SmallNews 2.0 can now create the newspaper as an ePub format eBook. ePub has been in the news a lot recently because it was mentioned as the format that the Apple iPad will support. In fact, most recent eBook readers (with the notable except of the Amazon Kindle) will read it. The best known desktop client is Adobe Digital Editions.

So which is better, PDF or ePub? That depends on what you want to do with it. If you format a PDF with the page size of the device you’re going to read it on, then it looks great. But if you read an PDF formatted for A4 pages on an 6″ eBook reader screen, it looks a mess. Yes, some readers do enable the PDF to be reflowed, but this is never entirely successful. Also, on my Sony Reader, if I increase the font size, the page flow gets messed up.

ePub, on the other hand, is designed to be reflowed. I find that at the default font size, there is not much difference between ePub and PDF on my Sony Reader. But if you increase the font size, the ePub version handles it much, much better. So I’ve switched to using ePub as the main version I read.

Where ePub really comes into it’s own is on even smaller devices, such as iPhone/iPod Touch. I previously used GoodReader to read the iPod version of the PDF. This worked quite well. I tried Stanza, but never really liked it for reading PDFs. But it’s a much better ePub reader, so I’ve switched to using Stanza/ePub on my iPod.

I said in the release notes that support for ePub in SmallNews is experimental. I have found that articles from The Guardian work very well in this format. But some other feeds are a little more unpredictable. ePub is an XHTML-based format, so the HTML from the newspaper site has to be converted to XHTML. If the source material is not well-constructed, this can cause problems. Most feeds I have tried do work, but my Sony Reader has crashed on 2 or 3 occasions. Whether this is the fault of the Sony software or the ePub created by SmallNews, I don’t know. Anyway, I would argue that even if the ePub is not quite perfect, the Sony Reader still shouldn’t crash. I will watch this over the next few weeks and see if I can establish any pattern.

If you’re interested in the technical detail of creating ePub files, they are basically a zip file of XHTML content, XML metadata and images. I found three tutorials about very useful:

• http://www.hxa.name/articles/content/epub-guide_hxa7241_2007.html
• http://www.jedisaber.com/eBooks/tutorial.asp
• http://www.spontaneousderivation.com/2008/12/13/creating-ebooks-an-epub-tutorial/

Also, this ePub validator.

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SmallNews 2.0 is (finally) available for download. It’s taken a long time because I kept adding features I want to put in, rather than finishing the others ones I’d already started.

This version adds three new features:

• Purging of the database. This can be performed manually from the Settings tab, and you can specify how many days of articles you want to keep.
• Experimental ePub support. You can now specify that an ePub version of the newspaper is created either as well or instead of the PDF version. It works very well for The Guardian, but can be a little more unpredictable for other feeds. More information about that to follow.
• Wait for publication. The handler for the The Guardian has the (as yet, undocumented) ability to generate the newspaper in the same order as the printed version. This makes it a great deal more coherent, but The Guardian don’t always get around to publishing this until mid-morning. This option can instruct SmallNews to wait until today’s edition has been published before starting a scheduled run. More info to follow on that too.

All of these need a bit more documentation, which I will aim to do shortly. I have added quite a bit of extra documentation since 2.0b3; you can find it on the SmallNews page.

Also, the source code for SmallNews is now available. It has always been an open source application in principle, I just never got round to publishing the source.

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A third beta release of SmallNews 2.0 is now available. This adds most of the features that had been marked as “not yet implemented” in the previous release, and a couple of other minor changes.

• Scheduled daily creation of the newspaper
• Create PDFs of articles from the database
• Send PDFs of articles from the database by e-mail
• A feed tester, to allow individual feeds to be tried (useful if they are not behaving the way you expect)
• A fix to one of The Guardian handlers which was not writing articles to the database correctly

I’ve also written some more documentation, and will continue to add to this over the next week.

The one outstanding feature that needs to be added before I call this version 2.0 is the ability to purge the database of old articles.

After this, I am planning to add two new significant features:

• Ability to search the database by keyword, author, date, etc, instead of just the article id.
• Support for the Apple iPad. This looks to me like it’s going to be a great device to use SmallNews on, but I’ll have to wait and see what the best format will be. I understand that it will support the ePub format, so I may look again at that. I originally consider ePub when adding support for the Sony Reader, but decided that a small-page PDF worked very well, so it wasn’t really necessary.

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