RE: [docbook-apps] PDF-like HTML output

["Jan Tosovsky" <j.tosovsky@email.cz>]

On 2015-08-24 Carlos Araya wrote:
> On 2015-08-19 Jan Tosovsky wrote:
> > On 2015-08-19 Carlos Araya wrote:
> > >
> > > The main issue for me is that, to my knowledge, there is no
> > > open source solution that works with CSS Paged media and its 
> > > associated generated content) and none of the available 
> > > commercial solutions is cheap.
> >
> > I personally take those HTML+CSS processors as temporary 'dead
> > end' solution which will be (in long term) replaced with regular 
> > web browsers.
> 
> The purpose of Paged Media is to generate print-ready layouts... 
> there are books that have been created with CSS Paged Media ...
> 
> I would not call it a dead end solution just yet.
> 

By that 'dead end' I meant rendering outputs by dedicated (commercial)
processors (in a long term).

> > So I was quite skeptic to CSS paged media (not mature yet,
> > expensive processors) ... until I met vivliostyle.js.
> 
> Thank you for sharing this. I think it's worth taking a look at it 
> but I'd ask right off the bat what's the browser support for this
> technology and what happens when Javascript is not available or we 
> need it to work with assistive technology?
> 

Basically, Javascript emulates functionality not implemented in browsers
yet. As browsers will become more mature, the need for such a 'patching'
library will decrease. (We can see similar decline of jQuery library that
'patched' various browser incompatibilities).

But the coverage of vivliostyle is not yet very clear to me (what gaps does
it really fill).

If Javascript is disabled, a browser will render elements incorrectly. It is
up to the end user :-)

> That said there's nothing stopping you from hacking Norm's XSLT 2
> stylesheets (https://github.com/docbook/xslt20-stylesheets) to generate
> the HTML you need to work with vivliostyle :)

Yes, I am just gathering some feedback if something like this is worth
investing time.

> > Once your content is rendered in a browser, it is quite straight
> > forward to convert it into PDF. But to be honest, this conversion IMHO
> > doesn't make much sense any more ;-)
> 
> Why do you see it making no sense?

Modern browsers read PDFs natively and render the content on canvas using
JavaScript. So in my opinion it is better to skip that HTML+CSS -> PDF and
PDF -> 'canvas' conversions by providing the content directly in browser's
natural format.


> I would also like the capability to share the content and
> the annotations I make without violating the license to my content.

hmm, a good point.

> IF you're interested on the convergence between web, ebook and other
> digital content you may want to check the epub+web white paper at:
> https://w3c.github.io/epubweb/

thanks for the link, a nice overview.

Jan

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