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ePub support


From: Borden Rhodes
Subject: ePub support
Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2018 15:42:01 -0400

I noticed in the TODO file of texinfo that there's a job for exporting
into ePub. This would be a great feature because I've wanted to take
things like the bash and sed manuals offline to read with me.

I played around a bit with the texinfo source. Unfortunately, I'm an
accountant, not a programmer or engineer. I also don't know most of
the languages texinfo is implemented in.

It seems that most of the bits to create an ePub already exist (with
one caveat). All that's really missing is a module to generate toc.ncx
and content.opf. Whilst I could implement something rudimentary in
Python, I imagine that would be of precious little value because there
would be no interest in pulling in the Python dependencies.

The caveat is that makeinfo --no-headers doesn't suppress header
generation when generating multipart HTML documentation. Whilst the
ePub format will still technically work with the headers, it won't be
pretty. I'm not sure whether this is a bug with --no-headers.

I found an EBook::EPUB on CPAN which seems to implement the required
NCX and OPF functionality. Rather than do things 'their way' by
feeding each HTML file into the module, all you'd really need to do is
graft ncx and opf code into the existing parser to generate those
files whilst the HTML parser creates the chapters.

If I can get the right support, I can try to help the implementation.
I don't have the time or resources to learn Perl, but I can probably
code most into Python if someone wanted to translate into Perl. I
could also help with the bash script to stitch the whole thing
together.

Is there interest?



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