGothic-Medium, sans-serif;
margin-left: 5pt;
margin-right: 5pt;
text-align: justify;
}

Test your ebook with Adobe Digital Editions. It should display Korean correctly.

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