Getting started

Papyrus

Extracting the ePub to a StorageFolder

An ePub file is really just a ZIP file with a fancy extension. You can extract it just as you would a ZIP file.

var targetFolder = await ApplicationData.Current.LocalFolder.CreateFolderAsync("Dawn of Wonder - Jonathan Renshaw");

using (var stream = await ePubFile.OpenStreamForReadAsync())
{
  var archive = new ZipArchive(stream);
  archive.ExtractToDirectory(targetFolder.Path);
}

Creating the Papyrus eBook

You'll need to create the eBook, handing it the StorageFolder to which you extracted the ePub.

var eBook = new EBook(targetFolder);

Initializing the eBook

When you initialize the eBook it will get all the properties of the ePub (e.g. the title, author, etc.)

await eBook.InitializeAsync();

You can now get HTML content from your eBook. If you want to display the content using native controls, keep reading to see Papyrus.HtmlParser usage.

Papyrus.HtmlParser

Papyrus HTML Parser allows you to get a collection of Block elements which can be displayed in a RichTextBlock, representing the HTML. It makes for a much cleaner layout, but could potentially misrepresent the actual layout as displayed in HTML.

Getting the HTML content

The EBook.GetContentsAsync() method has three different signatures. It can take a NavPoint, a SpineItem or a ManifestItem.

var html = await eBook.GetContentsAsync(item);

Parsing the HTML

Parsing the HTML is as easy as

var converter = new Converter();
converter.Convert(html, string.Empty);

You will now have access to a collection of Block elements which represent the converted HTML.

Parsing with CSS

The second parameter in the Convert method takes CSS styles. Getting the CSS styles is optional, but will help to display the UI more closely to how it is displayed in HTML. You may use whatever method you wish to get the CSS content, now that you can parse the location of the stylesheets from the HTML. The EBook class does have an extension method which takes an absolute path to a file inside its folder and returns the file. E.g. Book.GetFileAsync("C:/Path/To/The/EBook/styles/styles.css"); I intend to build the CSS loading functionality right into Papyrus in the future. If you opt not to get the CSS, just pass an empty string to the parser.