Challenge
The EPUB format stands out as being easy to use and accessible on many devices, including iPhone, Android, iPad, Sony Reader, etc. EPUB is reflowable, i.e. it adapts its presentation to an output device and is suitable for publications with much of the text and a simple layout. The two languages— XHTML and XML—make the EPUB code modifiable. As the format works well with most types of software, it provides a stronger distribution opportunity. SCAND mobile team has considered all the advantages of the EPUB format and created the epuBear solution. EpuBear is a cross-platform EPUB SDK used for the EPUB reader development. One of the main objectives was to make EPUB SDK lightweight and reliable at the same time.
Approach
The idea was to create a basic core of the EPUB SDK and prepare native wrappers in Java (Android), iOS (Swift), and C# (Xamarin) for our EPUB toolkit. The wrappers provided by the SCAND mobile development team make the EPUB SDK compatible with a definite project regardless of the target platform.
Description
Our set of software development tools for EPUB readers is initially realized in C++. The basic core of epuBear is extended with the help of additional wrappers. The code of each wrapper works as a proxy between the native code and the core.
Key Features
Basic functionality of the cross-platform epuBear core is as follows:
- Open, unpack, and parse EPUB documents
- Get EPUB document data
- Render pages to bitmaps
- Go to a page and chapter
- Open internal and external links
- Change font size
- Choose between a single and double-page mode
- Apply a night mode
- Support Latin, Cyrillic, and hieroglyphs
- Apply bookmarks
- Table of contents
Screenshots
Result
Our mobile team has created epuBear, a cross-platform EPUB SDK, for the developers who intensively use the EPUB file format in their projects.
Native wrappers in Java, Swift, and C# made our EPUB toolkit accessible for Android, iOS, and Xamarin correspondingly. We demonstrate all highlights of epuBear in Demo Readers available for Android and iOS. There is an opportunity to either buy epuBear as the EPUB toolkit or order EPUB reader development.
Related Cases
- Java
- Android SDK
- C++
- Java
- Objective-C