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Support for start to identify the bodymatter of a publication #246

Description

@HadrienGardeur

The EPUB spec offers the ability to indicate where a publication truly starts:

This is by far the most commonly used landmark supported in EPUB, we can find it in ebooks from Standard Ebooks for example: https://github.com/standardebooks/nathaniel-hawthorne_the-house-of-the-seven-gables/blob/master/src/epub/toc.xhtml#L99

A common use case for this information is to open an ebook at the bodymatter instead of the first resource in readingOrder. This is something that Kindle apps and devices default to for example.

This is also useful for generating samples and has been used by Apple over the years: https://help.apple.com/itc/booksassetguide/en.lproj/itceb1fd1630.html

We would like to support this landmark in all Readium toolkits as well by using the start value in rel directly in the readingOrder.
We'll explore how we could support other landmarks in the future to extend this further, but for the time being, we can already focus on that one.

Activity

  1. mickael-menu commented on Jul 28, 2025

    @mickael-menu
    Member

    Here's the Swift PR for reference: readium/swift-toolkit#602

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