[Sugar-devel] Support for EPUB with Read in sugar-jhbuild?

[James Simmons]

Bernie,

FBReader supports reflowing EPUBs when you resize the window.  It
doesn't give you a way to change the font size though.

I don't think we have much of a choice when it comes to supporting
EPUB.  It's the only format really designed for e-books that we do
support..  I would think we need to have Read support it, just as I
hope that one day Read will support Plain Text files.  Right now our
e-book story is complicated.  Teachers and students will want ONE way
to get books and ONE way to read them that does everything.  Partly
due to my own efforts we have three Activities that can be used to
search for and download books and four (counting Sugarized FBReader)
that can be used to read them.

The point of the Reading and Sugar book I'm doing is to try to explain
how to get the most out of our e-book reading platform, including how
to make and publish your own e-books.  It's a complicated story and we
need to make it simpler or at least keep it from getting any more
complicated.

James Simmons


On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 11:50 AM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 2010-04-24 at 22:21 -0500, James Simmons wrote:
>> 1). How do I get Read as delivered by sugar-jhbuld to work with EPUBs?
>>
>> 2). Does Read support EPUBs on SoaS right now?  If not, what are our
>> future plans regarding EPUB support?
>
> The only Linux reader that supports EPUB seems to be KDE's Okular,
> through libepub (ebook-tools). Moreover, Okular does not seem to
> dynamically reflow the text, which was the only useful feature EPUB had
> over PDF.
>
> Anyway, if we *do* support it, does it have to be in Read? Can't we have
> one activity per file format instead? It may be simpler from a
> maintenance and UI design PoV. Besides, EPUB resembles more HTML than
> PDF.
>
> --
>   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
>  \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/
>
>