Quote:
Originally Posted by riskydisco
Another thing that's surprised me is the amount of open source and 'home grown' tools used for epub production, i'm surprised that people aren't charging for these applications. Are these tools actually good enough and worthwhile?
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Of course they are. It surprises me that you are surprised, isn't TeX free and open source as well?
I actually think the lack of "professional" tools is a good thing, as it somehow prevents the proliferation of bloated, non-compliant ebooks that work only in some specific device and break awfully when the font or screen size is changed. A more handiwork process enhances semantics and simplification, rather than looks and using every feature.
But anyway, the ePUB format is very simple once you know HTML+CSS (which is very simple itself), so the tools to create it can be very simple too, which does not mean they don't help or they are not powerful enough.
Also the ePUB format (or at least its spreading) is very recent, so it's not strange that whatever tools there are are in an early development stage.