Although Amazon’s policy around the Kindle could stand to be revised, the device itself works for me. Good for text, lightweight, long lasting battery charge, built-in Wifi, large storage (for text), relatively cheap, the Kindle suffices as a book replacement. Since I bought one last summer, 33 out of the probably 40 books I read for recreation were on the Kindle.
The Kindle should be a great way to carry around a bunch of ForgeRock documentation, too. Yet for <pre>-style text like code, long commands, wide literal identifiers like com.sun.identity.agents.config.ignore.path.info.for.not.enforced.list, and lists that use indentation for formatting, the Kindle is not so great.
The default fonts seem to allow for about 45 characters in portrait layout. Even on the 7.5′ x 9′ pages we have been using for PDF, 80 characters of monospace font can fit without sprawling into the wide left margin.
This brings me to my questions:
- How should non-trivial DocBook output be styled for the Kindle? (While this is less of a problem on something like an iPad, it may be even more of a problem on something a sys admin is sure to have when most everything else drops offline: a phone. There’s an interesting discussion on APK at docbook-apps. But what size font will you have to use to read lists, wide literals, command lines, etc.)
- And by the way, what’s the right way with Maven to build Kindle-ready output from DocBook directly?
