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MrLeapyesterday at 11:50 PM3 repliesview on HN

An epub is just a plain html webpage compressed into a zip and its extension changed from .zip to ".epub". Assuming you have a web browser, you have something that will almost certainly render your epubs contents.

PDF is not nearly as pleasant under the hood. It's down right lovecraftian.


Replies

ablobyesterday at 11:54 PM

The lovecraftian horror of pdf mostly comes into play through the sheer amount of software that supply almost correct pdf. It's not enough to be able to read pdf anymore, you also have to be able to deal with software that emits subtly wrong documents.

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anenefantoday at 1:06 AM

I'm aware thanks. Mostly it's just my preferred viewer is older than css4 but it's been nice to find out why that was the case.

PDFs can be painful as well, more often it's then using abode's pdf viewer, but it's far less common for me. There was a time many years ago when I understood PDF structures better, back when I chose to manually edit and fix a couple of malformed PDFs.

goodmythicalyesterday at 11:55 PM

I was floored to discover this recently when I clicked "edit" in calibre for the first time a few weeks ago.

Straight HTML, edit anything everywhere. Super slick.