MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - What format to store books in? What software to read them with?

Lexicon · 12-29-2007, 07:04 AM

I think anybody who spends time formatting ebooks should take a serious look at the Daisy DTBook XML element set (which is actually included as part of the epub spec).

It allows semantic markup (ie. you use tags like <author> and <epigraph> rather than presentation tags like <center> and <font>) and inclusion in epub means that hardware readers should support the format natively in the near future.

Perhaps best of all; documents that you spend time marking up in DTBook should be accessible to those with vision problems - via text-to-speech and braille converters.

CSS (and possibly XLST) used in combination with a DTBook document should allow a visual presentation almost as good as using HTML/CSS, but with the advantages of greater accessiblility and semantic clarity.

Also it appears to be a fairly small element set, so it doesn't have the steep learning curve associated with TEI. Marking up something with a simple structure like a novel should be very easy.

12-29-2007, 07:04 AM	#38
Lexicon Enthusiast Posts: 44 Karma: 542 Join Date: Dec 2007 Device: Sony PRS-505	I think anybody who spends time formatting ebooks should take a serious look at the Daisy DTBook XML element set (which is actually included as part of the epub spec). It allows semantic markup (ie. you use tags like <author> and <epigraph> rather than presentation tags like <center> and <font>) and inclusion in epub means that hardware readers should support the format natively in the near future. Perhaps best of all; documents that you spend time marking up in DTBook should be accessible to those with vision problems - via text-to-speech and braille converters. CSS (and possibly XLST) used in combination with a DTBook document should allow a visual presentation almost as good as using HTML/CSS, but with the advantages of greater accessiblility and semantic clarity. Also it appears to be a fairly small element set, so it doesn't have the steep learning curve associated with TEI. Marking up something with a simple structure like a novel should be very easy. Last edited by Lexicon; 12-29-2007 at 07:21 AM.