Newbie question: Best editor for working with EPUB XHTML

[Dave Roberts]

I’m curious what editors people are using to make changes to epub files? Right now, I’m using Emacs on MacOS because it’s my default editing choice, and it has good support for Unicode. That said, it also isn’t the greatest with respect to displaying some Unicode characters (e.g., em-dash vs hyphen), at least in the settings I’m running with today (fixed font in XHTML mode). I’m sure I could customize it to make it even better (that’s Emacs’s greatest virtue), but was curious what others are using and why? Also, to be clear, I have no interest in starting an editor war thread. I’m not interested in editor evangelism; I’m just looking for simple statements like, “Yea, I use Emacs, too, and here’s what you might do to make it better,” and “I use Editor X because…”

Thanks,

— Dave

[Robin Whittleton]

I know a few people (including me) are on Sublime Text: it’s super fast, has great multiple cursor support, and handles files of any size without choking. I know we’ve got a couple of BBEdit users too, but I’ve not tried that.

-Robin

On 4 Jan 2026, at 20:38, Dave Roberts <drob...@gmail.com> wrote:

I’m curious what editors people are using to make changes to epub files? Right now, I’m using Emacs on MacOS because it’s my default editing choice, and it has good support for Unicode. That said, it also isn’t the greatest with respect to displaying some Unicode characters (e.g., em-dash vs hyphen), at least in the settings I’m running with today (fixed font in XHTML mode). I’m sure I could customize it to make it even better (that’s Emacs’s greatest virtue), but was curious what others are using and why? Also, to be clear, I have no interest in starting an editor war thread. I’m not interested in editor evangelism; I’m just looking for simple statements like, “Yea, I use Emacs, too, and here’s what you might do to make it better,” and “I use Editor X because…”

Thanks,

— Dave

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Standard Ebooks" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to standardebook...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/C54AACD3-21F2-4FE0-872B-F77474C68019%40gmail.com.

[Devin O'Bannon]

I use Phoenix Code on my MacOS, and I've found it's really useful--it renders everything properly, detects any issues with HTML coding and tells me where, autofills certain things, etc.

I had never coded HTML before I started doing stuff for StandardEbooks, and I started on Phoenix Code, and I've really liked it so far. I also haven't had to customize it at all in order to program things. You can download it here: https://phcode.io/

Devin

[Alexander Keane]

I hear you on the issues with "hyphen, en-dash, or em-dash" in Emacs. I use it on MacOS and Linux when I edit. I'm definitely going to keep an eye on this because so far my strategy has just been "extra attention to dashes during proofreading"

The project where I had to do a transcription along with the XHTML, I just gave myself a strict policy of "do not trust the OCR's decision, deleting the Dash and typing the correct one by unicode will take literally two seconds"

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/0906e2cd-2a3b-4fc8-a472-a8d93638745bn%40googlegroups.com.

[Dave Roberts]

Thanks! I’ll give it a try.

Sent from my iPad

On Jan 4, 2026, at 3:58 PM, Devin O'Bannon <devino...@gmail.com> wrote:



To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/0906e2cd-2a3b-4fc8-a472-a8d93638745bn%40googlegroups.com.

[Dave Roberts]

Yea, I was thinking of creating a key binding or three to insert the correct dashes. Coupled with queried search and replace, my guess is that would do it. Might also try a non-fixed font and see if that helps.

Sent from my iPad

On Jan 4, 2026, at 4:05 PM, Alexander Keane <lxtk...@gmail.com> wrote:



To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/CAHgd%3D3w8BNVdN3EBDDC9XkL7fpbzBRxjKcp9NU4q-xa-N2oYjA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Vince]

I use BBEdit and the Monaco font; from what I’ve seen here, I think we have most of the main players represented, e.g. BBEdit, Sublime, VS Code/Codium, Emacs, Vim, etc. I don’t remember seeing Panic’s Nova mentioned, but I might have missed it.

The actual display of the various dashes is more of a font thing than an editor thing; most fixed-width fonts have very poor visibility on the differences, just because of the “fixed” part of fixed-width. Monaco differentiates pretty well between hyphen and the various en/em-dashes; figure dash and em-dash look the same, though, but I don’t need figure-dash enough for it to bother me.

David Grigg modified the open-source Hack font a while back to add glyphs to make some of the characters more visible, see here to try it out and see if it helps.

[David from SE]

Thanks for your mention of my modified typeface Ebooks Hack, Vince. I’ll check whether the link you gave goes to the latest version, it’s been a while since I looked at it. It makes quotation marks far easier to recognise and distinguish, and it also has different glyphs for one, two and three-em dashes. It’s still what I use in BBedit.

David Grigg from SE

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Standard Ebooks" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to standardebook...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/403195A1-17C4-4F3E-8D31-3F2655AEFEA0%40letterboxes.org.

[Dave Roberts]

So, it sounds like no real center of gravity for editors. Everybody is using whatever they feel comfortable with. I agree that fonts will matter more. I’ll download the Hack variant and try that. I happen to use Hack with Emacs already, so that’s a good match for my existing setup. Thanks!

[bak]

I use Panic's Nova editor on MacOS and I like its xml syntax and structure support very much, and of course it has no problem displaying invisible characters, doing complicated regex searches, or manipulating Unicode whatnots. I have also set it up to run the build and lint commands on a project directory as a job. It can also render HTML previews and run a shell inside a project for little jobs and fixups.

Even more though, I have come to value and want to recommend an app called PopChar (which I believe is also a Windows app) that has allowed me to assign a hotkey and bring up a little window with a bunch of typographical "favorites" saved: all the dashes, quotation marks, word-join glyphs, etc; and then it will paste them to the cursor as HTML entities, Unicode characters, emojis, particular font glyphs. I have come to use it all the time as I edit.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Standard Ebooks" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to standardebook...@googlegroups.com.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/C54AACD3-21F2-4FE0-872B-F77474C68019%40gmail.com.

[Dave Roberts]

I tried EbooksHack and it worked great. Definitely better for editing epub books than the original Hack I had been using. David, if you have an updated version, let me know. Happy to give it a try. I’m using the version that Vince referenced.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/198953683182839808.0.v2%40titan.email.

[Alex Cabal]

I use Sublime Text with the LSP plugins.

You can se `se unicode-names` to distinguish between various kinds of
look-alike characters like dashes and spaces. That's what the tool was
designed for. How dashes and spaces display is (mostly) a function of
the font you select, not the editor. (Though Sublime does show a special
character for nbsp.)

On 1/4/26 1:38 PM, Dave Roberts wrote:
> I’m curious what editors people are using to make changes to epub files?
> Right now, I’m using Emacs on MacOS because it’s my default editing
> choice, and it has good support for Unicode. That said, it also isn’t
> the greatest with respect to displaying some Unicode characters (e.g.,
> em-dash vs hyphen), at least in the settings I’m running with today

> (fixed font in XHTML mode). I’m _sure_ I could customize it to make it

> even better (that’s Emacs’s greatest virtue), but was curious what
> others are using and why? Also, to be clear, I have no interest in
> starting an editor war thread. I’m not interested in editor evangelism;
> I’m just looking for simple statements like, “Yea, I use Emacs, too, and
> here’s what you might do to make it better,” and “I use Editor X because…”
>
> Thanks,
>
> — Dave
>

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "Standard Ebooks" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
> an email to standardebook...@googlegroups.com

> <mailto:standardebook...@googlegroups.com>.

> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/

> standardebooks/C54AACD3-21F2-4FE0-872B-F77474C68019%40gmail.com
> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/
> C54AACD3-21F2-4FE0-872B-F77474C68019%40gmail.com?
> utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.