Enjoying the discussion and your well thought out views Richard! FWIW, I'm pretty sure a friend of mine made a system for conversion of existing pubs to EPubs a few years back. And I think it was all (mostly?) done in LC. The system is described here (unfortunately only in German currently):
https://www.appendx.de/en/project_18.html And yes, we do need to continually improve, despite the pain - just ask Kodak. ;-) cheers Alan --- Richard Gaskin wrote: > Ralph DiMola wrote: > >> Richard I agree. I have customers that we are nudging toward EPubs for >> the reasons you've enumerated but when they see the amount of work >> involved they fall back to the "Well our employees are using MSWord >> and just PDF them. > > Yes, updating tooling is key for adoption. > > >> Tagging them is just too much work". The only ones we're having >> success with are when they compose in xml. > > This is curious to me, but perhaps I've been overly influenced by the > ease with which LC can translate binary formatting and styling into its > htmlText, making it then relatively straightforward to convert to common > HTML. > > If other tools are behind the times, maybe LiveCode has an opportunity > to be among the saviors of reading in the 21st century, providing a > foundation for easily converting things like RTF and even (with Curry's > great WordLib) xlxs and odoc into EPubs. > > As much as I like that vision, it seems odd to me that other tools like > office suites can output HTML, but not in a form that works with EPub > with less effort than we'd need in LC. > > >> I have seen crazy PDFs with the text stream down the left side of a >> paragraph and then down the other side. Edited PDFs are a nightmare. >> Don't even get me started with fonts. > > Even just copying from a PDF can yield wildly unpredictable results when > pasted into any other app. It's a rare day when I can copy content from > a PDF into an email and not have to remove a mystifyingly large number > of spaces and other characters not at all visible in the rendered PDF > within its specialized viewer app. > > >> I am working on a LC epub reader but the browser widget does not >> always play nice with the generated html from InDesign. I'm working >> now on figuring out just what LC is choking on. I also don't see a way >> to move to the chapter 2 when you slide to the end of chapter 1. We >> are falling back to chapter selections via sidebars or pop-ups or... > > Very exciting to hear you're working on this. If you're in a position > to release at least the core EPub display code as open source please > feel free to call or write if I may be of help. > > -- > Richard Gaskin > Fourth World Systems > Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web > ____________________________________________________________________ > ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode