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Posted by sohkamyung 1 day ago

Your ePub Is fine(andreklein.net)
862 points | 295 commentspage 4
dottchen 21 hours ago|
BOOX works fine. One solution is to ask Codex to reformat your epub file before importing it to your ereader.
tcoff91 20 hours ago||
I love my Boox, I run Storyteller on it instead of the native e-reader. I love that it’s just an android tablet with an e-ink screen.
yoavm 11 hours ago||
BOOX devices are great except for the GPL violation. It's really a shame.
GreenSalem 21 hours ago||
"EPUB is an amazing open standard for ebooks, and yet so many implementations of it are just fundamentally flawed, all in the name of keeping IP lawyers happy."

Easy to be dismissive, but IP violations can cost a large company hundreds of millions.

IP lawyers are more important to many companies than their software developers.

If you doubt that, check to see who gets paid more...

k_sze 19 hours ago||
The author says that "In a perfect world, RMSDK would just stop living in the CSS stone-ages or at least provide some kind of error handling instead of dropping the whole book, but I’m not holding my breath."

This is blatantly wrong.

In a perfect world, RMSDK wouldn't exist in the first place and Adobe would have gone bankrupt and become history at least 10 years ago.

m463 18 hours ago|
Actually - in a perfect world steve jobs would have written a missive about it and killed it from orbit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash

https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...

p-t 13 hours ago||
imho for a standard epub there should be as little CSS as possible
latexr 17 hours ago||
I’m curious if simply running the original EPUB through Kepubify fixes the problem.

https://pgaskin.net/kepubify/

naikrovek 22 hours ago||
Death to Adobe. For this reason and 10,000 others.
bowsamic 16 hours ago||
ePub compatibility issues are one of the worst parts of having a Kobo reader. I genuinely miss my Kindle and its simple but reliable MOBI format. At least there everything worked
ornornor 14 hours ago|
I don’t miss my kindle, at all. Its text layout engine was a joke (every page edge was ragged!), you depend very heavily on amazons goodwill to keep allowing you, the device owner, to sideload your own books, it’s getting harder to install third party software, and well that one is personal but it’s from Amazon.

I’ve switched to kobos (Clara HD) and I’ve had to for years. It’s chugging along (had to 3d print a replacement power button a couple months ago), I can run koreader no problem and use calibre with the kobo plugin. And the default rendering engine in kobo’s firmware does actually typeset the text: no ragged edges!

anenefan 23 hours ago||
The TLDR version is Abode supports backward compatibility ... and epub - * International Digital Publishing Forum* - is playing with a sprawling mess opting for the race to the top newest standards ... that always works so well and ensures the user base is always upgrading.

I'm very grateful for this information and it explains why I've avoided epub opting for pdf over epub as my reader software is old.

I'm am very much on the side of supporting backwards compatibility. It reminds me of the times the M$ used to upgrade their doc standards ... where if one hadn't upgraded, well bad luck.

gsnedders 23 hours ago||
To be clear, ADE’s behaviour is not conforming to any version of the standards it claims to implement. If it had been, it would reject that specific max-width property declaration as having an invalid value and ignore it, not reject the entire document: every single version of CSS has required that forwards-compatible behaviour.

PDF is not somehow immune to this either — a non-conforming implementation could similarly break what are meant to be forward-compatible extension points by raising an error on an unknown stream or object instead of (as required by the standard) ignoring it.

anenefan 21 hours ago||
So if I understand correctly a struggling epub viewer or ADE should skip css that it considers malformed - which means the reason my viewers have considered a epub to be not able to be viewed / corrupt / whatever it is for some other reason than more recent / current css implementation.

PDFs certainly can suck, more often those that will only work with abode's software and other viewers I've tried can not.

gsnedders 20 hours ago||
While plausible, I would suspect it’s more likely you’ve just run into bugs than forwards-compatible error behaviour — most ePubs don’t get anywhere near actually interesting CSS!
MrLeap 23 hours ago|||
An epub is just a plain html webpage compressed into a zip and its extension changed from .zip to ".epub". Assuming you have a web browser, you have something that will almost certainly render your epubs contents.

PDF is not nearly as pleasant under the hood. It's down right lovecraftian.

ablob 23 hours ago|||
The lovecraftian horror of pdf mostly comes into play through the sheer amount of software that supply almost correct pdf. It's not enough to be able to read pdf anymore, you also have to be able to deal with software that emits subtly wrong documents.
rcxdude 21 hours ago|||
That's part of it, but the design of PDF really doesn't help
PunchyHamster 23 hours ago|||
Adobe really have perfected act of making the most shoddy software that is still possible to sell
m463 22 hours ago||
I'm reminded of "PSD is not my favourite file format."

https://b3n.org/psd-is-not-my-favourite-file-format/

or in the code:

https://github.com/gco/xee/blob/master/XeePhotoshopLoader.m

anenefan 22 hours ago||||
I'm aware thanks. Mostly it's just my preferred viewer is older than css4 but it's been nice to find out why that was the case.

PDFs can be painful as well, more often it's then using abode's pdf viewer, but it's far less common for me. There was a time many years ago when I understood PDF structures better, back when I chose to manually edit and fix a couple of malformed PDFs.

goodmythical 23 hours ago|||
I was floored to discover this recently when I clicked "edit" in calibre for the first time a few weeks ago.

Straight HTML, edit anything everywhere. Super slick.

simcop2387 23 hours ago||
I think its one reason ive been happy with software based epub readers where upgrading is usually reasonable to do. Either on my phone or android based eink reader. That said if they change too much then yea nobody will produce the new standard and only support the old one if it isnt carefully designed for graceful degredation.
aboardRat4 11 hours ago||
Hot take: you don't need CSS in your book, a few of <style:'width: 100%;'> is enough.
charcircuit 23 hours ago|
>but it can’t validate CSS against a renderer which is fundamentally broken!

The epub standard doesn't say what version of CSS must be supported. There were no guarantees modern CSS would work so I wouldn't call the renderer broken.

gsnedders 23 hours ago||
You are of course correct that ePub nowadays doesn’t mandate a given version of CSS (though earlier versions did!), but that doesn’t matter in this case: it’s non-conforming according to even CSS level 1 (1996), per https://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1-961217#forward-compatible-par...

> illegal values, or values with illegal parts, are treated as if the declaration weren't there at all

So a conforming implementation would ignore that max-width property declaration, not raise an error.

And those earlier versions of ePub which defined a required subset of given CSS standards? The forwards-compatible parsing rules were part of their subset.

nightpool 23 hours ago|||
No, the CSS spec is specifically designed to be forwards compatible because of exactly this issue. Any invalid CSS rule should only cause that specific line to be ignored, not the whole stylesheet. And certainly even if your CSS parser chokes in some specific case, it shouldn't cause your ereader to fail to load the entire book!
acdha 23 hours ago|||
The parser is broken. The CSS standard says that parsers MUST ignore properties they don't recognize.
Ardren 23 hours ago|||
ePub3 is CSS2.1 (+ some extras) CSS21 standard says "Illegal values. User agents must ignore a declaration with an illegal value."

Ignore != Fatal error

ninth_ant 23 hours ago||
If the renderer completely fails because of a minor issue when parsing the css, that is broken.
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