Working with ePub files in Flash and the Text Layout Framework

Walflower is an ActionScript framework for working with ePub files in Flash. You can download the code from github at http://www.github.com/maxl0rd/walflower.

EPub is an open-source format that has become one of the most popular ways of distributing non-DRM-protected eBooks. It is essentially a zip file containing a directory of XHTML documents, supporting files like images, and a variety of manifests and metadata that describe the shape of the document, the order it should be read, etc.

Walflower integrates the nice zip library written by nochump, which is not the fastest unzip routine ever seen, but it works quite nicely. It then parses all the book meta-data into various data structures that describe the book. Finally, it works through all the XHTML pages and parses them into TextFlows that can be displayed with the Text Layout Framework, as described in a previous post.

There is a sample project up in the repo that shows this in action here: http://github.com/maxl0rd/walflower/tree/master/examples/EPubExample/

It does not generate any output yet, but it would be a good starting point for a project based on this lib. The process of making sense of this file format was rather horrible, and I hope this code is useful to anyone on the same path.

You can see an example eBook reader that was made with this library over here:
walflower halloween book teaser.