DiffDog E-book Now Available

We’ve published an e-book in multiple formats for your favorite tablet or other e-reader.

DiffDog Field Trials is a collection of information from the Altova blog, Tech Notes from the Library section of the Altova Web site, and DiffDog product feature pages. The e-book describes a wide range of real-world applications for DiffDog, Altova’s XML-aware diff/merge tool for files, folders, directories, and databases.

You can download DiffDog Field Trials from the Altova Web site in various formats:

· EPUB (1.57 mb)

· Kindle (3.08 mb)

· PDF (11.1 mb)

· iBooks (16.5 mb)

Or, look for DiffDog Field Trials soon in your favorite online electronic bookstore.

Editing EPUB files with DiffDog

As you can see from the list above, EPUB, the XML-based free and open e-book standard by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), is potentially the most efficient sharable file format. An EPUB document is based on a ZIP compressed archive containing style information, text formatted as html, and the images that appear in the e-book.

Altova XMLSpy provides powerful support for accessing, editing, validating and previewing EPUB 2.x documents. We used XMLSpy to assemble the EPUB version of our book, where we were able to interactively preview the result as we worked:

It’s especially convenient to drag groups of files – like image files – all at once from an external folder to the Archive Window in XMLSpy to add them to the EPUB work in process. For more details, you can read our earlier blog post about using XMLSpy as an EPUB creation tool: Learning About EPUB: Structure and Content.

There are also a range of dedicated and online conversion tools that let you create EPUB documents from existing files like PDF or word processor documents. If you use a file conversion method to create an EPUB, you may find you want to make small edits after conversion to revise a style, replace the digits of a placeholder ISBN, or even correct an unfortunate typo. DiffDog can help with that!

We recommend making a backup copy first, then you can open both files side by side in DiffDog and conveniently keep track of your changes:

Anyone who has worked with .html and .css files will be comfortable editing individual contents of the EPUB archive, for instance to remove underlining from all instances of a text style. Simply double click any file pair in the ZIP compare window to open a new file comparison view:

The disk icon near the file name above the window on the right indicates a change has not yet been saved.

Find out for yourself how DiffDog can help you quickly tune up your EPUB documents – download a fully-functional, free 30-day trial!