EPUB 3.3 BECOMES A W3C RECOMMENDATION

[ZodWallop]

I remember there being a small to-do J.K. Rowling's latest Cormorant Strike book having bad formatting. Can't remember the specifics. I think it was about side-by-side columns of text that were supposed to take place simultaneously.

Would ePub 3.3 be able to handle that?

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I remember there being a small to-do J.K. Rowling's latest Cormorant Strike book having bad formatting. Can't remember the specifics. I think it was about side-by-side columns of text that were supposed to take place simultaneously.

Would ePub 3.3 be able to handle that?

Yes, and epub 2 also sort of can. There are examples here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=353899
The work on any ereader (not just epub) solution is a table, but that's as janky as you'd imagine. The better approach is a div and float combo, which may work on many epub2 also but not Amazon (not mobi anyway).

[ZodWallop]

Hey, that would be handy for ebook versions of No Fear Shakespeare. I enjoyed those in paper.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I remember there being a small to-do J.K. Rowling's latest Cormorant Strike book having bad formatting. Can't remember the specifics. I think it was about side-by-side columns of text that were supposed to take place simultaneously.

Would ePub 3.3 be able to handle that?

The problem with this eBook is that the way it's setup is that these chats are full screen graphics. The text of these graphics is there in the eBook, but set not to display.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Feature creep in the wrong direction. A horse designed by a committee. Inevitable when epub was rolled into the W3 org. There is also no need for Fixed Layout Epub. That is as well served by a PDF.

None of the reading systems seem to even let you highlight text and lookup words. Surely these things are technically possible. It should at least look and walk like a PDF duck, or it's impossible to leave PDF.

I think the motivation for it was well intentioned (shares ePub stack/standards), but in practice, publishers are lazy and PDF is easier to push out for them.

[icallaci]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I remember there being a small to-do J.K. Rowling's latest Cormorant Strike book having bad formatting. Can't remember the specifics. I think it was about side-by-side columns of text that were supposed to take place simultaneously.

Would ePub 3.3 be able to handle that?

If I remember correctly, some of the side-by-side chats were images, some were tables, and some were regular <p> tags with no-break spaces. It looked as if different people were assigned different parts of the book and nobody was in charge of making sure anything displayed consistently. Also, with the images, if a side-by-side chat was short, the text displayed was huge, whereas if the chat was lengthy, the text was tiny, because all the images were displayed as full pages. It was a mess.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by icallaci

It looked as if different people were assigned different parts of the book and nobody was in charge of making sure anything displayed consistently... It was a mess.

Has a revised edition of the book ever been issued? I don't follow Rowling, but would hope work from such a major author would quickly be cleaned up and corrected.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Feature creep in the wrong direction. A horse designed by a committee. Inevitable when epub was rolled into the W3 org. There is also no need for Fixed Layout Epub. That is as well served by a PDF.

Apple got involved and got a lot of the multimedia stuff added to ePub 3.

[icallaci]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Has a revised edition of the book ever been issued? I don't follow Rowling, but would hope work from such a major author would quickly be cleaned up and corrected.

I have no idea. I only started reading the book because I had read the others in that series, but the formatting mess was so annoying that I DNF. It gave me the perfect excuse to stop reading her altogether. I wasn't impressed.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Apple got involved and got a lot of the multimedia stuff added to ePub 3.

And the .iBooks variant. That was at least a functional fixed layout replacement for PDF.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I remember there being a small to-do J.K. Rowling's latest Cormorant Strike book having bad formatting. Can't remember the specifics. I think it was about side-by-side columns of text that were supposed to take place simultaneously.

Would ePub 3.3 be able to handle that?

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The problem with this eBook is that the way it's setup is that these chats are full screen graphics. The text of these graphics is there in the eBook, but set not to display.

Originally Posted by icallaci

If I remember correctly, some of the side-by-side chats were images, some were tables, and some were regular <p> tags with no-break spaces. It looked as if different people were assigned different parts of the book and nobody was in charge of making sure anything displayed consistently. Also, with the images, if a side-by-side chat was short, the text displayed was huge, whereas if the chat was lengthy, the text was tiny, because all the images were displayed as full pages. It was a mess.

ZodWallop didn't ask what the problems are, he asked whether EPUB 3.3 could have been used to provide a decent presentation of the content.

So far, no one has answred that.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

ZodWallop didn't ask what the problems are, he asked whether EPUB 3.3 could have been used to provide a decent presentation of the content.

So far, no one has answred that.

No worse then ePub 2. In some cases, better due to better font handling (ex, small-caps)

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

ZodWallop didn't ask what the problems are, he asked whether EPUB 3.3 could have been used to provide a decent presentation of the content.

So far, no one has answred that.

I thought I did.
And the problem wasn't epub2 vs epub3 but an inept & inconsistent conversion of paper version source to ebook.

More explicitly, yes epub3.3 could do it better than what we saw. But so could epub2!

[Renate]

My major complaint with EPUB2 was that nobody could generate a clean TOC.
But that has nothing to do with standards.

My $0.02:
Standards have become tedious, beaurocratic and lots of pages.
Instead of saying, "Hey, there is this horrible omission in our standard, let's make 2.1!"
No, you invite anybody who has anything to do with anything and throw every suggestion in so as not to offend anybody.

Unrelated example, KML (geographic data files):
You can make points, paths, polygons. Ok, sounds good.
You can color them, fill them. Ok.
But you can't make a dashed or dotted line.

So, they came in with the new KML.
I thought that I found a new convoluted separate namespace to modify lines.
But I can't seem to find it now.

This is not valid KML:

<linetype>dashed</linetype>

But, that is what I use on my KML and my KML viewer to have a freaking dashed line.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by Quoth

I thought I did.
And the problem wasn't epub2 vs epub3 but an inept & inconsistent conversion of paper version source to ebook.

OK, but I think there was a strong implication in the question that it was asked whether EPUB 3 added anything that made having 2 columns easier, cleaner implementation or provide better reading experience.

More explicitly, yes epub3.3 could do it better than what we saw. But so could epub2!

Thanks for the elaboration.

So you are saying the poor implementation was a larger factor in the ugly results than any deficiency in EPUB 2? Does EPUB 3 improve 2 columns over using EPUB 2?