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Your ePub Is fine

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Re: Your ePub Is fine

#271

Post by KPGv2 »

pjmlp wrote: post #174
m348e912 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Love or hate Steve Jobs, his insistence of not supporting Flash on the iPhone (in favor of HTML5) accelerated Flash's demise dramatically.

And now were back with WebAssembly, WebGL, WebGPU, targeting 10+ year old graphic cards, without comparable easy of use tooling. Those that think using Godot or Unity is the same, never did Flash games.

Those are all open web standards, though. Flash was a proprietary platform. I can't even run Flash stuff anymore because it was proprietary.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#272

Post by troyvit »

criddell wrote: post #52
WolfeReader wrote: post #27

Every Kobo reader is capable of running KoReader ( http://koreader.rocks/ ). That's the first, and probably last, step I'd take to render a book that the default reader takes issue with.

As I understand it, KoReader doesn’t work with drm protected books which means I can’t use it with most books I buy. Ebook producers really should be forced to either drop drm or adopt a cross-platform standard.

It's probably too annoying for most, but I had a similar problem with KoReader and library books because those too depend on DRM. I ended up keeping KoReader as an app, then just not loading the app when I was reading a library book. It wasn't too bad.

KoReader also gave me a lot of freedom to manage the bad battery life of my Kobo Sage before it died of other causes. Definitely worth the extra cognitive load of dealing with the two experiences.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#273

Post by GoblinSlayer »

kstrauser wrote: post #85
mvdtnz wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The overwhelming majority of computer users simply DO NOT CARE about things like "install a binary blob" or "free-software hostile vendor" or "non-existent Linux support". They installed the plugin and got a way better experience. > Flash was a constant embarassment of RCEs vulns I wonder if anyone has done an analysis of Flash versus Javascript (or other browser technology) vulns over their respective lifespans.

If Flash hadn’t sucked harder than a neutron star, that would be an argument to have. People install lots of proprietary plugins today. Flash would’ve been just one more on that list. But it did suck, and badly. It crashed the browser all the freaking time, often hard enough to crash the whole OS. (“But the OS shouldn’t let that happen!” True, although even with that said, it was in the short list of common apps capa…

Still nothing can solidly run arbitrary code from internets, be it flash, java applets, javascript or even webp and web fonts.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#274

Post by frollogaston »

unnouinceput wrote: post #50

I don't like .epub. I understand the reasons why this format exists, and I am 100% behind those reasons. But it's because I don't find any EPUB readers appealing to me. Just give me a FoxIt Reader clone for .epub, that's all. But naaaah!!, every single fucking e-pub reader that I tried must be a fucking library collector instead, like it's 2000's Windows Media Player style. I hate that. As such, whenever I get my han…

I'd prefer pdf from the publisher because it'll lay out the same way on my side vs theirs, or if they give epub then I'm converting to pdf for the reason you said.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#275

Post by GoblinSlayer »

drtz wrote: post #37
echelon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash is still unsurpassed as the easiest publishing medium. JavaScript build system layer cake and "web standards" are a million times harder than just drawing some stuff, maybe writing a simple function, then building a static file that can be embedded anywhere and even downloaded. You have to spend so much time setting up any flash alternative, and the "standards" are worse. I hate Steve Jobs for killing Flash and…

> Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. Is this a troll? What could an application do with Flash in 2005 that we can't do with a modern web application today (excluding the obvious answer of runtime vulnerabilities that allowed apps to escape the sandbox)?

What was possible in Flash in 2005 in IE6 on a Duron processor with 32MB RAM is possible today in a gargantuan bloatware browser that eats all your hardware.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#276

Post by GoblinSlayer »

spider-mario wrote: post #262
eichin wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wasn't some of that smoothness because it ran at a 100hz tick without any way of adapting it (and still running existing code)? That was the complaint I kept hearing from people attempting to make flash on phones viable (this led to ludicrous battery consumption)

That’s not at all how I remember it (having used it in the Macromedia Flash 8 era, around 2006 or so). You would set your animation’s framerate and that would determine how often your `onEnterFrame` would run.

Framerate was for scripts, animation was interframe.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#277

Post by timeinput »

ndiddy wrote: post #70
hardwaresofton wrote: post #54

BTW for those who are looking for a device, the PineNote exists: https://pine64.org/devices/pinenote/ More expensive and less out-of-the-box software, but straight to the point on device ownership/what kind of software you can run, fewer strings attached. [EDIT] Great experience blogs on the PineNote https://shom.dev/posts/20250308_pinenote-day-one/ https://shom.dev/posts/20250406_a-pinenote-only-5-day-weeken...

Have you tried the PineNote yourself? It $400 and says that it's "aimed at Linux developers with an extensive knowledge of embedded systems and/or experience with mobile Linux." The community provided firmware they link for it hasn't been updated in over a year. The Kobos don't limit what you can do with them either, you can sideload alternative e-reader software like KOReader that improves on the built-in reader fun…

I have a pine note. It lives up to that description. It's "fine", but I like to use it as an e ink laptop (well terminal with occasional other uses) with a bluetooth keyboard. I don't know that I would even want to start on using it as an ebook reader. It's bulky / heavy, and just doesn't match my kobo. I imagine asking it to do DRM ebooks would just be a non-starter.

I tried to turn a kobo into an eink terminal, and basically failed at getting it to the state I wanted it to be in, so the pine note is nice, but as a plug and play ereader it would be a hard sell for me.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#278

Post by GoblinSlayer »

dredmorbius wrote: post #243
afiori wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conceptually maybe you can compile flash to SVG+js but this has nothing to do with the point. Many insist (I have no direct experience) that the flash ecosystem (especially the editor) was and is unsurpassed as a publishing platform for interactive experiences. Today with the current focus on mobile+low latency+e-commerce optimizations flash would probably have shown a lot of limitations, yet JavaScript, SVG, canvas,…

The narrow point I was addressing was the claim "it looked sharper and smoother than even current websites". SVGA graphics, being vector-based (as the name suggests), are indeed sharp, most notably when scaling up or down, and I've encountered SVGA-based interactive graphics which are reminiscent of Flash-based animations in that specific regard . Again, I'm not addressing other aspects of these options, and I do ver…

Modern web allows to disallow text extraction.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#279

Post by WorldMaker »

boredhedgehog wrote: post #212
dakolli wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really have an issue with kindle, I just download anything off of z-library and use the email to kindle tool. I haven't given Amazon a penny other than from the original purchase of the kindle. I only have used epub/pdf (and will never have a need for another format).

Technically you already have need of another format, because Kindles don't support epub, and your books get converted before the transfer.

The latest Kindle formats are just epub with a different DRM hat. Amazon still prefers to wrap the entire container in DRM whereas most epub DRM schemes are inside the container (ZIP file), but that's the only big difference now.

Re: Your ePub Is fine

#280

Post by WorldMaker »

Finnucane wrote: post #100
ameliaquining wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A compatibility linter is a poor substitute for a vendor-supplied test platform, but if the vendor is uncooperative it may be the best that can be done.

It's not a direct substitute at all. It's not intended to be. And--it's on the vendors for making crap software and not keeping up.

Especially because what Adobe failed to do was follow a CSS1 requirement: if you don't understand a line, skip it and move on to the next line. Adobe didn't need to predict CSS4 in the 2010s, Adobe needed to understand CSS1 better.
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