MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Prince XML for creating mobile reader-sized PDFs?

frabjous · 09-12-2009, 12:41 AM

I've started to experiment cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) commandline tool Prince XML for creating liseuse-sized PDFs from HTML or XML source.

It's free to download and run for personal use, though it does add a small watermark on the first-page.

My road there has been the following. Those of you who followed the "PDF is not an ebook format" thread know that some of us who do still think PDF is an ebook format have been disappointed with the typography quality delivered by the renderers for most standard reflowable formats like ePub and mobi. In particular these tend not to support such things as end-of-line hyphenation, ligatures, font kerning, widow and orphan control, embedding font subsets, etc.

But at the same time we all must admit that the ability to customize/change the font size and page properties is a desirable feature.

This lead us to discuss what options there might be for the best of both worlds. At least presently, it seems that the best looking ebooks are those generated by something like (pdf)LaTeX, made especially for the size of the device in question, and the font size preferred by the user. Some of us are still looking into the possibility of automating the process of generating appropriately-sized PDFs from LaTeX code, as in this thread.

One stumbling block is that LaTeX uses its own mark-up language, whereas most other ebook formats are HTML or XML based, and while conversion is certainly possible, it's unclear if any converters right now work well enough that the resulting code wouldn't have to be manually checked and corrected

In researching the use of LaTeX for creating ebooks, I discovered that Feedbooks used to do something like this with LaTeX, but has switched to Prince XML -- so I decided to experiment with it myself.

Some interesting features:

Support for end-of-line hypenation (using the same algorithm as TeX, with the possibility of specifying a custom pattern list)
Font kerning
The possibility of incorporating floats and footnotes, etc.
Limited support for MathML
The possibility of specifying whatever page-size you want, and whatever font/font size you want, to embed, etc.
Bette/fuller support for CSS than any ePub renderer (perhaps even theoretically perfect up-to-spec ePub).

The results are interesting, so far. I don't think the results are as good as LaTeX, but it may just be that I'm less familiar with it. Still the possibility of more easily incorporating it within a conversion script--for example, from ePub--(their website even gives instructions on how to call it from within various programming/scripting languages), makes exploration of it worthwhile, in my opinion.

I'd be very interested in hearing about anyone else's experience with it, or opinion about its prospects.

My own experiments are just beginning, but I'll post some initial results in the next post.

09-12-2009, 12:41 AM	#1
frabjous Wizard Posts: 1,213 Karma: 12890 Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: Amherst, Massachusetts, USA Device: Sony PRS-505	Prince XML for creating mobile reader-sized PDFs? I've started to experiment cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) commandline tool Prince XML for creating liseuse-sized PDFs from HTML or XML source. It's free to download and run for personal use, though it does add a small watermark on the first-page. My road there has been the following. Those of you who followed the "PDF is not an ebook format" thread know that some of us who do still think PDF is an ebook format have been disappointed with the typography quality delivered by the renderers for most standard reflowable formats like ePub and mobi. In particular these tend not to support such things as end-of-line hyphenation, ligatures, font kerning, widow and orphan control, embedding font subsets, etc. But at the same time we all must admit that the ability to customize/change the font size and page properties is a desirable feature. This lead us to discuss what options there might be for the best of both worlds. At least presently, it seems that the best looking ebooks are those generated by something like (pdf)LaTeX, made especially for the size of the device in question, and the font size preferred by the user. Some of us are still looking into the possibility of automating the process of generating appropriately-sized PDFs from LaTeX code, as in this thread. One stumbling block is that LaTeX uses its own mark-up language, whereas most other ebook formats are HTML or XML based, and while conversion is certainly possible, it's unclear if any converters right now work well enough that the resulting code wouldn't have to be manually checked and corrected In researching the use of LaTeX for creating ebooks, I discovered that Feedbooks used to do something like this with LaTeX, but has switched to Prince XML -- so I decided to experiment with it myself. Some interesting features: Support for end-of-line hypenation (using the same algorithm as TeX, with the possibility of specifying a custom pattern list) Font kerning The possibility of incorporating floats and footnotes, etc. Limited support for MathML The possibility of specifying whatever page-size you want, and whatever font/font size you want, to embed, etc. Bette/fuller support for CSS than any ePub renderer (perhaps even theoretically perfect up-to-spec ePub). The results are interesting, so far. I don't think the results are as good as LaTeX, but it may just be that I'm less familiar with it. Still the possibility of more easily incorporating it within a conversion script--for example, from ePub--(their website even gives instructions on how to call it from within various programming/scripting languages), makes exploration of it worthwhile, in my opinion. I'd be very interested in hearing about anyone else's experience with it, or opinion about its prospects. My own experiments are just beginning, but I'll post some initial results in the next post. Last edited by frabjous; 09-12-2009 at 01:35 AM.