4 ms·

While everyone here seems to talk about the epub angle to the story, there's also simply the deeper story here, that "the web's" handling of paged media and the

While everyone here seems to talk about the epub angle to the story, there's also simply the deeper story here, that "the web's" handling of paged media and the CSS paged media specs (to which his epub problem is related) is a never ending shitshow. Not only for epubs, for everybody who actually wants to print to real paper, too, ideally with a working cross browser solution. Mistake is largely not in the specs, but in the lack of support for them. Page breaking controls, weirdly breaking tables, lack of access to area outside the page box to influence headers/footers without weird hacks etc. etc. For printing, the 1990ies never ended. This leads to the bizarre situation where basically everyone who has semi complex printing needs in web applications will create PDF and then print that - and for creating those PDFs, often HTML to PDF conversion is used, just with actually implemented CSS for paged media. Which again proves that the spec is at least 99% there, if somebody would just kindly implement it in a browser, too. Won't be more complex than having the latest WebGL whatever thing in your browser engine ;-)

wakeupcall 2y ago
Some months ago I wanted to format/print some documents, and given the existing tooling I had I decided to try the html->pdf route. I fully agree is a shitshow. The way things break across pages is hard to fix even when hand-tuning the html itself (not just by working it around with css) to avoid content being cut across margins and pages no matter what. I've found chrome to be "less bad", but still unusable. Column handling is even a bigger joke. In the end I exported the document to libreoffice, and got something way more usable in a few hours just by editing the styles than whatever I was able to do in days of fiddling with html+browser. iBooks on apple might get a pass as it doesn't need to paginate, but truth be told it seems that epub/ebooks and ereaders in general are being targeted at novels and romance, where form factor, typesetting and formatting doesn't matter that much. I have access to ebooks through my local library and there's no way I would use, let alone buy, any technical ebook. Not to mention, I've seen a steady average decline in the quality of printed media in general over the last ~15 years. A lot less attention is put in the typesetting and layout. Even the print quality itself is lower, which I think is due to the smaller and cheaper print runs being done now also for more popular titles.
- spookie 2y ago
  Paper quality in general has seen quite a decline as well.
  - onetokeoverthe 2y ago
    Suggestions for better quality paper providers?
    - wiether 2y ago
      [flagged]
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  I thought book quality started going downhill circa 1990. I am a fan of the old mass market paperbacks. These had a reputation of being low quality books back in the day because they are cheap and not super-durable but I think they are high quality from a Deming point of view because they are made by a process that is highly repeatable. Circa 2000 I thought my 1970s paperbacks were in great shape, but 2010 they were seriously yellowing. I just looked at my bookshelf and found a '59 James Blish anthology that I bought for 50 cents maybe ten years ago, it is in "poor" condition and will probably crack if I read it without taking great care. Next to that I found a copy of Galbraith's The Affluent Society from 1958 which is perfectly usable except I'd be worried about the cover coming off. A Frank Herbert book from '68 is stained but in great shape other than the cover also being at risk. A '74 Herbert book is a touch discolored but has no problems at all. (My collection includes not just science fiction of that era but also both self-help and serious books on psychology as well as books about science, politics, social sciences, etc. Government reports about inflation or race relations would be published as mass market paperbacks. You could get Plato and Sartre and Freud and the rest of the Western literary heavyweights) The construction, materials, process, and such were repeatable enough that they even fail consistently. Not permanent, but 50 years is not bad. The right size to go in a purse or side pocket of a backpack (e.g. part of the loadout of a bibliomaniac who has 12 books in his backpack) I've got to find a good way to reinforce the cover (adhesive tape?) Those are no longer produced, today it is trade paperbacks. There is wide variation in the dimension, construction, materials and processes for these. You sometimes find a trade paperback that is beautiful, strongly constructed and printed on acid free paper. Others you pay $50 for and the binding breaks the first time you lay the book open on the table.
bayindirh 2y ago
I think being able to format a page just for printing, esp. with HTML/CSS itself is a killer feature and is gigantically underestimated. I understand that printers are Satan incarnate and runs on concentrated sins of cost cutting engineers, and nobody has time to read that 1.5 page article someone wrote by giving proper effort, but scientific articles, books, nice blog posts we want to delve in, etc. are real and regardless on the substance they run on, printers are real things and they are used nevertheless. The tendency to assume that everyone is running on high end laptops and cutting edge, network connected tablets is making me angry sometimes. Implementing features like this will make many programmers' life easier who need to be able to generate and print reports from their web applications, too. It's not only about books and shrewd people who want to print a blog post and study/read that on a table or wherever.
jamesfinlayson 2y ago
Completely agree - I wrote a book that had some specific layout requirements in HTML, and while it was easier to get something up and running than LaTeX, getting the printing part right was very painful (not least of all because no browsers seem to support things like page numbering).

