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Posted by sohkamyung 1 day ago

Your ePub Is fine(andreklein.net)
868 points | 296 commentspage 5
charcircuit 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day 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 1 day ago|||
The parser is broken. The CSS standard says that parsers MUST ignore properties they don't recognize.
Ardren 1 day 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 1 day ago||
If the renderer completely fails because of a minor issue when parsing the css, that is broken.
unnouinceput 1 day ago||
I don't like .epub. I understand the reasons why this format exists, and I am 100% behind those reasons. But it's because I don't find any EPUB readers appealing to me. Just give me a FoxIt Reader clone for .epub, that's all. But naaaah!!, every single fucking e-pub reader that I tried must be a fucking library collector instead, like it's 2000's Windows Media Player style. I hate that.

As such, whenever I get my hands on an .epub file, I go to an online converter, convert it to a .pdf file and nuke it from my system. Then the .pdf gets opened in my FoxIt.

frollogaston 10 hours ago||
I'd prefer pdf from the publisher because it'll lay out the same way on my side vs theirs, or if they give epub then I'm converting to pdf for the reason you said.
pteraspidomorph 21 hours ago|||
Have you tried foliate? Their embedded reader works quite well for me.
Tomte 9 hours ago|||
Okular.

It‘s working great on Windows, as well.

__float 1 day ago|||
Hmm, Sumatra PDF perhaps?
stonecharioteer 21 hours ago||
As someone who loves FoxIt reader, I'm building https://merrilin.ai to be the best damned ebook reader out there, to support PDF and epub. FoxIt's annotation system is one of the best I've experienced and I want to design one that is just as good if not better.
gabrieletrovato 15 hours ago||
Building a robust annotation system for both PDF and EPUB is a tough technical challenge, but definitely needed. I've been working in a similar space and recently open-sourced it. It's a local-first 3D library for organizing and reading EPUBs and PDFs directly in the browser. It's called KoreShelf on Github
majora2007 5 hours ago||
I just released a pretty solid annotation system for Kavita's EPUB reader. It wasn't super challenging (although Kavita has a custom epub renderer).

Now doing that with PDF would actually make it challenging.

Annotation system (with pics): https://wiki.kavitareader.com/guides/readers/epub/#annotatio...

cjfidpwmwn 13 hours ago||
Is it just more or hn has become a place to come and complain and consume tech drama disguised as a tech forum? It's all "I hate dario ", "I hate altman", "corporations are evil".

It's getting very tiresome.

dmang-dev 16 hours ago||
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willXare 17 hours ago||
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Javalicious 1 day ago||
Wow. This brings up some (bad) memories of working with an .epub export about 10 years ago. We had some embedded fonts to work around some poor rendering in some of the readers we tested, but some of the readers ignored the fonts altogether, causing the content to render boxes (bangs head on table)

It looks like not a whole lot has changed in that space -- the readers are still the gate for what you can do with the format. Who's available to make a CanIUse for epub readers, to shame them into compliance? (only partly /s)

BonoboIO 23 hours ago||
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Edwingg 23 hours ago||
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Edwingg 22 hours ago||
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itsthecourier 1 day ago|
bro, what an anchor to the past that framework is