Chapter 5. Installation

System requirements

Make sure to have a Java™ 11+ runtime installed on your machine. To check this, please open a command window and type "java -version" followed by Enter. You should get something looking like this:

C:\> java -version
openjdk version "25" 2025-09-16
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 25+36-3489)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 25+36-3489, mixed mode)

Installation

Simply unzip ebookc-X_Y_Z.zip in any directory.

After that, you can run command-line utility ebookc by simply executing ebookc_install_dir/bin/ebookc.bat (ebookc_install_dir/bin/ebookc on the Mac and on Linux).

C:\> mkdir XMLmind
C:\> cd XMLmind
C:\XMLmind> unzip ebookc-1_12_0.zip
C:\XMLmind> dir ebookc-1_12_0
... <DIR> bin
... <DIR> doc
... <DIR> docsrc
... <DIR> LEGAL
...
C:\XMLmind> ebookc-1_12_0\bin\ebookc.bat
ebookc: ERROR: Usage: ebookc [option]* in_ebook_file out_file_or_directory
...

Contents of the installation directory

bin/, bin/ebookc, bin/ebookc.bat

Contains the ebookc command-line utility. Use shell script ebookc on Linux and on the Mac. Use ebookc.bat on Windows.

doc/, doc/index.html

Contains the documentation of XMLmind Ebook Compiler.

docsrc/, docsrc/manual.xml

Contains the documentation of XMLmind Ebook Compiler in ebookc format. File docsrc/manual.ebook contains an ebook specification. You may want to use this sample ebook specification to experiment with the ebookc command-line utility.

LEGAL/, LEGAL.txt

Contains legal information about XMLmind Ebook Compiler and about third-party components used in XMLmind Ebook Compiler.

lib/*.jar

All the Java™ class libraries needed to run XMLmind Ebook Compiler. For example, lib/ebookc.jar contain the code of XMLmind Ebook Compiler.

plus/

This directory is present only in the case of the ebookc-X_Y_Z-plus-fop.zip distribution. It contains most recent Apache FOP (including hyphenation and MathML support). This XSL-FO processor is automatically declared and thus, ready to be used to generate PDF or PostScript.

schema/

Contains a W3C XML schema and a Schematron which may be used to check an ebook specification for validity. File schema/catalog.xml contains an XML catalog which points to these schemas.

src/, src/build.xml

Contains the Java™ source code of XMLmind Ebook Compiler. src/build.xml is an ant build file which allows to rebuild lib/ebookc.jar.

whc_template/

Contains the template directory of XMLmind Web Help Compiler.

xsl/

Contains the XSLT 2.0 stylesheets used to convert ebook specifications to a variety of formats.