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Originally Posted by Sonist
CS5 has come a long way in streamlining the workflow to produce EPUBs.
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I'll take your word for it.
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As to EPUB viewers which are not compliant..., you can hardly blame EPUB or InDesign for it.
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I don't. But it's like browsers that aren't web standards compliant (and
no browser is 100% standards compliant): my web code may be standards complaint, but I'll probably have to do fiddles here and there to handles cases where browsers don't implement the standard.
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And I don't think you can achieve complex designs with XML.
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Entirely? No. XML is the storage format, not the end format. But once in XML, you should be able to use XSLT transforms to do a lot of the work automatically, and reduce what you need to do to properly reproduce the intended design.
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But seriously, if the publishers were so stymied by EPUB, then why not just output perfect PDFs from the InDesign (or QuarkXPress) files? Then they can flood the market with PDFs, and the manufacturers will quickly respond with readers which can accommodate the format.
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Possibly because of what PDFs
won't do?
PDF is Portable Document Format. It's intended to look just like the printed page, on any device with a capable PDF viewer.
What if what you are doing is more than a printed page? ePub is a container, and doesn't have to contain just text and static graphics. We are beginning to see experimental ebooks incorporating video and audio.
The other issue is the chicken and egg problem: why should the publishers flood the market with PDFs when most extant readers don't display them? The presumably want to
sell the things, and who will buy them?
If they
don't sell, what is the incentive for a reader vendor to add PDF display capability? (Doing that right would likely involve licensing Adobe's Mobile SDK, which is what Amazon did for the Kindle DX.)
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Dennis