12-19-2008, 12:28 PM | #1 |
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Capabilities of different formats
I have been buying Microsoft Reader or mobipocket files from fictionwise/booksonboard/cyberread and then converting them to .lrf files to load onto my Sony PRS-505. I have not bought an eReader format book yet, despite their additional discount at fictionwise.
I'm curious as to whether there is any significant difference in the capabilities of these different formats - i.e. are there any features that are available in one format that are not available in others? If there are significantly different capabilities, then do publishers actually make use of any of these features, or generally speaking will the same book look and behave similarly regardless of the purchased format? I suppose what I'm really asking is, should I be preferring one format over another when purchasing books from a technical perspective? |
12-20-2008, 04:32 PM | #2 | |
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The short answer is that eReader is definitely the worst -- eReader books use a very limited, proprietary, non-SGML markup language called "PML". Mobipocket uses HTML 3.0 with proprietary extensions while LIT uses a somewhat confused subset of OEBPS 1.0, which has markup somewhere between HTML 4.0 and XHTML with a hybrid/subset of CSS 1 & 2. The upshot is that LIT content is more technically advanced and easier to work with at a markup level (for example, it is forced to follow XML well-formedness rules), but most people may not notice much of a difference between the two. Hope that helps. |
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12-21-2008, 04:16 AM | #4 | |
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I've been exploring what CSS Mobipocket does support, and am working on a Test Suite.mobi which imports an external CSS file. I know that <p class="bold"> for example works, as well as other formatting options. Regards, Alex |
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12-21-2008, 05:40 AM | #5 |
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Are you generating the Mobipocket book with mobigen? In which case it's mobigen which understands CSS, not the Mobipocket renderer.
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12-22-2008, 02:47 PM | #6 |
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Actually while eReader is non-standard it has the best support for extended characters of any of the formats out there. So if this is important it is a good format.
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12-22-2008, 03:11 PM | #7 |
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I assume by "extended characters" you just mean characters not in the Unicode Latin script? In which case I don't believe this is really true. On the encoding end, all the current major e-book formats allow the encoding of any Unicode character. On the display end, even if granting that the glyph complement in the eReader default font set is larger than others, it still doesn't include glyphs for all Unicode characters -- that requires font embedding, which AFAIK is currently only supported by EPUB, BBeB, and Topaz.
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12-22-2008, 06:04 PM | #8 | |
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Dale |
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12-23-2008, 03:58 AM | #9 |
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I've used &xxxx; codes in mobipocket format for accented letters, Cyrillic script, punctuation... with no problem. I sort of assume it would work for anything, as long as I use a font that has the correct glyphs.
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12-23-2008, 04:35 AM | #10 | |
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Pardon my ignorance, but I don't even know what mobigen is. Regards, Alex |
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12-23-2008, 05:54 AM | #11 |
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Oh, no worries! 'Mobigen' is Mobipocket's command-line tool for doing what you describe doing with Mobipocket Creator -- creating a Mobipocket book from XHTML, OEB, etc. content. As I'm pretty sure it's the same code under the hood, same difference in this case -- it's mobigen / Mobipocket Creator which understands CSS and converts XHTML+CSS into the HTML 3.0ish markup (with no CSS) the Mobipocket renderer understands.
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12-23-2008, 10:53 AM | #12 | |
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12-25-2008, 06:15 AM | #13 | |
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Either way, my original post was to oppose the statement that Mobipocket does not understand CSS. Whether its through mobigen or Mobipocket Creator or something else under the hood I still think that Mobipocket does understand some CSS, though it is erratic and not up to W3C standards. Regards, Alex |
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12-25-2008, 06:50 AM | #14 | |
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12-25-2008, 08:32 AM | #15 | |
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