feelings on .epub ? - Page 7

kovidgoyal · 10-30-2007, 04:55 PM

Oh right yeah it will work, I overlooked the margin property on <p>

jbenny · 10-30-2007, 05:34 PM

I'm really glad that GregS asked his question about margin notes and I hope that others will ask similar questions. Myself, I am just curious to see what can actually be done with this new epub format. Asking about things like footnotes, margin notes, etc. will give me and others things to think about and to try that we might not think of ourselves. Keep 'em coming.

GregS · 10-30-2007, 06:27 PM

I am so pleased with the response to my question - many thanks to especially to JBENNY for showing the problem solved.

The fact is I don't own a reader (I listed Sony because it is the one I will get when it comes out in Australia - because of its price - I am looking for a device that can be used in schools, though the Iliad has features I would very much like to see in use).

I mentioned World Unique IDs because I see absolute references as very important in study.

WUIDs are very easy to generate (contact Lestec.com.au if there is interest in this). The idea is that edition is given one ID and the work itself another. These can both be established via name-space xmlns. It works like an ISB number but can be generated by anyone anytime on the net. If adopted, it means bibliographies and references are unambiguous and electronically chasable.

My aim, long term, is to make quality textbooks available for school students via a reader (ie their complete course references), referencing is an important aspect of this. Ideally epub would have a choice of css stylesheets one rendering paragraph, illustration, picture and tables references, another normalized reading.

In the long term, while epub seems perfect for literary works, I hope the industry also embraces TEI in the future - especially important for university students.

I am looking forward over the next year of getting plays (with line numbers) available. In rehearsals and study the readers would be great, then the same text could be projected or shown on a monitor as a cheap tele-prompter via a laptop.

The future of this technology is very bright, it solves a lot of problems in my area (Photocopy madness, general shortage of textbooks and the poor quality of so many, plagues teaching - a cheap robust reader is a dream come true as I have had to resort to type condensed pdfs http://members.iinet.net.au/%7Egreg....ld/Literature/ ).

Again thanks for all, as epub now looks like a perfect intermediate technology for my needs.

jbenny · 10-30-2007, 07:34 PM

GregS,

There is no specific mechanism in epub to use your WUID, but there are several optional metadata fields that might be used for such a thing. However, any use of such a data field would have to be taken care of by custom software. Standard epub readers wouldn't know what to do with it.

The ability to select different stylesheets may be problematic, also. I see nothing in the epub spec that addresses this. In fact, I was trying to figure out a way to allow a user to switch stylesheets in an epub myself. You can't do it as you would in Firefox, as there is no defined standard mechanism for this in epub. The obvious method of providing two identical copies of the content, but with different linked stylesheets and then selecting the one you want via a hyperlink would work, but would be rather wasteful. Of course, if you use the Firefox Lector plugin for reading the epub, switching stylesheets is not a problem. I'll have to ponder this more. Any ideas?

For textbooks and such, the epub spec certainly could use some improvement. However, it is a new spec and what has been done so far is a very good effort by all involved. I'm sure that future versions will add new capabilities. I just hope that those creating the specs are keeping an eye out on forums like this one.

I applaud your efforts to provide textbooks and related material in electronic form. If only the major publishers would do more of this. BTW, I looked at one of your online PDFs - it is a good thing that younger people have good eyesight. I wouldn't want to read too many documents formatted that way

Look for a PM. I want to ask you about something related to all of this.

jbenny · 10-30-2007, 07:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GregS

WUIDs are very easy to generate (contact Lestec.com.au if there is interest in this). The idea is that edition is given one ID and the work itself another. These can both be established via name-space xmlns. It works like an ISB number but can be generated by anyone anytime on the net. If adopted, it means bibliographies and references are unambiguous and electronically chasable.

An additional comment on this: Each epub must have a unique ID (but not each copy). For commercial ebooks, this would normally be the ISBN. For privately created epubs, you can use any method you like, as long as the ID does not conflict with any other epub. One method that I am using is simply a combination of a name and a Julian date. For example: jbenny2454404.4892939813. You could use an organization's name, a domain name, etc. The Julian date includes the date, hours, minutes and seconds. Such a combination is highly unlikely to collide with any other such epub ID.

I don't see any reason why you couldn't use such a technique to give each copy of an epub its own unique ID, if you wanted. Or, it may be easier to manage by using one of the other metadata fields for an individual copy ID, as I mentioned before.

