Friends, You may be aware the R (<https://www.R-project.org>) has been using texinfo for its basic manuals "forever". A long time ago, it was suggested to us that ebooks were convenient to read, so we looked into coming up with a pipeline to turn .texi to .epub. See <https://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html> for the current results.
This pipeline is very simple: we first convert .texi to .html, and then use Calibre's ebook-convert to convert .html to .epub. This has worked rather well for us for a long time. A few months ago, we got a bug report that this would give invalid epub according to epubcheck, see <https://bugs.r-project.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18182>. My current status is: * The texinfo TODO has Support the epub output format, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OEBPS and there are <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2018-07/msg00009.html> <http://per.bothner.com/blog/2016/texinfo-roadmap/> * Calibre ebook-convert will not make attempts to create valid epub according to epubcheck. * Dr Google finds <https://github.com/ikrukov/epub> <https://github.com/jlhg/texinfo2epub> which suggests using a pipeline using makeinfo --docbook and then xsltproc. There is also <https://opensource.com/article/17/9/docbook> which suggests using a pipeline using makeinfo --docbook and then pandoc --from docbook --to epub3. I can get both approaches to "work" in the sense that epubcheck is happy, but the visual quality of the epubs is not so good as the ones I get using the current pipeline. Which may be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, as I use Calibre for reading the epubs, and have no idea what others are seeing with other epub readers. So after playing with this a bit, I am now wondering how to best move forward. In an ideal world, the Texinfo TODO Support the epub output format, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OEBPS would be DONE :-) In the discussions in the bug report for R, someone wrote calibre does not guarantee that an EPUB produced by it is valid. The only guarantee it makes is that if you feed it valid XHTML 1.1 + CSS 2.1 it will output a valid EPUB. and of course makeinfo gives HTML 4.01 Transitional: I also tried the effect of going through HTML tidy to turn that into XHTML, but that did not make epubcheck happy. Any ideas/suggestions/... how to best move forward? Best -k
