Shinyu Murakami: Position Paper
- What’s CSS typesetting
- Print formatting of publications via CSS
- There are dedicated softwares for CSS typesetting
- Some of them use Web browser rendering engine, enhanced with JavaScript
- Many books are already made with CSS typesetting
- Technical books
- Trade books
- Manuals and catalogs
- Academic journals
- Various CSS typesetting engines
- Proprietary softwares
- Open source softwares
- Common problems on CSS typesetting
- CSS typesetting engines implement different draft CSS page layout spec and they are not very compatible
- Standardization of CSS page layout specs, such as:
- Generated content for paged media
- Page floats
- Page templates
- See also Current Status of Japanese Typography Using Web Technologies
- Web browser based CSS typesetting, such as Vivliostyle
- Advantages:
- Can use Web browser capabilities and standards support
- Pagination on the Web, with print support
- Responsive or adaptive page design is possible
- Houdini APIs can be expected as a basis of making next generation CSS typesetting
- Problems: Web browser’s print/PDF output support is still poor and needs massive improvement
- Problems on font embedding to PDF
- Limited to RGB color
- Subpixel rendering problem
- Cannot generate standard-compliant PDFs such as PDF/X, PDF/A or PDF/UA
- Advantages:
- Pagination on Web needs to be standardized
- Scroll vs. pagination should be a user preference
- In pagination mode, same page layout spec as printing should be available
- CSS typesetting quality improvement brings about Web layout quality and readability improvement
Shinyu Murakami
project leader at Vivliostyle.org