Quote:
Originally Posted by balok
I don't believe bookdesigner is open source, nor multi-platform. If it were, then it would be a good idea to post ebooks in bookdesigner's XML format so people could convert as needed, regardless of their device. What I think would be great is a small fool-proof utility with two boxes, one for the input file and the other for the output file and format. You plug in the XML file downloaded from mobileread, and click "convert" and out comes the same file in LRF, PRC, LIT, whatever you want, and exactly as it should look. No tweaking. A command-line version of this utility could even be used by the site to output the source xml in whatever format the web user asks for. Fooling around with font size, margins, etc., is a job for an editing program and would be a question of personal preference.
Ok, so there's the right source format. Now let's hope some programmers will take advantage of it right now instead of everyone waiting for reader devices that can read ePub natively.
|
Book Designer uses an openly defined XML file format. There is no requirement for the tool itself to be open source but as it happens it is freely available. However an XML file format means nothing without a DTD. The nice thing about XHTML is that is is a fully defined version of XML that works fine and there is no reason to make up another XML format (there are a million of them already I believe). The Book Designer xml/html code is really very poorly done as compared to xhtml. While it can produce targeted devices they don't look as professional as I would like.
I have used the epub formatted xhtml files to produce books for my eb1150 without much effort using ebook publisher to read them in so the idea is sound and existing tools can already work with it.
Dale