HTML+CSS has facilities to target a page format (CSS @page rule, cm and in dimension units). Not to say that it's on the same level as LaTeX, but it's pretty impressive by its own right.
Are there good deep dives on how far you can practically this? Especially in combination with headless browser pdf generation?
Last time I looked into it, a while ago, my impression was that it would get rickety too soon. It’d be a good place to be, I think, if web and “document” tech stacks could have nice and practical convergence.
We use CSS paged media to create e-books and invoices (using weasyprint [0]). One of the most helpful resources for me was print-css.rocks [1], they cover a lot of what’s possible and include which tools support which parts of it (tools targeting paged media, browser support is essentially non-existent and outside using JS to fake it with paged.js, not relevant). The expensive tools tend to support more features, but thanks to some donations/sponsorships, weasyprint has really caught up and now supports a very large part of the spec.
> Especially in combination with headless browser pdf generation
I have no idea why you’d want to do that. Browsers are bad at it, dedicated tools are great at it.
I'd say it's already there. See for example the https://pagedjs.org/ project which allows advanced typesetting (including for printing) using web technologies. It is already used in production by at least one book publisher (C&F editions)
I've used it for my own such production, perfect binding with a hand guillotine and screw clamps in my attic - nothing remotely professional, but you still have to start by making a
book block, and Paged.js is a solid call there. Unless beauty of typography (more than TTF/OTF hinting can handle) is of particular merit, it's usually my preferred first typesetting option.
As an old hand with PDF-in-browser production, I expected much worse of Paged.js than I found. It's powerful and mostly enjoyable to use! Oh, you end up with a large set of CSS rules, and it is not without bugs and gotchas (failing to specify a bleed rule somewhere at least once in every @page context subtly breaks layout; footnote layout is functional but automatic call numbering isn't always perfect, etc.)
You should definitely not expect to take Paged.js out of the box, slap a theme on it, and go; it comes as a box of parts with a mostly complete machine inside, and if it breaks you get to keep all the pieces. I imagine the publisher who uses it must have some prior interest in web technologies, for example.
Nor is Paged.js remotely as
capable or flexible as InDesign or a comparable tool, especially for the deeply rudimentary condition of web typography overall - something even as elaborate a tool as this can't really approach fixing.
But Paged.js is also unlike InDesign in having a much shallower (days vs months) learning curve for folks like us with prior web experience, and however equivocal a review I may now be giving of its technical merits, I do actually like working with Paged.js quite a lot.
I've also used pagedjs for a relatively complex booklet with bidirectional text in different languages, images and long footnotes. The result was great but there were some annoying bugs, some of them seeming to be possible underlying bugs in chrome and Firefox. Still, latex would have been even more frustrating.
Coincidentally, I've also used pagedjs for a project recently (125K novel) and encountered some bugs/minor issues. Overall though, I would say I had an immensely positive experience (because even when stuff broke, it was still just HTML, CSS, and JS--so I, like any other web developer, could fix it).
That said, it's a shame that the relevant W3C specs (see https://pagedjs.org/about/) still aren't fully supported by browsers (but perhaps such is the fate of niche features), but with that being the case, I'm infinitely thankful that pagedjs exists as a polyfill.
Oh, I certainly don't doubt that. And as I said, I haven't really found Paged.js all that frustrating! I have extensive though not recent Pagemaker experience; I expected InDesign to be easier, and now I rue the day when that's where I'm forced to resort.
In my experience Paged.js is at its best when building to PDF, but then that's always my intermediate format when working to paper, because that's where PDF's inflexibility shines. The source of a book block, everything that builds to that PDF, partakes of all the infelicities of the JS ecosystem. But to remake the book itself again, all I need do to start is print the PDF.
I pay for a tool to convert HTML/CSS into PDFs https://www.princexml.com/ and it seems to work well. I don't have the best idea of how it compares to the various free options though.
