yeah, that is really important i think, especially the thing of getting it to produce a reasonable pdf proof at the end...
i bought a copy of Plato's Timeaus and Critias a while back from amazon and the typography on it was so bad i felt totally ripped off, like someone just printed a dumb pdf with OCR errors onto cheap glue bound book and done, though it was pretty cheap, just awful tho
i don't see any reason why an adequate version can't be encoded in epub format, all the ebook readers i've used with epub3s generate pages that would be adequate on hard copy at their size (small on my phone) and probably wouldn't look bad on a bigger format like an e paper reader
mostly it's just having decent conventions about section markers and for example starting chapters/sections always on an even page and so on, and automatically generated annotations and end-of-chapter, or end-of-book bibliography (this would be better than bottom of page IMO) and i'm pretty sure there is schemes for generating indexes out of a compiled text, and having all their page numbers correctly noted with the annotations in the bibliography
and other things too, like side-by-side translations where you have odd page is one language even is another, or odd is the text, and even is the annotations, and they stay side by side correctly
of course, watch out for that dirty feature creep but i think those few considerations would make it very possible to pop out beautiful hard copy editions from a complete compiled chapter set of a book... i don't think it's traditionalism or any kind of impractical to insist on having adequate hard copies also... IMO, digital copies suffer from a similar problem as word of mouth recitations, they can be lost forever, but parchments can survive thousands of years
I hate when they have typos everywhere, too, from crappy scanning.
Yeah, we're also going to have an ePaper version, so that you can choose to actually read the original notes on your eReader, rather than needing to create the ePub first. Sort of like njump: no websocket.
But, it's essential that people can generate quality LateX, PDF, ePUB, etc. directly from their notes, and that they can have them printed in physical form. The notes and the paper/epaper need to look the same. WYSIWYG and all that jazz.
We're going to offer to auto-generate auxiliary text, like indexes and summaries, and translations, yeah. Already practicing. 🙂 Including on videos. 👀
It'll be the first backend-heavy Nostr client. Closest we've come to that, so far, is Ditto, I guess, but this is going to be very relay-forward. No magic between the client and the relay. Want to keep the core very clean and neat, so that people can easily fork, self-host, and improve it. But all of the whizz-bang stuff will need some data storage and some processing power, even if some of it can be done in the browser.
It's more the question of what you download, to view offline. You have to have some static page, at some point. If the page were to be created, dynamically, as you read it, (to keep the likes and etc. up-to-date, and incorporate changes to your npub, like adding follows) then you would need to stream the changes. Which is difficult, when working offline or on ePaper.
If you create it server-side and then pull the finished page, then it'd have to be stored someplace, before moving it to your device. I guess, you could store it in your browser cache, on a different device, but then you have to have a device in-between the server and your ePaper device.
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