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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. |