3 ms·

I feel like there's a slight lack of grassroots activity with epubs, people tend to work with mature products or random e-readers. I've recently experimented a

I feel like there's a slight lack of grassroots activity with epubs, people tend to work with mature products or random e-readers. I've recently experimented a bit with making epubs by hand (bash+perl) and they tend to break readers more often than not. So I feel we've come to the spot where there's standards, but then there's convention over (a) decade(s) that just trumps standards. Reminds me of DHCP where I've yet to come across three implementations that agree on certain aspects. Also, is 'supports epub x.y' been a selling point in any reader so far? I'm looking through the changes and holy hell, this makes me feel like punching an engineer, and I am one! Everything is buried under three or more layers, requiring at least 3 clicks and a bunch of scrolling and usually just refers to what they've changed compared to the PREVIOUS version. While fine for a standard, this is absolutely awful for anyone who doesn't work with epub files daily (which I'm guessing is a very small minority). If you're interested in changes written for humans, this link is what you're looking for: https://www.w3.org/publishing/epub32/epub-overview.html https://www.w3.org/publishing/epub32/epub-overview.html It doesn't contain motivation for these changes, though, so we'll go with "some engineer thought these would be a good idea" I guess I'd like to ask the working group: #1 How widespread would you consider high/recent version support for epubs to be? #2 How would you sell epub 3.2 support to people developing e-readers or reader applications? #3 Why isn't the first page filled with "Hey guv, you're an engineer who's interested, here's what epub is and does, and here's a link with all the recent changes along with update motivation information" because looking at this site, I could not find a single thing for convincing manager/C-level types to grant 200 product update hours for this.

m-p-3 7y ago
> I've recently experimented a bit with making epubs by hand (bash+perl) and they tend to break readers more often than not. Me too, and I wish SVG support was better on most eReader (not a good experience so far), and that there was official support for MathML or something equivalent. It hurts to see so many books using raster pictures to display a formula or a diagram, when it would look crisper and flow better if it was vector-based.
- Finnucane 7y ago
  I'm in academic book publishing, and our books have a lot of charts and diagrams that are challenging to display on certain readers that have poor SVG support. Also, tables can easily be larger than the readers can comfortably handle, and certain readers (yeah, looking at you, Kindle) suck at it. You'd think there would not be such a great difficulty in this, since epubs are constructed out of the same basic tech stack as web pages. I think the fundamental problem is that Amazon, Apple, etc., don't have much incentive to support texts beyond the most commercial genres.

m-p-3 7y ago

> I've recently experimented a bit with making epubs by hand (bash+perl) and they tend to break readers more often than not. Me too, and I wish SVG support was better on most eReader (not a good experience so far), and that there was official support for MathML or something equivalent. It hurts to see so many books using raster pictures to display a formula or a diagram, when it would look crisper and flow better if it was vector-based.

Finnucane 7y ago
I'm in academic book publishing, and our books have a lot of charts and diagrams that are challenging to display on certain readers that have poor SVG support. Also, tables can easily be larger than the readers can comfortably handle, and certain readers (yeah, looking at you, Kindle) suck at it. You'd think there would not be such a great difficulty in this, since epubs are constructed out of the same basic tech stack as web pages. I think the fundamental problem is that Amazon, Apple, etc., don't have much incentive to support texts beyond the most commercial genres.