[ note: this is *not* an April Fool's joke ]
Folks,
At <
http://people.spodhuis.org/phil.pennock/exim/> you can find two
files, "spec.epub" and "filter.epub". These are generated from the
current spec, in git, so do not quite match any release.
I'd appreciate feedback and bug-reports upon the quality of these books.
And if anyone has cover-art they want to contribute, it would definitely
be appreciated! :) More significantly: I'm not a docbook expert, so if
anyone reading this is, and can suggest improvements to our docbook to
improve the epub result, please do let us know.
If there are no bug-reports, contributions or whatever, then I'll expect
the next release of Exim to build .epub files using this mechanism.
Reports welcome for various devices too -- we want this to be a
generally useful ebook document. If you want to load onto a non-ePub
device, you'll probably need to convert yourself: I'm not sure what the
strict legality would be of us creating ebooks in proprietary formats
using open tools, and I'm frankly not interested in chasing that path:
if we provide ePub books in an open format, anyone interested in Exim is
likely to be technically proficient enough to handle a media conversion
themselves if required.
That said: if conversion to .mobi or whatever throws errors because of
something unfortunate in our .epub then we'd like to get that fixed: not
providing other formats is not the same as deliberately blocking them.
So, any problems with the ePubs? Missing characters? Broken tables?
Anything at all, if we don't get it reported, I won't notice. This
generation is just an idea that occurred to me last night as a "doh, why
don't we ..." moment; I've minimally reviewed the results.
The 'epubcheck' tool reports no errors; skimming through the results
with Calibre's built-in book viewer shows no major problems, but
emphasis on "skim" on my part. Actually, it looks quite nice. Aside,
perhaps, from the spec.epub page count (2186).
Possible issues I've noticed:
* Calibre and iBooks seem to disagree on page numbers. WTF?
* In the domainlists section, around page 382 Calibre, 275 iBooks,
there's an example split across two pages. That's unfortunate. If
anyone with documentation experience can suggest how we can augment
our docbook to avoid splitting examples across pages, I'd definitely
like to hear from you!
* Something weird with text placement at the top of page 586 (Calibre)?
localhost_number and message_body_newlines seem overlapped. Only
seems to affect Calibre, not iBooks (page 416).
So far, the output in iBooks seems eminently usable, aside from the
examples-split-across-pages issue.
Feedback welcome,
-Phil
PS: devs: this is the epub branch on tahini/github, and I apologise if
you pulled between first push and now, since I just did a force-push
to get the changes relative to master (oops).
