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A comment on Pollen: A publishing system written in Racket. Parent comment

Re:Pollen: A publishing system written in Racket by xigoi on Monday October 28, 2024 @04:09AM (#41968727)
> Also missing, is any other format, such as PDF and ePub, which is also a deal-breaker for me, as I want my books to work for as wide an audience as possible.

Isn’t ePub just zipped XHTML? And you can easily turn HTML into PDF by using the “print to PDF” feature.

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Re:Pollen: A publishing system written in Racket by pasc1878 on Monday October 28, 2024 @04:30AM (#41968830)
Yes for epub - but not really for HTML to PDF, yes you can convert it but you do not get all the detailed niceties you get from say a LaTex to pdf transition, probably OK for a fiction or similar book but not a technical one.
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Re:Pollen: A publishing system written in Racket by soapdog on Monday October 28, 2024 @07:05AM (#41969833)
EPUB has lots of nuances beyond the XHTML files. There's the structure of the folders, lots of XML files, how to name, link, and namespace things. It is not as straightforward and zipping a bunch of XHTML files.
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Re:Pollen: A publishing system written in Racket by jtbayly on Monday October 28, 2024 @09:32AM (#41970870)
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, my point is that I don’t want to have to lookup the spec and figure it out and then write my own script to take one of these books and make an epub.

Or go through the process manually of printing 20 separate web pages and then merging them into one PDf and then figuring out how to create a table of contents at the beginning and a bibliography at the end with links that actually work.

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