[Info-vax] Documentation Tools, DocBook, EPUB, iBooks (was: Re: X86 first boot? - A Really Stupid Question)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2019-04-02 02:37:37 +0000, Craig A. Berry said:

> On 4/1/19 5:00 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> 
>> Been pondering what might happen with iBooks documents created for 
>> OpenVMS materials, though that'd require readers to have a Mac or iOS 
>> device to view the contents.  That might not be a popular prerequisite.
> 
> There are XSLT stylesheets and other tools around that can transform 
> DocBook XML documents into HTML, ePUb, PDF, and other formats.  As far 
> as I know, iBooks uses ePub, which may be the only time Apple ever 
> chose a non-proprietary format for anything.  And no, neither macOS nor 
> iOS is required to read the ePub format.

Ayup.  Some EPUB works reasonably well across various readers, and 
some... does not.  EPUB becomes a particularly entertaining effort from 
all I can tell of it, if the intentions exceed text.  Which mine do. 
The iBook extensions to EPUB add some of those capabilities.  As do 
some of the newer EPUB versions, though I've not rummaged those other 
options within the last couple of years.  Alas, text with or without 
simple graphics can be spotty in some EPUB readers.  And though the 
iBook format is an extension to EPUB, the format is not portable to 
other devices hence my earlier comment.  Beyond EPUB and iBooks, here 
are always other approaches and some portable and some not, and some 
quite odd.


https://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/
https://bookry.com/author/widget/library/
https://tiddlywiki.com
http://www.opendocumentformat.org/
https://calibre-ebook.com
http://pandoc.org
etc...




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