Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons
license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary
on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the
entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/


   Google Docs Exports EPUBs, But Not Well

   Michael E. Cohen

   Time was when creating an ebook in EPUB format required some high-end
   tools and knowledge of XHTML and XML coding. Today, however, EPUB
   creation apps are increasingly available to anyone. For example, I have
   on my Mac a number of apps that can produce attractive EPUBs without
   forcing me to touch a tag. Nor are these apps only for high-end
   professionals either; they're designed to be used by so-called 'normal'
   people. For example, [1]Pages and [2]Nisus Writer Pro are aimed at
   general users, [3]iBooks Author is targeted at teachers, and
   [4]Scrivener is designed for writers ' okay, maybe it's stretching
   things to call this last group 'normal' but I think you get the point.

   You can now add to this list of EPUB-creating apps Google's word
   processing Web app, [5]Google Docs. Recently making its way onto the
   File > Download As submenu in Google Docs is this new option: EPUB
   Publication. Choose that and ' presto! ' your document is downloaded to
   your computer as an EPUB ebook, ready to be opened by iBooks or any
   other EPUB reading app. No muss, no fuss, and it takes just seconds.

   [6][tn_download-as-google-epub.jpg]

   Sounds great, right? Not so fast: while the menu command does produce
   an EPUB as advertised, unless your document is simple text with little
   or no special formatting, you may find yourself disappointed with the
   results.

   Take, for example, the EPUB created from the dissertation file that a
   friend of mine had in Google Docs. The strict margin requirements that
   dissertations require were too much for the Web app to handle,
   producing an EPUB that chopped off the text at the end of each line.

   [7][tn_overflowing-text-google-epub.jpg]

   Okay, so maybe dissertations and their finicky formatting requirements
   are beyond this export feature. How about a simple text document that
   adds in an occasional image, as a school or business report might? Even
   then, problems arise. For example, a simply formatted TidBITS article
   about iTunes, when downloaded from Google Docs, produced an EPUB that,
   while not truncating text, fell apart when it came to the images:
   almost every image in the article extended beyond the margins ' and not
   just the text margins but the page margins, causing portions of images
   to spill over onto the next page.

   [8][tn_image-overlap-google-epub.jpg]

   Maybe simple documents without graphics can make it through Google
   Docs' EPUB-exporting mill. To test that, I tried a page of a novel I
   wrote recently, a book that contains no images and precious little
   special formatting. Even something this simple broke when the exporter
   encountered italic text, adding an extraneous space after each italic.

   [9][tn_bad-italics-google-epub.jpg]

   In short, there's no chance that Google Docs could be capable of
   creating something as complex as a Take Control book, where we have
   styled text, lots of graphics, and a lot of internal and external
   links.

   Although the capability to export a document as EPUB certainly has its
   uses, especially if you want to share the document with people who will
   view it on a mobile device where a PDF may be too awkward to view
   (remember, PDFs provide the images of printed pages, which on a small
   screen can be unreadably minuscule), the EPUB export capability
   currently provided by Google Docs is unlikely to provide a satisfactory
   ebook for most people. Doubtless, Google will improve the exporter over
   time, but until it gets smarter about EPUB exporting, I can't recommend
   it for any purpose beyond amusement.

References

   1. http://www.apple.com/mac/pages/
   2. https://www.nisus.com/pro/
   3. http://www.apple.com/ibooks-author/
   4. https://www.literatureandlatte.com/
   5. https://www.google.com/docs/about/
   6. http://tidbits.com/resources/2016-03/download-as-google-epub.png
   7. http://tidbits.com/resources/2016-03/overflowing-text-google-epub.png
   8. http://tidbits.com/resources/2016-03/image-overlap-google-epub.png
   9. http://tidbits.com/resources/2016-03/bad-italics-google-epub.png

.