Comment

Comment by warpspin

While everyone here seems to talk about the epub angle to the story, there's also simply the deeper story here, that "the web's" handling of paged media and the CSS paged media specs (to which his epub problem is related) is a never ending shitshow. Not only for epubs, for everybody who actually wants to print to real paper, too, ideally with a working cross browser solution.

Mistake is largely not in the specs, but in the lack of support for them. Page breaking controls, weirdly breaking tables, lack of access to area outside the page box to influence headers/footers without weird hacks etc. etc. For printing, the 1990ies never ended.

This leads to the bizarre situation where basically everyone who has semi complex printing needs in web applications will create PDF and then print that - and for creating those PDFs, often HTML to PDF conversion is used, just with actually implemented CSS for paged media. Which again proves that the spec is at least 99% there, if somebody would just kindly implement it in a browser, too.

Won't be more complex than having the latest WebGL whatever thing in your browser engine ;-)

parent warpspin 2 years ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton