Typesetting a novel for Print with HTML & CSS Paged Media

I’ve been fol­lo­wing new deve­lo­p­ments around CSS Paged Media and PrintCSS for a while now. I never had the chan­ce to test them out in a real word pro­ject. Until recent­ly. The publi­shing house I work for wants to pro­du­ce per­so­na­li­zed novels. Cus­to­mers can cus­to­mi­ze their novel in a web fron­ted writ­ten in Python. The out­put is plain HTML5.

To avo­id over­head I set out to type­set the dif­fe­rent novels with web tech­no­lo­gies. The­se are my findings:

tl;dr: It pret­ty much went smooth­ly. CSS Paged Media is even more con­ve­ni­ent than InDe­sign in some aspects.
Docrap​tor​.com (with Prin­ce XML as the engi­ne) was my Con­ver­ter of choice.
I would only wish for one miss­ing fea­ture, other­wi­se type­set­ting was a breeze.

Wei­ter­le­sen …