Re: [NTG-context] Ebooks with ConTeXt?

On 2019-12-10, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:

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Am 2019-12-10 um 16:53 schrieb Denis Maier :

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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