Hi Martin, On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 7:02 PM, Martin Sevior<[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 4:11 AM, Sayamindu Dasgupta<[email protected]> > wrote: >> Hi, >> >> On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 7:44 PM, Benjamin M. >> Schwartz<[email protected]> wrote: >>> Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote: >>>> This mail is a request/proposal to add webkitgtk as an external >>>> dependency for either Sugar or Read >>> >>> I object strongly either way. >>> >>> The last thing Sugar needs is a hard dependency on _both_ major browser >>> engines. Moreover, it's entirely unnecessary in this case. ePub is a >>> simple XML format. You can convert it to HTML (or PDF or ...) using >>> Calibre [1], >> >> Calbre is QT based, and uses QTWebkit for rendering. >> >>> or view it directly through gecko using an extension like >>> OpenBerg Lector [2]. It might even be possible to view it using hulahop >>> without any fancy extensions, just by adding an appropriate stylesheet. >>> >> >> OpenBerg Lector works only for version 2.x of Firefox, and the last >> release happened two years back. I'm not sure if anyone is maintaining >> or not. >> >> I initially tried out whatever I wanted to do with Gecko, however, it >> looks like performance can be degraded quite a bit with larger books. >> To ensure proper pagination (the current form of Read depends on the >> document being properly and consistently broken up into pages), I need >> to pre-render the entire book beforehands to get an idea of the >> dimensions (under a predefined set of graphics settings, so that the >> dimensions come out in a device/screen independent manner). However, >> with large books like War and Peace (which consists of more than 350 >> XHTML files), the basic pre-rendering code takes around 18 seconds >> with Gecko (using Hulahop) and around 2 seconds with Webkit. This is >> on my desktop machine - I did not try the comparison on an XO-1. All >> the pages are quite simple, with no images, and minimalistic >> formatting. > > <snip> > > Out of interest, did you think of using libabiword? We do pagination, > equations via mathm, imagesl etc. > If the format is a simal xml like thing it is would not be too hard to > import it. > > libabiword is already shipped with with sugar of course and you'd get > all sorts of other goodies for free. Immediate collaboration, > annotations and mark up of favourite passages etc. > > Cheers >
Yes - I had considered using Abiword at a certain point. However, Epubs are increasingly starting to take advantages of latest features in CSS (a typical epub-file is normally metadata + content layout directives + xhtml files + css files) like embedded font-faces, etc, which are only available in the very latest versions of Gecko/Webkit. Thanks, Sayamindu -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
