pdf2htmlEX VS rvalp

"Free" book. Actually a really annoying (to the point of unusable) dynamic-loading paginated html page.

The PDF itself nowhere to be found.

Things I have tried: - pdf2htmlEX: Very elegant for normal conversions for users in the browser, but it is so elegant that it keeps the layout, strips tags and put them as styling (CSS) and converts tables to background images; not something useful for me - pdftohtml: Not the most pretty output, disregards tables, puts a lot of tags into the HTML.

I don’t think it’s a question of standards. It’s more that HTML and PDF are different things that solve different problems. PDF is supposed to be a static document that looks exactly the same in every compliant PDF reader. A correctly built PDF with have every glyph that it uses embedded, for example. It’s archival, in the sense that it will always look the same, in any future versions of PDF readers. HTML is markup that describes the author’s intentions to the browser. The reader can use his or her own fonts and have other preferences. The text might reflow to fit screens of various sizes. You can embed all kinds of resources from the network. One can take heroic measures¹ to force an exact rendering, but, in my opinion, that’s a dead end that hacks a markup system to do what it’s not intended to do.

PDF works great on the web; we don’t need to force HTML to replicate its abilities. It already has hyperlinks, and we can seemlessly navigate bewteen PDF and HTML pages in the browser.

[1] https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX

I'm trying to download an ebook from a website. The document has been created using pdf2htmlEX (https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlex).

There's another good introduction to RISC-V and assembly book here: https://github.com/johnwinans/rvalp