Optional, lightweight web rendering

[jscholes]

For many reading tasks, the current approach of a read-only textarea with a custom hotkey overlay works wonderfully. It's fast, predictable, offers granular cursor tracking, and so on. This feature request is not intended to suggest a replacement in any way.

However, there are some cases in which being able to drop into a web-based rendering of a book, particularly for EPUB files, would be extremely helpful:

• Books with content that Paperback currently does not support but may in the future, e.g. tables and math (Support for displaying tables in books or other files that contain tabular data #81).
• Books with content that Paperback would probably struggle to support in a streamlined way, such as embedded video with captions or complex SVGs with ARIA attributes.
• Books with specific, intentional formatting (like code samples or shell commands) where browsers have already done the heavy lifting to construct a sensible accessibility tree.
• Markdown previews.

I appreciate that a web renderer would not provide the ability for Paperback to track, remember, and restore the reading position with the same level of accuracy it can via the textarea. But I also think many of the use cases where web rendering would be helpful fall into educational territory (e.g. textbooks) where reading a book straight through from start to finish isn't the most common requirement anyway. And as the feature could be an optional thing to drop into for the current "section", it need not support all of the same things like bookmarking and such.

I also understand that Paperback, above all, aims to be streamlined and performant. By no means am I suggesting that it become an Electron/CEF app. However, it could:

• Use the system's builtin browser engine, e.g. Edge WebView2 on Windows.
• Expose a web server and offer a quick way to open the current bit of the book in the user's default browser, with some buttons/hotkeys to jump to the next/previous bits.

Note that I'm specifically not personally interested in web rendering via anything as outdated as Trident/MSHTML. I think Paperback probably already does a better job than those on its own, and they aren't up to the task of modern, complex markup.

Appreciate all the work on this project so far!

[aryanchoudharypro]

For many reading tasks, the current approach of a read-only textarea with a custom hotkey overlay works wonderfully. It's fast, predictable, offers granular cursor tracking, and so on. This feature request is not intended to suggest a replacement in any way.

However, there are some cases in which being able to drop into a web-based rendering of a book, particularly for EPUB files, would be extremely helpful:

• Books with content that Paperback currently does not support but may in the future, e.g. tables and math (Support for displaying tables in books or other files that contain tabular data #81).
• Books with content that Paperback would probably struggle to support in a streamlined way, such as embedded video with captions or complex SVGs with ARIA attributes.
• Books with specific, intentional formatting (like code samples or shell commands) where browsers have already done the heavy lifting to construct a sensible accessibility tree.
• Markdown previews.

I appreciate that a web renderer would not provide the ability for Paperback to track, remember, and restore the reading position with the same level of accuracy it can via the textarea. But I also think many of the use cases where web rendering would be helpful fall into educational territory (e.g. textbooks) where reading a book straight through from start to finish isn't the most common requirement anyway. And as the feature could be an optional thing to drop into for the current "section", it need not support all of the same things like bookmarking and such.

I also understand that Paperback, above all, aims to be streamlined and performant. By no means am I suggesting that it become an Electron/CEF app. However, it could:

• Use the system's builtin browser engine, e.g. Edge WebView2 on Windows.
• Expose a web server and offer a quick way to open the current bit of the book in the user's default browser, with some buttons/hotkeys to jump to the next/previous bits.

Note that I'm specifically not personally interested in web rendering via anything as outdated as Trident/MSHTML. I think Paperback probably already does a better job than those on its own, and they aren't up to the task of modern, complex markup.

Appreciate all the work on this project so far!

hi, thanks for creating this issue.
their is table support coming that will use wx webview to render the table, so i think their's no harm in adding an option to view the current section in a wx webview, though probably we won't have support for bookmarks or reading position saving if we do that.

[trypsynth]

Hi James,
Yes, this is certainly something that's on the roadmap, once we get Aryan's table support pull request merged using wxWebView, we want to add the ability to pop up the current epub section in the webview, at the very least. We could also possibly add an option to pop up the entire document in a web view for e.g. complex HTML documents and so the feature isn't entirely restricted to epubs. This would also make Paperback a useful tool for viewing how a Markdown file will render in a common browser, for example. I welcome any thoughts on this, as it stands currently it's just a messy rough draft of ideas floating around in my head.