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

Please see my comments inline

On Wed, Aug 19, 2015 at 2:07 PM, Jan Tosovsky <j.tosovsky@email.cz> wrote:

Dear Carlos,

thanks for your valuable feedback!

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.

Paged media content may or may not be the same solution than generating adaptive layouts like epub's multiple renditions. The purpose of Paged Media is to generate print-ready layouts... there are books that have been created with CSS Paged Media (Lea Verou's CSS Secrets comes to mind) and we can expect more such content in the future

I would not call it a dead end solution just yet.

So I was quite skeptic to CSS paged media (not mature yet, expensive
processors) ... until I met vivliostyle.js. It brings CSS paged media to
browsers NOW. To some extent it makes dedicated processors redundant.

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?

I don't believe all works in reality as smooth as announced on their page,
but I like the concept. As it is open source, you can extend it if you find
some funcionality missing. So instead of patching XSL-FO processors I'd
rather patched this _javascript_ library (if I could). It is also temporary
'dead end' which will be replaced with regular browsers, but you can prepare
the content in pure CSS standard NOW with minimal risk of further updates
when browsers will become mature enough.

In an ideal world you would be able to get high quality print outuput directly from your web content without having to use a library at all. But we're not there yet and, sadly it'll be a long time before we get there from a publisher and content distributor perspective.

Publishers and other vendors will want DRM to be built into the content they distribute. Do we really want EME for content other than video?

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 :)

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?

I personally would still like the option of hard copy reading so I can make notes and underline the content I read. I would also like the capability to share the content and the annotations I make without violating the license to my content.

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/

All above shouldn't be taken too seriously. It is just my (naive) view.

We all have our opinions about how things should work. It's the sharing of these opinions that make us grow as a community.

> The final question I'd have before jumping into CSS Paged Media
> development is for what version of the stylesheets?

While I'd prefer XSLT2, I am afraid this is not acceptable by majority of
end users.

Jan

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