opubWriter is in its infancy; there are still many features to add and enhancements to make. This page lists its known limitations, detected faults, and gives an idea of the improvements that are planned. Feel free to use the Contact page to make your own suggestions.

Known faults and limitations

1. The 'validate' option against each book in the library doesn't do anything. It would be useful to have something like EpubCheck built into opubWriter. That product is open source Java and, potentially, could be converted to C#.
2. The Metadata screen allows any number of items of each type to be added, but it doesn't allow optional values to be set. For instance, any number of <date> items can be added, but that's not much use while the optional 'event' attribute isn't available to distinguish between them. The following metadata items have optional attributes:

   metadata item	optional attributes
   contributor	role, file-as
   creator	role, file-as
   date	event
   identifier	schema, id

3. The New Epub Data screen has a faulty layout.
4. When opubWriter was first released, it included the ability to change the order of the content documents in a single-level epub using a drag and drop approach. However, it was soon realised that the Javascript to achieve this works in Internet Explorer but not is Firefox. A content creator definitely needs this ability and the problems encountered will need to be solved.
5. A user can upload images and have them included in the publication's manifest. However, when the tinyMCE 'Insert image' button is used to insert an image into a document, opubWriter makes a mess of the URL. The reason the URL needs to be modified was discussed in the Inside Epub blog, but the solution isn't working, yet.

Planned enhancements

1. Tighten up the XHTML elements that are allowed by the tinyMCE editor, bringing them in line with the OPS Preferred Vocabulary. TinyMCE has a setting called valid_elements which could be used for this purpose.
2. Although the user can upload images, there is no way, short of editing the XHTML to include an image in a document.
3. Likewise, a new CSS stylesheet can be uploaded and included in the manifest, but there is no user-friendly way of including it in a content document. At the moment, the user would need to edit the XHTML and insert a <link> element.
4. Much more validation is needed when the content creator changes something. For instance, it shouldn't be possible to delete, without first warning, a stylesheet, image, or any other item that is referenced by another document.