FB2
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FB2 stands for Fiction Book. It is the eBook format described at http://www.fictionbook.org/index.php/Eng:FictionBook
Contents |
[edit] Goals
The stated goals of the FictionBook project are:
- The main objective is to accurately keep the book structure
- It should allow effortless converting (including automatic) of FictionBook files to other popular formats: TXT, DOC, RTF, HTML and so on.
- To provide reader applications that allow reading the FictionBook format without converting.
This format is being developed by several Russian programs to have a unified archive electronic format for books that can be converted as needed to other formats. Currently the specification is most suited for fiction books.
[edit] Specification
Current version of FB2 specification is 2.1.
Format is defined in terms of W3C XML Schema which is available from the project site.
Specification is developed by the tightly-knit team of Russian e-libraries holders.
[edit] Description
Here is a high level description of the elements slightly modified from the FB2 site.
All text in the document is stored in the following paragraph-type elements: p, v, and subtitle. An empty-line element that has no content is used to insert one line of vertical space. A few more complex containers are built from these basic elements: title (contains any number of p and empty-line), annotation, poem, cite, epigraph.
All documents start with the FictionBook root element, under which stylesheet, description, body and binary elements can occur. The stylesheet elements immediately below root contain stylesheets; their type attribute contains the MIME type of stylesheet. It is recommended to include one text/css stylesheet to ease conversion to other formats if any styles are used in the document. Binary elements are quite simple too and contain any base64-encoded opaque data that might be needed to render the document. They must always have the id and content-type attributes.
Description element contains all information about the book that is further divided into four main categories: title-info, document-info, publish-info, and custom-info.
The next major part of FictionBook document is body that contains the actual book’s text. The first body element is always the main subdocument in the book. Subsequent bodies can be used to store footnotes, comments and other stuff that does not belong to the normal text flow in the book. Each body element can contain an optional title, optional epigraph and at least one section.
There are two distinct kinds of sections. One contains other subsections only, and the other contains actual text paragraphs. It is not possible to mix subsections and paragraphs inside the same container in the current version of FictionBook standard. Each section can have a number of optional header fields: title, epigraph, image, and annotation. After these, there must be at least one paragraph-type element for text sections or at least one subsection for others.
The FictionBook provides a few elements for hyperlinking, an essential feature for electronic documents in our modern times. Hyperlinks in FictionBook are based on the XLink specification from the W3 consortium, and are a subset of the XLink.
For more information see: FictionBook description
[edit] Software
List of software using or producing FB2 may be found at project site (rus, extensive) and (en, less extensive). Notable examples:
[edit] Usage and popularity
The format is veriy popular in Russian-speaking community, as three of four largest Russian e-text libraries use this format extensively:
LitRes - prominent Russian e-book seller, tightly related to the before mentioned libraries, also uses fb2 as the internal and external format for e-books.
