Re: epub and external links (to Dropbox)

[John MacFarlane <jgm-TVLZxgkOlNX2fBVCVOL8/A@public.gmane.org>]

+++ Federico Bruni [Oct 15 15 06:51 ]:
>   Yes, with version 1.15 it works but only when using ?dl=1.
>   Unfortunately, this way the file is downloaded and saved inside the
>   epub file, which is what I do not want. If I wanted to include files in
>   the epub I would save time and use local files. I'm using external
>   files because I want to stream the audio and keep the epub file size
>   small.
>   Now, I need to understand if the streaming doesn't work because of
>   pandoc or because of dropbox.
>   Let's try a regular path file on a server, see file attached:
>   pandoc -o pandoc-server.epub [2]pandoc-server.md
>   pandoc downloads the file and includes it in the epub. Why?
>   HTML output does not include external resources by default and you can
>   include them with option --self-contained. IMO epub output should work
>   the same. Is it a bug or a design decision?

Design decision.  The idea is that EPUBs should be
self-contained electronic books that can be read on your
device even when you don't have an internet connection.

We treat PDFs, docx, odt similarly -- all necessary
resources are downloaded and included.

In principle we could change this behavior, but a change in
the default here might break existing workflows.  One
possibility would be to make this behavior sensitive to some
kind of flag.  For example, if the `data-external` attribute
is set on `<source>` element, don't include in the EPUB.