Quote:
Originally Posted by crdjm
Not completely agreed to 2nd point, it (AI) has its place. Over-hyped, perhaps. A place, certainly.
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Some things labelled AI are very useful.
Quote:
Originally Posted by crdjm
Agreed on epub2 comment. So, if you don't want it, don't use it. If you do want all that epub3 offers, automation to give you a head start, at least, would seem useful.
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Conversion of epub2 to epub3 on it's own is almost pointless. A human has to author the epub3 extra features.
There are different applications and features of epub3:
- A simple conversion to epub3 from epub2. There are no extra semantics, no interactivity.
- Fixed layout that's really just an alternate to PDF.
- Adding more semantic information, such as figure, section etc. Makes little or no difference to most rendering.
- Adding interactive or dynamic content via javascript coding *
- Adding audio media (works on some eink) *
- Adding video or animation (rubbish on eink) *
Only the fixed layout conversion can be done by automated means, once additional conversion settings similar to conversion to PDF are added.
The items with
* are akin to multi-media authoring, but using epub3 instead of some other system.
A straight conversion from epub2 to epub3 may no effect on appearance and should still work on an epub2 renderer, as epub3 simply adds an extra different navigation system etc.
So to take any advantage of epub3 a human needs to author. This can be done in Calibre, though it's more suited to conversion or editing or fixing existing content. Sigil is a more flexible authoring tool.
So any tool offered to do checking should be able to check epub2 or epub3 and never convert. Conversion needs human authoring to be worthwhile, so needs Sigil, Calibre or any of the more expensive and often poorer commercial tools. I'd only use InDesign for PDF or Fixed Layout epub3.