[clug] Apple and ePub

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

Alex Satrapa <grail at goldweb.com.au> writes:

> On 24 Jun 2010, at 18:36, Neill Cox wrote:
>
>> So if Apple fails to conform to a standard but do so in order to
> protect us from bad designers it's OK?  Perhaps we should get them to
> refuse to allow Comic Sans in Safari as well?
>
> More correctly, when *everyone else in the market* restricts what
> fonts can be used on their device or in their software, *why* are
> people complaining about Apple doing the exact same thing? Other
> readers such as Stanza, Readme, Kindle, and Kobo all have similar
> limitations.

Some devices let you put more fonts on and use them.  Note that the
Kindle isn't really an appropriate comparison as it doesn't use ePub.

>
>> Note: I am taking it on faith that there is such a thing as an "ePub
> specification" and that it "requires that conforming ereaders, like
> yours [ie Apple's] purports to be, support font-family".
>
> Here's the appropriate section from the Open Publication Structure
> (OPS) 2.0 v1.0 document:
>
> [snip]
>
> There's nothing in the spec stating explicitly that Readers must
> actually render using the fonts described in "font-family" - only that
> the Reader must support the descriptor (ie: not break when the
> descriptor is used). The readers I've come across do not support all
> the features you'd expect them to, based on a naive interpretation of
> the spec. The Amazon Kindle (and others like it) cannot support
> colours (for obvious reasons). So you can't expect ePub readers to
> render the colours that you've painstakingly specified in your
> document. Apple's iBooks will display the document with a huge white
> border, so using any background colour will make your ePub look odd in
> iBooks. Readme will convert the entire document to display in some
> horrid font, complete with a dropcap to start every paragraph.

Is there anything in the spec stating that Readers must actually render
the text as given and not delete every second word?

OK, this example is fatuous, but my impression is that if the file says
to do something and the device in question has the technical
capabilities to actually do it, then why doesn't it?

And as I said in another reply, my understanding is that this means that
you can't use different fonts in different parts of the book to denote
code, etc., which would make it almost useless to buy any programming
book to read on that device then.  (I admit I could be interpreting this
wrong though.)

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com