Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

It appears this site (Github pages) is trying to require Javascript in order to read it.

At the same time the top comment is suggesting EPUB should not require Javascript.

I never use the HTML markup, CSS, etc. when I read an "ebook". I dump it to text and read it with less(1). I do not need to see images. I just want to search and read text. I use stupid simple shell scripts; something like the following.

    #!/bin/sh
    printf "(\n"
    for x in ${1-*.epub};do
    echo printf  \'\\n\\n,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, "$x" ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,\\n\\n\'
    7z l $x|sed -n "s/.* /7z x -so $x /;/nav.xhtml/d;/[tx]ml$/p"|sort -n
    done
    echo ")|tr -cd '[\\\12\40-\176]'"
Example usage:

   epub.sh 1.epub |sh > 1.htm
   links -dump 1.htm > 1.txt
   less 1.txt
If I need to to adjust the order of the sections, I do something like

   epub.sh 1.epub > 1.sh
   vi 1.sh
   1.sh > 1.htm
   links -dump 1.htm > 1.txt
If I want to save the "ebook", I can compress the .txt smaller than any of the "ebook" formats.

   zstd -19 1.txt
   zstdless 1.txt.zst
Plain text is portable for me; works on both BSD and Linux.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: