@ Madcap - any news on ebook support?

[stephgl]

I'm just moving into single-sourcing our Help, manual, datasheet, and web FAQ. So far, so great with single-sourcing the user-side Help, server-side Web FAQ and mobile targets! Really, it's lots of fun.

I'll be embarking on print targets soon. Alongside that, I've been requested to look into options beyond PDF for ebook formats in the near future.

@Madcap Team: Are there plans in the works to support any of the ebook formats?

@Everyone: Have any of you had success passing a Madcap-output PDF (or any other target type) through a converter to an ePUB or other ebook format that supports both tables and text wrap? I'd love to hear about it, or get a pointer to resources.

Thanks in advance,
-Steph

[RamonS]

@Madcap Team: Are there plans in the works to support any of the ebook formats?
-Steph

You are better off asking MadCap directly. This here is a peer to peer forum from users for users.

I think one issue with supporting "any of the ebook formats" is that there are just too many who each have about equal share in a highly fragmented market that does not allow free choice as formats are tied to proprietary readers / devices. My guess is the decision was to wait a while to see if there are one or two formats that will serve most of the market and are likely to stay around for years to come. Supporting all these formats now will eat up a lot of development resources that in the end are mainly wasted if a bunch of formats are abandoned.

[jcoria]

That issue should be moved toward the handful that are popular. Heck you could say the same thing about outputs in general. Thats the way it is, otherwise we would be with just chm. I know my company right now is really paying attention to mobility including, BB and iOS. a few formats for mobile outputs would be great and I would be happy to be a beta tester for those. more and more, mobile apps are becoming more popular...going to need help with them.

jC

[RamonS]

While BB and iOS will be around the platform to go for in the smartphone / minidevice arena is clearly Android. So that gives three platforms plus likely the "us too" stuff from Microsoft. Add to that the plentiful amount of file formats, even when focusing only on the popular ones.
My guess is that testing isn't the issue at the moment, but finding a developer that can work on this. Recently I was involved in a decision at work about a specific feature. The choices were to hire another developer, extend the delivery date for the product, or don't do it. We cannot change the delivery date due to contractual agreements and we could not prove that by adding this feature we can make hiring a developer worthwhile. So we took the good idea, put it on the shelf, and for now decided to do nothing. None of us liked the decision, but there are forces in the business world that collide with common sense. Well, actually, there is only one force: money.