Hadrien · 10-30-2007, 10:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jbenny

An additional comment on this: Each epub must have a unique ID (but not each copy). For commercial ebooks, this would normally be the ISBN. For privately created epubs, you can use any method you like, as long as the ID does not conflict with any other epub. One method that I am using is simply a combination of a name and a Julian date. For example: jbenny2454404.4892939813. You could use an organization's name, a domain name, etc. The Julian date includes the date, hours, minutes and seconds. Such a combination is highly unlikely to collide with any other such epub ID.

I don't see any reason why you couldn't use such a technique to give each copy of an epub its own unique ID, if you wanted. Or, it may be easier to manage by using one of the other metadata fields for an individual copy ID, as I mentioned before.

We use UUIDs on Feedbooks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUID
A few samples provided by IDPF used them too.

jbenny · 10-31-2007, 01:37 AM

OK, that makes more sense now. Just different terminology. GregS calls them WUID, the WikiPedia says UUID. I am familiar with the use of a GUID. I didn't know that they were also used in ebooks. This would certainly be another method for those without an ISBN to use.

Hadrien, are you using a UUID for each individual ebook that is generated on your site, or just for each title? If for each individual ebook, why bother?

GregS · 10-31-2007, 05:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jbenny

OK, that makes more sense now. Just different terminology. GregS calls them WUID, the WikiPedia says UUID. I am familiar with the use of a GUID. I didn't know that they were also used in ebooks. This would certainly be another method for those without an ISBN to use.

Hadrien, are you using a UUID for each individual ebook that is generated on your site, or just for each title? If for each individual ebook, why bother?

JBENNY, it is early days in many ways - but UUIDs are dangerous - they are just big numbers there is no verification that the same number cannot occur in different contexts, just that it is unlikely.

GUID suffer the same problem.

WUIDs, which I might add have been used by Microsoft after an article of mine was published are absolutely unique. Lestec, developed the idea and has it implemented - it requires only a small script to run on servers and relies on two factors - unique IPs followed by a serialised date and number (only one applicant allowed within the time frame).

There is some compression involved and a randomising reversal and it is represented in base32 (the only system where the value remains the same in lower and upper case - there are some refinements base36 +).I would like it standardised, date stamps from a local machine can be added so one "head" can generate endless "tails" - all unique. Please if you want a system of WUIDs contact Lestec - it is simple and guaranteed to work without any chance of duplication - which was my purpose when I wrote the article years ago.

I am not directly associated with Lestec (I cannot program to save my life).

It needs some refinement (reducing the WUID letter size below 22) the server script is trivial however, the conversion routines are not difficult - but it needs to work the same way for everyone to banish any chance of duplication, if you see it as important, please contact Les Moul.

Hadrien · 10-31-2007, 06:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jbenny

Hadrien, are you using a UUID for each individual ebook that is generated on your site, or just for each title? If for each individual ebook, why bother?

For every title. Once we've generated it once, the epub stays in cache. But if I dump the cache (while editing the book or because we changed the epub output), it'll be generated once again with a new UUID.

Edit: Anyone tried soft-hyphens yet in epub ?

jbenny · 10-31-2007, 11:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GregS

WUIDs, which I might add have been used by Microsoft after an article of mine was published are absolutely unique. Lestec, developed the idea and has it implemented - it requires only a small script to run on servers and relies on two factors - unique IPs followed by a serialised date and number (only one applicant allowed within the time frame).

Can you provide a link to the article you wrote? If not, how about a URL to other information on WUIDs? Are WUIDs some type of standard, or are they proprietary to Lestec (whoever they are)? Unless they are an open standard, I don't see any widespread adoption of them happening.

jbenny · 10-31-2007, 02:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hadrien

Edit: Anyone tried soft-hyphens yet in epub ?

If you want to point me to a sample file, I can see how things look. FBReader already supports hyphenation, so should be ok. I don't know what Lector would do, but it would be whatever Firefox does. As for Digital Editions, I doubt that they support hyphenation at this point, as they don't yet support justified text.

Darn, we need more epub reader programs!

GregS · 11-02-2007, 04:13 AM

JBENNY the original article seems to have disappeared, I have some preliminary discussion from September 2004, a submission was sent to W3.org, but no replies.