wakeupcall 2y ago

Some months ago I wanted to format/print some documents, and given the existing tooling I had I decided to try the html->pdf route. I fully agree is a shitshow. The way things break across pages is hard to fix even when hand-tuning the html itself (not just by working it around with css) to avoid content being cut across margins and pages no matter what. I've found chrome to be "less bad", but still unusable. Column handling is even a bigger joke. In the end I exported the document to libreoffice, and got something way more usable in a few hours just by editing the styles than whatever I was able to do in days of fiddling with html+browser. iBooks on apple might get a pass as it doesn't need to paginate, but truth be told it seems that epub/ebooks and ereaders in general are being targeted at novels and romance, where form factor, typesetting and formatting doesn't matter that much. I have access to ebooks through my local library and there's no way I would use, let alone buy, any technical ebook. Not to mention, I've seen a steady average decline in the quality of printed media in general over the last ~15 years. A lot less attention is put in the typesetting and layout. Even the print quality itself is lower, which I think is due to the smaller and cheaper print runs being done now also for more popular titles.

spookie 2y ago
Paper quality in general has seen quite a decline as well.
- onetokeoverthe 2y ago
  Suggestions for better quality paper providers?
  - wiether 2y ago
    [flagged]
PaulHoule 2y ago
I thought book quality started going downhill circa 1990. I am a fan of the old mass market paperbacks. These had a reputation of being low quality books back in the day because they are cheap and not super-durable but I think they are high quality from a Deming point of view because they are made by a process that is highly repeatable. Circa 2000 I thought my 1970s paperbacks were in great shape, but 2010 they were seriously yellowing. I just looked at my bookshelf and found a '59 James Blish anthology that I bought for 50 cents maybe ten years ago, it is in "poor" condition and will probably crack if I read it without taking great care. Next to that I found a copy of Galbraith's The Affluent Society from 1958 which is perfectly usable except I'd be worried about the cover coming off. A Frank Herbert book from '68 is stained but in great shape other than the cover also being at risk. A '74 Herbert book is a touch discolored but has no problems at all. (My collection includes not just science fiction of that era but also both self-help and serious books on psychology as well as books about science, politics, social sciences, etc. Government reports about inflation or race relations would be published as mass market paperbacks. You could get Plato and Sartre and Freud and the rest of the Western literary heavyweights) The construction, materials, process, and such were repeatable enough that they even fail consistently. Not permanent, but 50 years is not bad. The right size to go in a purse or side pocket of a backpack (e.g. part of the loadout of a bibliomaniac who has 12 books in his backpack) I've got to find a good way to reinforce the cover (adhesive tape?) Those are no longer produced, today it is trade paperbacks. There is wide variation in the dimension, construction, materials and processes for these. You sometimes find a trade paperback that is beautiful, strongly constructed and printed on acid free paper. Others you pay $50 for and the binding breaks the first time you lay the book open on the table.

bayindirh 2y ago

I think being able to format a page just for printing, esp. with HTML/CSS itself is a killer feature and is gigantically underestimated. I understand that printers are Satan incarnate and runs on concentrated sins of cost cutting engineers, and nobody has time to read that 1.5 page article someone wrote by giving proper effort, but scientific articles, books, nice blog posts we want to delve in, etc. are real and regardless on the substance they run on, printers are real things and they are used nevertheless. The tendency to assume that everyone is running on high end laptops and cutting edge, network connected tablets is making me angry sometimes. Implementing features like this will make many programmers' life easier who need to be able to generate and print reports from their web applications, too. It's not only about books and shrewd people who want to print a blog post and study/read that on a table or wherever.

jamesfinlayson 2y ago

Completely agree - I wrote a book that had some specific layout requirements in HTML, and while it was easier to get something up and running than LaTeX, getting the printing part right was very painful (not least of all because no browsers seem to support things like page numbering).