Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
Is there something that prince does that calibre's own conversion to pdf does not do?
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I haven't tested calibre's conversion much, but Prince is supposed to have better typesetting than normal HTML renderers (in particular better paragraph-breaking algorithm). It also supports a number of CSS3 and custom CSS properties allowing some interesting things like real floating images (no white space when an image is moved to the next page), real footnotes (although most of the styling is missing), special page styles (headers/footers) for the first page of a chapter, etc.
But probably the main reason for my tool is that it allows to use specific CSS stylesheets only for the PDF conversion. One additional stylesheet may contain user preferences, like page size, fonts (already available in the calibre configuration), but also margins, justification, hyphenation limits, etc. (that's a suggestion for calibre). Another stylesheet may be included in the book itself (in a <meta> tag), and it's intended to have some some styles to work specifically with Prince, using the above features for example.
I've just compared both PDF conversions, and it looks like the kerning from calibre is not that good either. I've attached the results, you can compare yourself. There are also differences in the title page picture (a problem of default resolution probably), in the TOC (Prince added the page numbers to the HTML TOC, I guess calibre can only do that if it generates the TOC itself), in the PDF bookmarks (calibre has only one level), in the <hr> (compare page 41)... The comparison is not 100% fair, because this book is already tweaked for Prince (with the special style I mentioned above).