Hello, abiword-dev
I'm considering proposing the ePub filter but I noticed there's no mentor for it. I'm not sure who added it. Is there support for it on this mailing list? The project looks straightforward.
Taking a ten-mile-high view of the format, I don't think this will bring along any new dependencies. ePub is based on xml and stored in an extension-renamed zip archive. Additionally, as ePub's "Open Publication Structure" (OPS) is a subset of XHTML 1.1 and CSS, the simplest way to handle this part of ePub would be to modify or subclass the HTML exporter for our needs.
Judging by the existence of HTML export functionality (IE_Exp_HTML) it's tempting to add some options to it and/or write an ePub subclass that uses the HTML functionality to generate the ops files. Or add in an 'ePub mode' to the HTML exporter. At the very least, in 'ePub mode' we need to disable certain HTML exporter options so that it doesn't use AWML tags, and exports the CSS as a separate file.
We would also need to check and make sure that the HTML exporter exports to only the subset of XHTML and CSS that ePub supports, or otherwise add options to restrict it in 'ePub mode'. Also, since ePub allows us to expose chapter/section headings and other navigation controls we need to add UI options so that end users can select what headings should be exposed to ePub. We are allowed to use fragment identifiers in our manifest, so we wouldn't have to split documents into separate HTML files.
Overall Abiword seems to be well equipped to gain ePub support, at least on the exporting side. It looks like we have XHTML importers, so they could be used in a similar manner, but I would have to look into that first.
P.s. I also considered proposing the 'speed up for large documents' thing, but after emailing msevior directly and then reading the mailing list it seems that the particular idea is already spoken for.
Received on Wed Apr 6 05:14:45 2011
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