ePub is a reflowable text format best suited to mobile and small screens, PDF a fixed layout format.
Thanks for the quick reply. Do you know what it will do with pictures? I have the issue that my uploaded pictures are just a bit too big to fit two horizontal ones on one page in a PDF export. It works if I scale down text size by 10 degrees, but this also decreases font size, which is not what I wanted. Would pictures be scaled automatically?
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Does Write.as support PDF export? If so I’m not familiar with it and don’t know how it may handle images.
Oh, you’re right, I just print the blog page from my browser, then write.as has nothing to do with it, of course.
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Here is what I get when I try it.
There is an error with About SFSS — SFSS
I don’t know how to fix it.
Otherwise, the ebook looks great.
I have made my first try with the .epub-add-on. Looks great! Thanks a lot! But I am missing all those photos embedde to my post-articles. Any parameter to be set? I have used: https://write.as/xxx/tag:yyy.epub
Using the “fancy” editor to insert images, not markdown.
Just give https://monz.photos/tag:fotografie.epub a try, please! There are no images to be seen in the eBook. So what is going wrong?
So, I have a custom domain (https://sfss.space). For those who have one, you have to add /.epub to the original domain.
Here’s the result in my case:
https://write.as/science-fiction-short-stories/.epub
Two things:
-
There are posts/chapters I want to exclude (archives section for example). I’ll do that by editing the book with Calibre, I think that will do the trick). Or better, Ill create another blog containing only the posts I want.
-
I have an error messages on certain pages and I don’t understand why… If someone has an idea on how to solve it, Id be very grateful.
(“error on line 13 at column 34: attribute id redefined - below is the rendering of the page up to the first error”)
Fixed the error by going to line 13 and erasing the html tags
Are you still working on epub export, @matt ?
I found some bugs, that might benefit from your attention. 
In order to reproduce them, download https://write.as/blog/tag:Updates.epub and validate with EPUBCheck.
On my machine it resulted in 41 error messages.
Duplicate elements:
- 3x
RSC-016 Fatal Error while parsing file: Attribute "id" was already specified for element "h2".
Forbidden elements:
- 1x
CSS-001 The "unicode-bidi" property must not be included in an EPUB Style Sheet
Missing elements:
- 1x
OPF-053 Date value "" does not follow recommended syntax as per http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime:zero-length string. - 1x
RSC-005 Error while parsing file: character content of element "dc:date" invalid; must be a string with length at least 1 (actual length was 0) - 1x
RSC-005 Error while parsing file: Element "title" must not be empty.
Remote resources not properly referenced or declared:
- 5x
RSC-006 Remote resource reference is not allowed in this context; resource […] must be located in the EPUB container. - 4x
OPF-014 The property "remote-resources" should be declared in the OPF file.
Broken links:
- 18x
RSC-007 Referenced resource […] could not be found in the EPUB. - 7x
RSC-026 URL […] leaks outside the container (it is not a valid-relative-ocf-URL-with-fragment string)
From my own experiments with pandoc I’ve learned that creating a properly formatted epub has its unique challenges. It might sound trivial, but an epub is not a website. It is a self-contained entity with a peculiar structure and wrapping.
Hope this helps.
Hi @sfsspace, most of the errors that EPUBCheck reports for your EPUB are already mentioned in this post. Some of them are formal and technical details, that @matt should be able to fix quickly.
More interesting is the question, how exported epubs should handle non-text content:
a) Images that are hosted on snap.as should be included by default in the exported epub, especially if they were uploaded from the same user account as the text. I can’t think of a legal or technical reason not to do it.
b) Embedded content from other sources, like Youtube, could be replaced by a placeholder with an external link to the resource. That’s a design decision for Matt.
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@matt asked:
What do you think so far?
I think, that eBook export is too buggy to be useful.
What would you like to see next?
Compliance with W3C specifications, especially resource locations.
Images must be stored within the container.
Our goal is to make this add-on into a full eBook creator, with just enough customization to be widely useful, but not so much that it becomes unwieldy.
In order to become useful without any customization, this add-on should at least be able to reliably export words as a standard-compliant EPUB file.
IMO the default eBook export should focus on words first, images second and other content last. I would be happy, if it exported just the words, but in a standard-compliant and meaningful way:
- omit images and other media (or replace them with external links)
- add basic bibliographical data to the cover page like URL and date of creation
- add basic bibliographical data to each chapter like URL and date of publication (design for blogs as default use case)
- apply W3C EPUB accessibility recommendations
The whole point of EPUB export is having a self-contained file, that can be read offline on any standard ebook reader.
“Type words, put them in ebooks.” 
So I’m getting closer to having my book going on write.as and if ePub were to work, it would be pretty swell to have that available. But it sounds like there’s still work to be done. @matt Has there been any progress?
Thanks!
Tap tap tap. Is this thing on?
@matt any update on the ebook plugin? I have my book up at https://meadmadeeasy.info/ but have some page-ordering issues I’m not sure how to fix.
Hey not so far, unfortunately. Some of the issues brought up earlier by @sfsspace and @rhubarb will take a varying amount of effort to fix, and I don’t have the bandwidth for it at the moment. But I do want to polish up this feature as soon as I can.
As for those issues @davepolaschek, what problems exactly are you having with page ordering?
Ok. When it’s ready, I’ll likely be a customer.
As for the page-ordering issues, I used the “novel” format, and then later discovered I missed a chapter. When I added it, it was appended, and I probably need to go edit things somehow to get it to present in the correct order to someone visiting the front page (or presumably getting an epub once that’s ready and I pay for the feature).