Create an epub version of the Spring framework reference [SPR-11167]

[spring-projects-issues]

Mario Jauvin opened SPR-11167 and commented

---

Affects: 3.2.5

Referenced from: commits 887815f

0 votes, 5 watchers

[spring-projects-issues]

Phil Webb commented

This would certainly be a nice addition. We have recently moved to asciidoctor for generation of the reference guide, however, we still use docbook as an intermediary step. Hopefully sometime in the future we could drop docbook and just generate output directly. When that happens, if asciidoctor/asciidoctor#184 is resolved epub would be relatively easy.

[spring-projects-issues]

Mario Jauvin commented

Phil

I was under the impression that it was possible using docbook to create epub format. I understand that you are talking about a long term implementation but I could use today as well as many other users a mobile version of the doc on my tablet. Can there not be anything done before?

[spring-projects-issues]

Phil Webb commented

Can there not be anything done before?

A pull request ;)

I have one docbook issue to take a look at before 4.0 GA. I will try to tack this on but historically docbook issues have been a bit of a time sink so I am doubtful that I will get to it before we go GA.

Have you tried using the PDF version on your tablet?

[spring-projects-issues]

Mario Jauvin commented

Yes I tried PDF but a US Letter PDF is a pain to look at on a tablet especially with diagrams or pictures.

[spring-projects-issues]

Phil Webb commented

I have spend about an hour or so looking into this and unfortunately it doesn't appear to be that easy to generate epub output. There are XSDs shipped with docbook for epub 2.0 and epub 3.0 but I could only get the epub 3 versions to work with our docs. It seems like we could modify our Gradle plugin to generate the appropriate HTML used by epub (I made a start [1]) but we would still need to package this up into a custom ZIP file [2]. We would need to add specific CSS and font files and ensure that the ZIP is written in such a way that the manifest is the first entry.

This more work than I have time for at the moment, but contributions would be welcome if anyone can get further than me.

[1] https://github.com/philwebb/gradle-plugins/tree/epub
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB

[spring-projects-issues]

Stéphane Nicoll commented

See also https://github.com/regueiro/spring-reference-ebook