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.