Quote:
Originally Posted by eping
It sounds reasonable in theory. ADE and most readers are based on Adobe SDK.
But in reality, they are quite different on many respects. They share the same bugs of Adobe SDK, but each of them has particular bugs and advantages of their own.
For example, Nook has no landscape mode, so test on ADE can not reveal true user experience of your book on Nook.
Such as TOC, ADE has a side TOC tree, but such things doesn't exist on most real devices. Tree are not supported at all.
And Nook has several font choices which you can not test on ADE, so you must test on Nook to see real effect of those fonts.
Furthermore, if there's error in CSS, epubcheck doesn't report it, and ADE can ignore it, but on Nook, it crashes.
So only real device test is reliable.
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ADE is a good first check. ADE also doesn't support landscape mode although you can resize the window. (Resizing the window is a good way to check for several problems by the way.) ADE TOC in my experience shows identically to the external NCX TOC you get on reading devices and a tree is certainly supported by the SDK. Nook does have some changes and a unique DRM but it is still based on the SDK from Adobe and depending on which version of ADE you run the CSS errors will be dramatic in ADE in that it will ignore the whole CSS entries if there is an error. ePubcheck does not check the CSS at all. You need a special CSS checker. Certainly a real device is better but then you need all of the real devices since they are all different to fully test. ADE can give you a good first check that will catch most errors for most Adobe SDK devices.
Dale