Quote:
Originally Posted by brewt
If Epub is to be a "standard", shouldn't we be able to count on what something looks like? Or am I mis-construing something into what I want here?
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ah, here we encounter the same hurdle facing all standard formats (html webstandards comes to mind) : the manner they are interpreted by the viewer. this is why for instance the same website can look dramatically different in firefox, internet explorer, and opera. this is why webdesigners hate ie : it is very capricious about how it interprets the "standard" html / css code defined by the W3C (web standards consortium), and why book creators are pretty soon going to hate DE (i suspect). you are right : yes, we should be able to count on what it looks like. in reality, this is rarely the case...
epub is an excellent format, currently still suffering from a lack of GOOD viewers (sony's and adobe's DE is not frankly very good, from what i've seen).
if you want to see an epub file display really nicely, the best thing is to unzip it (right click the file, open with winzip or winrar, whichever you have), and then inside the "content" folder slide the .html file into a browser window (preferably firefox. ie is the devil). so far, a webbrowser is still the *best* epub viewer around (particularly one with good standards conformity, like firefox), because it has the most refined css support (it can display justified text, for instance
).
epub viewers for devices will eventually catch up ; i hope it is sooner rather than later.