IDPF 2013 ePub3 Fixed Layout Test Cases

(Read more background to this article in the Blog Post.)

This is a continuation from the General ePub3 test cases on the previous page. Please note all of these Test Suite Books are strictly [under construction] and subject to change at any time. This chart will be maintained if and when the test cases are changed. Meanwhile this chart and the comments will assist users and publishers to understand ePub3 features in more depth.

Comments on Fixed Layout

This test case set shows the problems we had creating test-cases for a full implementation of the potential of the EPub3 Fixed Layout Specification. We put our own simple set of Fixed Layout Test-Cases up here over a year ago. We have many more but these are the standard iBooks exemplars with the addition of 16:9 aspect ratio considerations.

This IDPF list is far from complete and you get the clear understanding that they are struggling to know what to create test cases for as thinking is defined by the limited Apple iBooks and Readium implementations without Spine-properties.

To make it "Clear at a Glance" what each test book is expecting a ready system to display there is this earlier graphical tutorial posted in November 2012 to help the reader to understand what they should expect to see. We have used 16:9 aspect ratio as that makes it clearer to see the portrait-landscape orientation changes.

There are still a lot of Fixed-Layout features missing from this list. Notably page left-center-right forced layout and fully flexible spine-properties.

Another small criticism is the comments in the books seem to assume the first/title/cover page should open right. This is not in the specification and indeed should be set with the page position statement rather than being forced. We posted an article on this on the 21 January 2013 The FLO Opening Page Problem

Because AZARDI does use the page positioning spine statements this is set by the configuration and not default reading system behaviour.

We find this very important with textbooks where we generally want things to open as a spread rather than forced to the right.

To get a full understanding of a correct interpretation of the IDPF Fixed-Layout specification take the time to download "FIXED LAYOUT Grows Up" and view it in AZARDI. If you are using AZARDI you can use Alt-H to see the document and spine properties applied to each page.

Columns and Colour Codes

No The linear feature item number in this table.

Req Whether the specification says the feature is required. R=Required. O=Optional

Feature The feature description taken from the Test Suite Table of Contents.

AZARDI The following colour codes are used in the AZARDI support columns for each of the four AZARDI options: Desktop, Online, IOS and Android.

Y GREEN Fully supported

N ORANGE Not supported. May be supported in future releases

X RED Not supported as by decision