PDF

[Alan]

Enjoying the discussion and your well thought out views Richard!

FWIW, I'm pretty sure a friend of mine made a system for conversion of existing pubs to EPubs a few years back. And I think it was all (mostly?) done in LC. The system is described here (unfortunately only in German currently):

https://www.appendx.de/en/project_18.html

And yes, we do need to continually improve, despite the pain - just ask Kodak. ;-)

cheers

Alan

---
Richard Gaskin wrote:
> Ralph DiMola wrote:
> 
>> Richard I agree. I have customers that we are nudging toward EPubs for
>> the reasons you've enumerated but when they see the amount of work
>> involved they fall back to the "Well our employees are using MSWord
>> and just PDF them.
> 
> Yes, updating tooling is key for adoption.
> 
> 
>> Tagging them is just too much work". The only ones we're having
>> success with are when they compose in xml.
> 
> This is curious to me, but perhaps I've been overly influenced by the 
> ease with which LC can translate binary formatting and styling into its 
> htmlText, making it then relatively straightforward to convert to common 
> HTML.
> 
> If other tools are behind the times, maybe LiveCode has an opportunity 
> to be among the saviors of reading in the 21st century, providing a 
> foundation for easily converting things like RTF and even (with Curry's 
> great WordLib) xlxs and odoc into EPubs.
> 
> As much as I like that vision, it seems odd to me that other tools like 
> office suites can output HTML, but not in a form that works with EPub 
> with less effort than we'd need in LC.
> 
> 
>> I have seen crazy PDFs with the text stream down the left side of a
>> paragraph and then down the other side. Edited PDFs are a nightmare.
>> Don't even get me started with fonts.
> 
> Even just copying from a PDF can yield wildly unpredictable results when 
> pasted into any other app.  It's a rare day when I can copy content from 
> a PDF into an email and not have to remove a mystifyingly large number 
> of spaces and other characters not at all visible in the rendered PDF 
> within its specialized viewer app.
> 
> 
>> I am working on a LC epub reader but the browser widget does not
>> always play nice with the generated html from InDesign. I'm working
>> now on figuring out just what LC is choking on. I also don't see a way
>> to move to the chapter 2 when you slide to the end of chapter 1. We
>> are falling back to chapter selections via sidebars or pop-ups or...
> 
> Very exciting to hear you're working on this.  If you're in a position 
> to release at least the core EPub display code as open source please 
> feel free to call or write if I may be of help.
> 
> -- 
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World Systems
>  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
>  ____________________________________________________________________
>  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com