Rendering and pagination

[JayPanoz]

I thought it would be more useful to open a new issue about rendering (-epub-bleed, overrides) in the context of pagination since I’m kind of being overly active about that in the bleed issue.

Disclaimer: @dauwhe, speaking as an RS “implementer” there, although it’s a really early feedback and will be able to provide more details later. But please be assured I’m coming in peace.

Pagination

To sum things up, you can’t do without columns at the moment if you want a cross-platform implementation and don’t want to make super heavy manipulations using JavaScript (for which, if some Reading Systems can be any clue, you have to tweak files beforehand).

Won’t dive into super technical details (compromises, tricks you have to use to break the least amount of things possible, especially the box model) but the spec to improve them already exists. It can be found here.

It is, in my humble opinion, critical that we can nest columns in a super simple page model dealing with overflow, padding, etc. (because columns + overflow is super nasty at the moment). Also, it could be useful for web publications, if the publisher wants to provide a paginated view for instance. Finally, that could open up the possibility of -epub-bleed (say for EPUB 3.2, should that exist in the future).

Have (pretty quickly) explored shadow DOM (+ Regions) for the longer term but I’m not particularly hopeful it will solve all the issues we have. If you have to manipulate the entire DOM, performance becomes an issue.

Overrides

Am pretty uncomfortable with this since I’m an author too but it would be interesting to discuss with implementers of browsers’ Reader Modes, Read-later services, AMP & IA & Apple News. We have issues in common e.g. how to manage images in night and high-contrast-mode, overrides, etc.

This is probably our best bet to find practical solutions.