PDF

[Richard Gaskin]

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