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aapezzuto · 02-02-2009, 06:21 AM

I have managed to get a small team (3 of us) together to work on making a good GUI driven e-book formatting program. Before going any further, let me outline what this is, and is not.

e-Bibliophile is designed to be a program that will allow you to convert and mark up a document, creating a project file, that can have styles applied to it, and be output into many different formats. We are not targeting ALL books, we are targeting MOST books. There are several things that have been purposefully left out to keep the contextual markup and the styling separate. It should be a good tool for people who want to properly format a book, with loving care, and distribute it to the most formats, with the least amount of "fiddling."

It is not and end all, only tool anyone will ever need for all digital publishing. It is not a replacement for adobe acrobat for print perfect, every pixel right where you want it design. It is not the right platform for writing your next math text book. And sadly, when something breaks, we will not have the same 15-30 min response time you have come to expect from Calibre and kovidgoyal.

It will be open source, so that may help out on some of the shortfalls, but there are certain things that are crippled by choice, and would be hard to circumvent.

We are in early stages of this project. We have a first draft of the human editable markup, and have some proof of concept code to keep our different views synchronized. What we need from you, the well versed e-book formatting community, is feedback on the current version of the markup. It can be found here. Google code provides commenting on each page of the documentation, so please utilize that for anything specific to part of the markup. I am especialy interested in feedback about the complex lists and the drama elements.

This markup syntax will be used as the "quick and dirty" alternative to a GUI driven markup. Pains have been taken to make it as similar to existing XML/HTML type markups, while improving readability. This syntax as well as the object model that it represents will be exposed for 3rd party plugins, to allow for further automation of editing.

As soon as we have a revised version of the markup, we will begin coding the GUI and markup interactions, as well as start on the first draft of the css interface that will be used.

Thank you in advance, for your help!

02-02-2009, 06:21 AM	#1
aapezzuto Zealot Posts: 116 Karma: 693 Join Date: Sep 2007 Device: none	Constructive Criticism Needed I have managed to get a small team (3 of us) together to work on making a good GUI driven e-book formatting program. Before going any further, let me outline what this is, and is not. e-Bibliophile is designed to be a program that will allow you to convert and mark up a document, creating a project file, that can have styles applied to it, and be output into many different formats. We are not targeting ALL books, we are targeting MOST books. There are several things that have been purposefully left out to keep the contextual markup and the styling separate. It should be a good tool for people who want to properly format a book, with loving care, and distribute it to the most formats, with the least amount of "fiddling." It is not and end all, only tool anyone will ever need for all digital publishing. It is not a replacement for adobe acrobat for print perfect, every pixel right where you want it design. It is not the right platform for writing your next math text book. And sadly, when something breaks, we will not have the same 15-30 min response time you have come to expect from Calibre and kovidgoyal. It will be open source, so that may help out on some of the shortfalls, but there are certain things that are crippled by choice, and would be hard to circumvent. We are in early stages of this project. We have a first draft of the human editable markup, and have some proof of concept code to keep our different views synchronized. What we need from you, the well versed e-book formatting community, is feedback on the current version of the markup. It can be found here. Google code provides commenting on each page of the documentation, so please utilize that for anything specific to part of the markup. I am especialy interested in feedback about the complex lists and the drama elements. This markup syntax will be used as the "quick and dirty" alternative to a GUI driven markup. Pains have been taken to make it as similar to existing XML/HTML type markups, while improving readability. This syntax as well as the object model that it represents will be exposed for 3rd party plugins, to allow for further automation of editing. As soon as we have a revised version of the markup, we will begin coding the GUI and markup interactions, as well as start on the first draft of the css interface that will be used. Thank you in advance, for your help!