Portable EPUBs

• Zundler

  4 18 5.6 Python

  Bundle assets of distributed HTML docs into one self-contained HTML file

I fully agree with the author's "I want to replace PDF" sentiment.

It's true that running code in the document has some downsides, but the vast majority of people does it all the time in their browsers. And it comes with tremendous upsides. Just imagine large amount of data presented in interactive tables which can sort, filter and export or interactive graphs inside the document. We already use HTML+JS so much, why should we stop at documents? Yes, they can't be printed, but in my observation less and less people even own a printer these days, and I see no reason why this trend should not continue. I bet the future will be mostly living, interactive documents.

It's funny that I just mentioned this in the other thread [1], but I also felt that there is a need for a format that is self-contained and widely supported by standard software (by which I mean browsers). A well-specified open format would be great, but until then I tackled the self-containedness problem with JS and wrote a Python script that zips and bundles all assets and embeds them as a SPA into one HTML file [2]. The focus is on Sphinx docs but it should work in general with all distributed HTML docs.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138444

[2] https://github.com/AdrianVollmer/Zundler

• bene

  4 204 7.9 HTML

  An EPUB Reading System

  

I really like this proposal. Just last night, I was reading an EPUB of The Hobbit and clicked on a footnote, which instructed me to refer to page 24. It turned out that it meant page 24 of the printed edition of the book, which was in the first chapter of the book. Page 24 in the EPUB was still part of the prologue. So I had no idea which page it was referencing. As it stands, my Kobo has an increased font size, so I notice that I can flip the page a few times and still be on page 4 before it finally turns to page 5, which I assume is referencing the pages of the written text. This is a nice compromise, but doesn't solve the issue with the hard coded footnote being misleading.

I wonder if we could instead look at religious texts such as the Bible (e.g. John 3:16) and code editors (e.g. Ln 4, Col 12) for referencing locations in reflowable text. The same way you can jump to a footnote in a document should allow you to have an actionable reference to a specific location anywhere in the text. But I don't think the text should be stylized like how the Bible has the numbers (e.g. 16) scattered within the text itself. Those should probably be hidden within the text and leave the reading software to display the first line number of the page down at the bottom instead of the page number. That might look like "4" the same as it currently does, but this 4 references a section of the text rather than a page number. Perhaps it could be togglable for greater detail and display word 23 of section 4 as "4:23". Or maybe it could consider the chapter too. For example, chapter 2 section 4, word 23 would look like "2, 4:23". This might get funky in a Terry Pratchett novel, but it would hopefully allow for easier discussion of exact parts in a document and significantly easier linking.

I love the interactive code example for marking up The Rust Programming Language. That gets at what I was saying above although is more targeted at a document than referencing parts of a novel.

Kudos to author for creating [Bene](https://github.com/nota-lang/bene/) as part of this proposal. That was cool to discover I was using their tool to read the proposal itself!

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

Suggest a related project