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I have an ebook that I'm trying to make adjustments to. When I load it on my Nook Simple Touch, it has large margins, ignoring the settings on the Nook to have a minimal margin. When going through the HTML for the ebook, nothing jumps out at me as causing this large margin. After I make changes to the CSS, I need to package the files back up as an epub, copy the file to my Nook, and then see if I fixed it. That whole process is time consuming, especially since I'm testing one minor change to the CSS at a time.
Is there some software that will simulate the epub renderer of an ereader on a computer and let me inspect the DOM to see why it's maintaining large margins on an ereader?
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As mentioned by @Jason Down, you can use calibre.
To inspect the layout (like in a browser's dev tools), you can open an EPUB in calibre's viewer, then right click somewhere on the page and select Inspect.
To edit EPUBs, right-click on an EPUB and select "Edit Book" (second option from the bottom.)
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To inspect the CSS rules inside the EPUB file, you can load it with a browser-based reader (for example Readium). All major browsers have code inspectors where you can modify the CSS in realtime.
For the rules that are added by the E-reader devices, I don't know a good way either. This page talks about a NOOK emulator, maybe that can help.
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There is no such thing. I've done extensive research. For Amazon's platform, there is the Kindle Previewer, but it has so many bugs that I think it is mostly worthless. The fundamental problem is that every device and app has their own hidden stylesheet that will override yours. None of these stylesheets are documented and figuring out what they do is painfully tedious.
Your best bet is to search for known "bugs" that people have discovered. It is quite likely that someone else has run into this behavior before (I haven't). I have toyed with the idea of building a tool such as the one you describe, but discovering the idiosyncratic behaviors of the various platforms, devices, and apps is a more daunting task than writing an app to mimic them. Not to mention keeping it up to date.
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For editing an EPub, I would look into sigil. It has the ability of WYSIWYG editing and comes recommended by other users on this forum. It's free and open-source.
An alternative is Calibre. Editing EPubs is a bit more code-centric in contrast to sigil. It's also free and open-source.
For some comparisons between the two programs, check out this blog.
As far as an actual hardware emulator for specific eReader devices, I'm not aware of any.
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