On Sunday, 26 May 2013 at 01:57:16 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
This is a worthy goal. We manage to generate mobi files for the
spec (and Phobos in a pull request), is the ebook format very
different?
Andrei
Good evening, Professor,
I'm still working through the ePUB standard, but, from what I can
tell, the two are very similar. According to Wikipedia, ePub
obsoletes Mobi (despite Amazon stubbornly enforcing Mobi (or some
variant) for its Kindle). They both rely on similar standards,
including OPF and NCX file formats, and ePUB uses XHTML and zip
compression, thereby avoiding reinventing the wheel to the extent
possible (although one would think that Docbook would make more
sense for, you know, eBooks).
Actually, in generating my first ePUB of the DLang spec, I simply
used the same mobi input files, copied-and-pasted two boilerplate
ePUB files and zipped the whole thing up. Aside from some
egregious formatting on my Kobo, it works. Of course, I want to
take the time to generate a proper ePUB 3 file and use as much of
the standard as possible to advantage.
Naturally, the goal is to extend whatever scripts I write to
generate a DLang spec ePub to generate DDoc documentation eBooks,
too, so I'm not entirely a one-issue person...
