Re: Ebooks with ConTeXt?

[Nicola <nvitacolonna@gmail.com>]

On 2019-12-10, Henning Hraban Ramm <texml@fiee.net> wrote:
>
>> Am 2019-12-10 um 16:53 schrieb Denis Maier <denis.maier.lists@mailbox.org>:
>>> 
>>> Perhaps this is a silly question (excuse my ignorance about the
>>> topic): what if you want to add some stylistic touches to your
>>> ebooks, such as initials? Or Non-breaking spaces? How about adding,
>>> say, a text box with a different background and a smaller font?
>>> 
>>> Or fine control page numbering, headers, footnotes, ligatures, or
>>> the spacing between paragraphs, or center a separator as above? Do
>>> you need to modify the generated CSS for that, or would ConTeXt (or
>>> Pandoc) allow you to take care of (some of) those things?
>>> 
>>> Nicola
>> 
>> For Pandoc: Some things can be tweaked with pandoc, but for anything
>> that is a bit more advanced you'll probably need a custom CSS. For
>> special content you can use spans and divs. In your custom CSS you
>> can define how those elements should be rendered. Sounds pretty
>> similar to what Hans wrote in his response. Probably the main
>> questions are if you prefer to work with pandoc markdown or with
>> ConTeXt sources, and if you need additional output formats.

The current need is only for epub. In any case, I'd like to have
a single source of truth for the content. I have experimented a bit with
Pandoc and, in fact, it can generate an .epub file that can be imported
by iBooks Author and converted with kindlegen. As for the style, it
seems that modifying the CSS gives the most control and can't be avoided
for advanced tweaks, even if I'd use ConTeXt.

As for ConTeXt, I have tried the latest beta with:

    context mybook.tex
    mtxrun --script epub --make mybook

This, among the rest, creates an .epub file, which unfortunately the
above mentioned tools do not like (maybe, that output is still
experimental?). I'll try to follow the more complex steps at
https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Epub_Sample.

> The problem is that custom CSS must be tuned for every single ePub
> reader (app or device), it’s like the browser wars. Most readers
> interprete only a strange subset of CSS2, it’s completely unreliable
> in my (limited) experience.

That's... sad.

> Have a look at https://wiki.contextgarden.net/ePub WRT ePub ot of
> ConTeXt, also at the old docs; unfortunately I never finished writing
> these pages, but I must review my ePub workflow soon-ish.

Thanks, I'll give it a shot!

Nicola


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