Jutoh, how to batch set pages to spread left and right pages?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Whatcha mean, "what" makes it? Do you mean, what makes it fixed-layout, or do you mean, what software makes it, Jon?

Give me a bit of clarity and I'm happy to say what I know, however much--or little--that may be.

Hitch

What software allows making fixed layout ePub 3 without having to put in all that really awful code? Thanks.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What software allows making fixed layout ePub 3 without having to put in all that really awful code? Thanks.

Jon:

That's a trick question, really because the answer is, you can't have both. If you make a fixed layout that would work, on, say, ePUB3/Apple devices, you're stuck with the "junk code" because it is the junk code, specifically placing and floating the px dimension offsets, that makes it fixed-layout for text floating "over" the background.

Without it, it could not be fixed-layout and, thus, would not exist. No "junk" code, as you call it, and no fixed layout.

The only two other options are:

1. You make a reflowable eBook/ePUB, in its entirety, made of jpgs of every single page, one image after another, with page breaks between and that's that, or,
2. like KPF/KindleCreate, you take a PDF, slap a wrapper around it so that the Kindle devices will 'accept' it (like a whatits bird slipping in its baby offspring into another bird's nest to be raised, right?) and that's "fixed-layout" but as Quoth mentioned, it's really just a pdf.

How else, Jon, would you make a fixed-layout ePUB, with real text, not images of text that were fixed????

Hitch

[Quoth]

And you really don't want to see what inside a real, not a scan, PDF based on postscript for the text and locations of the text and vector images. Also unlike real ebooks based on HTML the innards need not at all be sequential. PDF is a sort of wrapper with multiple layers and kinds of things in it. The epub 3 fixed layout is sequential and is sort of human readable.

Postscript is a programming language
Text can be generated by a program fragment or included as a stream.
PDFs can have postscript content that's only easily understood by executing the program.

Actual postscript not inside a PDF does a bit more
https://paulbourke.net/dataformats/postscript/

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Hitch

The only two other options are:

[*]like KPF/KindleCreate, you take a PDF, slap a wrapper around it so that the Kindle devices will 'accept' it (like a whatits bird slipping in its baby offspring into another bird's nest to be raised, right?) and that's "fixed-layout" but as Quoth mentioned, it's really just a pdf.

And as far as I can figure out, they only do this so it can use Amazon DRM instead of Adobe DRM. Because Kindles can do actual DRM free PDFs just as badly.

They did use Adobe DRM before they bought mobipocket or did azw (before azw3) or before the first Kindle. But you pay Adobe a royalty.
Also very long ago the DRM on PDFs was 'broken'. Still trival to save a password free version of a password protected PDF.
A company asked me once to develop a way of having a secure PDF for public download rather than their 'watermark'. I explained that such a thing is fantasy.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Quoth

And you really don't want to see what inside a real, not a scan, PDF based on postscript for the text and locations of the text and vector images. Also unlike real ebooks based on HTML the innards need not at all be sequential. PDF is a sort of wrapper with multiple layers and kinds of things in it. The epub 3 fixed layout is sequential and is sort of human readable.

Postscript is a programming language
Text can be generated by a program fragment or included as a stream.
PDFs can have postscript content that's only easily understood by executing the program.

Actual postscript not inside a PDF does a bit more
https://paulbourke.net/dataformats/postscript/

Originally Posted by Quoth

And as far as I can figure out, they only do this so it can use Amazon DRM instead of Adobe DRM. Because Kindles can do actual DRM free PDFs just as badly.

They did use Adobe DRM before they bought mobipocket or did azw (before azw3) or before the first Kindle. But you pay Adobe a royalty.
Also very long ago the DRM on PDFs was 'broken'. Still trival to save a password free version of a password protected PDF.
A company asked me once to develop a way of having a secure PDF for public download rather than their 'watermark'. I explained that such a thing is fantasy.

Yup, agreed on all fronts.

Hitch