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
    • Prince
    • PDFreactor
    • Copper PDF
    • Antenna House Formatter
    • VersaType Converter
  • Open source softwares
    • wkhtmltopdf
    • WeasyPrint
    • Vivliostyle
    • Paged.js
• 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
• 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