Jason van Gumster

2391 points
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Atlanta, GA

Jason van Gumster mostly makes stuff up. He writes, animates, and occasionally teaches, all using open source tools. He's run a small, independent animation studio, wrote Blender For Dummies and GIMP Bible, and continues to blurt out his experiences during a [sometimes] weekly podcast, the Open Source Creative Podcast. Adventures (and lies) at @monsterjavaguns.

Authored Comments

Great article, Seth!

Another plus for EPUB is that if you're planning on trying to sell an EPUB file (of your own writing/notes, of course), nearly all vendors/distributors will accept an EPUB (well... EPUB2 at least). They may auto-convert to their closed format on the backend, so you'll have to make sure that conversion goes cleanly, but for the most part, it's pretty seamless.

Pandoc tends to be my (and, from the look of it, Seth's) go-to app for converting between document formats. EPUB only supports a subset of HTML tags and CSS rules and regarding image support, many dedicated ereaders are limited to just JPEG support (so avoid PNG and GIF).

As a secondary option, you may also want to try Calibre. It has some basic conversion capability built into it and, if I recall correctly, it can parse HTML. If you can't get up and running with Pandoc, that might be a decent fallback.