I bought a Kobo Mini ereader and got started on reading all the Victorian books in the world. But i soon got fed up of the standard Gutenberg epub formatting, specifically the horrible default cover and the way that the Kobo would use a screenshot of the front page when no cover image was included, said front page being the standard gutenberg legal boilerplate reduced to unreadable size.
I looked at DocBook but it was massively complicated and still didn't do everything i needed. So i decided to do it myself. This is the result.
It uses a text document marked up with some xml to define chapters and paragraphs and the odd bit of meta data and generates an epub.
I use NetBeans on Mint 13 but the project is Maven based so it should be easy enough to use with other IDEs.
After building it i run it from the command line, something like this: java -cp ./target/acdepub-1.2-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar me/koogy/acdepub/Main five_jars.xml which will create a five_jars.epub
I've been using it for a couple of years now but it's still a bit beta - I need to document this a bit more, and add some markup examples etc. There are some in src/test/xml but it's come on a way since i wrote those.