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Re: EPUB-Experiences making them?

for

From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Dec 3, 2014 11:47AM

Please keep in mind that the original idea had been to make EPUB completely page-free, with content flowing as needed. Where a page oriented viewer is used pagination would happen in an ad hoc manner, controlled by the viewer, and its configuration through the user. [If you can't think right away of a not page oriented viewer, think of a text to speech presentation of the book content in an audio-book like fashion.]

Those promoting this 'page-free' concept were probably surprised by the fact that the world isn't ready yet to say good bye to the concept of pages, even not for electronic publication content (I agree with Duff that EPUB is probably not a suitable carrier for documents in general). Thus page-related features are creeping in from all sides. The concept of page numbers had to be introduced, and one of the most favourite recently added features is … fixed layout (as in: each page has its own spatial arrangement of content items). So much about theory and practice of 'page-free'.

Olaf


On 3 Dec 2014, at 19:25, <EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:

> I don't believe this is the case, at least not with EPUB 3. The
> IDPF accessibility guidelines for EPUB 3 specifically talk about
> putting how to add page numbers in page-spinning lists, for
> example:
>
> http://www.idpf.org/accessibility/guidelines/content/xhtml/pagenum.php#xhtm020-faq04
>
> Deborah Kaplan
>
> On Wed, 3 Dec 2014, Duff Johnson wrote:
>
>> Lisa,
>>
>>>> Don’t author tables, lists, paragraphs, etc that span pages. Unlike PDF,
>>>> EPUB has (so far as I am aware, happy to be corrected) no means of
>>>> associating semantic structures that span multiple pages.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I would love to know, because I have found that to be unclear in the
>>> research I have done so far. Books are the best material for ePubs, as they
>>> wouldn't have spanning things except text (although that falls under
>>> paragraphs)…
>>
>> Why would books (or other publications) not include content that spans pages?
>>
>> How else would books accommodate long (or wide) tables, lists, etc?
>>
>> And indeed… how does EPUB handle the situation where a long paragraph breaks between pages, often in the middle of a sentence?
>>
>> I would suggest caution in adopting a format that could not - in principle - accommodate such content (if that’s the case).
>>
>>> and I am hoping to use ePub on all sorts of documents,
>>> anything you can think of...
>>
>> As you correctly noted, EPUB is designed for publications. It’s not really a general-purpose electronic document format.
>>
>> Thanks for the link, Deborah. Does the book include answers to questions about content that spans pages?
>>
>> Duff.
>> >> >> >>
>>
>
> -- > >