On Feb 17, 2011, at 12:59 AM, Hans Hagen wrote:

> On 17-2-2011 8:14, Gerben Wierda wrote:
>> On 16 Feb 2011, at 17:47, Wolfgang Schuster wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> Am 16.02.2011 um 17:42 schrieb gerben.wie...@rna.nl:
>>> 
>>>> I'd like to keep working in one format so I was wondering if there is a
>>>> ConTeXt based workflow/setup that can produce EPUB (next to normal PDF)?
>>> 
>>> With MkIV you can get a xml version of document with 
>>> \setupbackend[export=yes].
>> 
>> But that XML is not ePUB's XML, I assume.
> 
> no, but one can of course convert one kind of xml into another
> 
> for epub one has to provice css etc anyway (and epub is not much more than 
> packaged html + css)

This would also be useful to me. In my experience, the unpleasant part of 
generating ePub is making correctly formatted manifests and putting them in the 
right places inside the right kinds of zip files. If ConTeXt could do this for 
me, it would certainly make life easier. On the other hand, it may not be 
appropriate to bother because there are other tools that will convert HTML to 
ePub for you and make the manifests (Calibre, for example). 

I consider CSS intractable so that's not something I would worry about ConTeXt 
generating for me, if it were on the table.

> going the other way around, processing an epub file also demands some 
> handywork as the source code is not by definition well structured


ePub is definitely structured. I would say too structured, since it makes you 
provide both a ToC manifest and a navigation manifest that necessarily must 
include almost identical information ;) Of course, depending on a simplified 
browser for your document viewing and having lots of secret failover modes to 
handle poorly formatted documents makes the structure less meaningful than it 
ought to be.

You are free to break your document into as many HTML chunks as you wish, but 
you are limited to fairly prosaic HTML and CSS. I'm of the impression the HTML 
documents generally map onto chapters so as not to distress the hardware's 
memory constraints too much.

Overall, ePub and Kindle's format strike me as too much and too little 
respectively. I should be able to change the font and the formatting, but I 
definitely consider HTML + CSS is too much complexity.

— 
Daniel Lyons

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