You are absolutely right it should be a standard, strictly speaking it is not owned by anyone, as I placed the idea in the public domain. Lestec.com.au merely got it working and now has some plans of using it in the future - but as a simple method it would benefit by being made into a standard.

I would avoid MS implementation, besides which they seemed to have done nothing with it.

The implementation is so simple I am amazed no-one has created it elsewhere.

The only thing that could go wrong is non-standard uses that look like WUIDs and end up with the chance of reproducing the same ID.

I will ask Lestec if we can produce a simple free generator and some documentation soon and notify the forum when it is available (they are in the middle of something right at thw moment).

This is stupid, but how would we go about making it a standard - any suggestions?

In terms of publishing I have come up with my own little system two WUIDs:

1) a EID that is an edition ID.

2) a WID a work or Title ID.

A WID needs a public listing, Ie "The War of the Worlds" by HG Wells has a single WID that is used by anyone in any language that produces the work in anyform so long as the text stems directly from the work.

The EID identifies the particular rendition.

Given these two bits of information any work produced any where can be unambiguously referenced even if the particular edition cannot be found, the work could be.

Other information such as the language, the publisher's name and edition numbers etc.,. can be read from headers, along with the actual title and author, original publication date.

ISBN numbers work well enough for printed works, but with the possibilities of epublishing, we need something that is more flexible and guarantees unique identity.

Other WUIDs identifying everything from authors, to publishers may be useful and should over time become standardized INMO.

If people think in general this is a good Idea, I could write a submission to the .epud/IDEF. I am, however, new to the forum and this whole side of things, and need a little longer to perfect (shorten) the system, ideally, a simple server based script would make it available to anyone, while convincing servers to have load the script would ensure more than enough bandwidth for widespread usage.

View Poll Results: What are you feelings about .epub right now:
.epub is the greatest thing since paper!	4	9.30%
.epub is ok, I'll get around to using it someday.	9	20.93%
Why do we need another format?	6	13.95%
I'm waiting till someone other than adobe has a viewer.	2	4.65%
I'm waiting till my reader can natively support it	15	34.88%
How is this different that .oeb?	1	2.33%
What was the IDPF thinking!?!	1	2.33%
What the heck is .epub?	5	11.63%
Voters: 43. You may not vote on this poll

10-30-2007, 05:34 PM	#92
jbenny Addict Posts: 323 Karma: 358 Join Date: May 2007 Device: Tablet PC and Nokia N800	Pushing the envelope I'm really glad that GregS asked his question about margin notes and I hope that others will ask similar questions. Myself, I am just curious to see what can actually be done with this new epub format. Asking about things like footnotes, margin notes, etc. will give me and others things to think about and to try that we might not think of ourselves. Keep 'em coming.

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10-30-2007, 04:55 PM	#91
kovidgoyal creator of calibre Posts: 44,017 Karma: 22669822 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Mumbai, India Device: Various	Oh right yeah it will work, I overlooked the margin property on <p>

10-30-2007, 06:27 PM	#93
GregS Zealot Posts: 107 Karma: 308 Join Date: Oct 2007 Location: Perth Australia Device: EZ Reader 5", Iliad	I am so pleased with the response to my question - many thanks to especially to JBENNY for showing the problem solved. The fact is I don't own a reader (I listed Sony because it is the one I will get when it comes out in Australia - because of its price - I am looking for a device that can be used in schools, though the Iliad has features I would very much like to see in use). I mentioned World Unique IDs because I see absolute references as very important in study. WUIDs are very easy to generate (contact Lestec.com.au if there is interest in this). The idea is that edition is given one ID and the work itself another. These can both be established via name-space xmlns. It works like an ISB number but can be generated by anyone anytime on the net. If adopted, it means bibliographies and references are unambiguous and electronically chasable. My aim, long term, is to make quality textbooks available for school students via a reader (ie their complete course references), referencing is an important aspect of this. Ideally epub would have a choice of css stylesheets one rendering paragraph, illustration, picture and tables references, another normalized reading. In the long term, while epub seems perfect for literary works, I hope the industry also embraces TEI in the future - especially important for university students. I am looking forward over the next year of getting plays (with line numbers) available. In rehearsals and study the readers would be great, then the same text could be projected or shown on a monitor as a cheap tele-prompter via a laptop. The future of this technology is very bright, it solves a lot of problems in my area (Photocopy madness, general shortage of textbooks and the poor quality of so many, plagues teaching - a cheap robust reader is a dream come true as I have had to resort to type condensed pdfs http://members.iinet.net.au/%7Egreg....ld/Literature/ ). Again thanks for all, as epub now looks like a perfect intermediate technology for my needs.

