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The author discusses fixed layout epubs. Effectively, the epub can give a default pagination, line-breaks, font, font size, page size, and positioning for image
by joshjob42 3y ago
The author discusses fixed layout epubs. Effectively, the epub can give a default pagination, line-breaks, font, font size, page size, and positioning for images etc., making it render identically on everything (one might optionally omit pagination if opening in a browser but keep everything else). This can be done already in epub3. But that's not ideal, because then it doesn't look good anymore on a phone, etc. Depending on the reader though, you could override the default, but then you have to hope that your reader does a good job of making a nice document. An alternative is for the epub to specify multiple renderings, for various common screen types.
I don't think this is unreasonable as a solution. By all means let's try to get a smart reader, but letting people create defaults for their documents that can be overridden if desired by the user is a good middle ground.
- idoubtit 3y agoIndeed, EPUB3 provides all the features that the author wishes. His "portable EPUB" format is just a loosely specified subset. It's unclear if some extra features are included in the format as they are in his "Bene" tool, like the rendering of references (i.e. links with a data-target attribute). The EPUB3 standard is much more complex than EPUB2 (media overlays, mixing fixed layout with reflowed, MathML…). In my experience the implementations are much more varying, and most of them aren't complete. So a "Portable EPUB" may not render as expected because the reader tool lacks some specific feature. The author also requires full JS support, which I supose does not help with portability.