10-30-2007, 07:34 PM	#94
jbenny Addict Posts: 323 Karma: 358 Join Date: May 2007 Device: Tablet PC and Nokia N800	GregS, There is no specific mechanism in epub to use your WUID, but there are several optional metadata fields that might be used for such a thing. However, any use of such a data field would have to be taken care of by custom software. Standard epub readers wouldn't know what to do with it. The ability to select different stylesheets may be problematic, also. I see nothing in the epub spec that addresses this. In fact, I was trying to figure out a way to allow a user to switch stylesheets in an epub myself. You can't do it as you would in Firefox, as there is no defined standard mechanism for this in epub. The obvious method of providing two identical copies of the content, but with different linked stylesheets and then selecting the one you want via a hyperlink would work, but would be rather wasteful. Of course, if you use the Firefox Lector plugin for reading the epub, switching stylesheets is not a problem. I'll have to ponder this more. Any ideas? For textbooks and such, the epub spec certainly could use some improvement. However, it is a new spec and what has been done so far is a very good effort by all involved. I'm sure that future versions will add new capabilities. I just hope that those creating the specs are keeping an eye out on forums like this one. I applaud your efforts to provide textbooks and related material in electronic form. If only the major publishers would do more of this. BTW, I looked at one of your online PDFs - it is a good thing that younger people have good eyesight. I wouldn't want to read too many documents formatted that way Look for a PM. I want to ask you about something related to all of this.

10-31-2007, 01:37 AM	#97
jbenny Addict Posts: 323 Karma: 358 Join Date: May 2007 Device: Tablet PC and Nokia N800	OK, that makes more sense now. Just different terminology. GregS calls them WUID, the WikiPedia says UUID. I am familiar with the use of a GUID. I didn't know that they were also used in ebooks. This would certainly be another method for those without an ISBN to use. Hadrien, are you using a UUID for each individual ebook that is generated on your site, or just for each title? If for each individual ebook, why bother?

11-02-2007, 04:13 AM	#102
GregS Zealot Posts: 107 Karma: 308 Join Date: Oct 2007 Location: Perth Australia Device: EZ Reader 5", Iliad	JBENNY the original article seems to have disappeared, I have some preliminary discussion from September 2004, a submission was sent to W3.org, but no replies. You are absolutely right it should be a standard, strictly speaking it is not owned by anyone, as I placed the idea in the public domain. Lestec.com.au merely got it working and now has some plans of using it in the future - but as a simple method it would benefit by being made into a standard. I would avoid MS implementation, besides which they seemed to have done nothing with it. The implementation is so simple I am amazed no-one has created it elsewhere. The only thing that could go wrong is non-standard uses that look like WUIDs and end up with the chance of reproducing the same ID. I will ask Lestec if we can produce a simple free generator and some documentation soon and notify the forum when it is available (they are in the middle of something right at thw moment). This is stupid, but how would we go about making it a standard - any suggestions? In terms of publishing I have come up with my own little system two WUIDs: 1) a EID that is an edition ID. 2) a WID a work or Title ID. A WID needs a public listing, Ie "The War of the Worlds" by HG Wells has a single WID that is used by anyone in any language that produces the work in anyform so long as the text stems directly from the work. The EID identifies the particular rendition. Given these two bits of information any work produced any where can be unambiguously referenced even if the particular edition cannot be found, the work could be. Other information such as the language, the publisher's name and edition numbers etc.,. can be read from headers, along with the actual title and author, original publication date. ISBN numbers work well enough for printed works, but with the possibilities of epublishing, we need something that is more flexible and guarantees unique identity. Other WUIDs identifying everything from authors, to publishers may be useful and should over time become standardized INMO. If people think in general this is a good Idea, I could write a submission to the .epud/IDEF. I am, however, new to the forum and this whole side of things, and need a little longer to perfect (shorten) the system, ideally, a simple server based script would make it available to anyone, while convincing servers to have load the script would ensure more than enough bandwidth for widespread usage.