Providing simple solutions to complex eBook issues
As of July 1, 2020 Blitz is no longer maintained.
Check this page for further details.
We’ve build a solid bedrock for EPUB 3 but don’t worry, it is backwards-compatible with ePub 2 and Kindle Mobi. We believe it can be a complete solution to designing eBooks.
An EPUB 3 template leveraging HTML5 and the EPUB 3 vocabulary.
Style Sheets and a meta-language for eBook layout and typesetting written in LESS CSS.
A template repository providing scripts to automate markup changes and optimizations.
In addition to the framework, we’ve build 3 web apps to help you design outstanding eBooks. Best part of it? You can install them on your mobile device and use them offline.
A checklist to help you achive great design in your eBooks.
A checklist to help you achieve good performance in your eBooks.
A collection of CSS snippets to kickstart progressive enhancement in your eBooks.
CSS is a big part of the Reader Experience.
Our stylesheets can make it or break it, we should stop thinking of CSS authoring as “lay out and typeset.” Bad CSS can disable user settings, make some reading modes unusable, conflict with default styles, etc. And it’s not just about CSS, it’s about HTML (and JS) as well.
Blitz was designed to help authors provide a minimum enjoyable experience.
We do believe that, ideally, this framework and its companion web apps shouldn’t exist. Unfortunately, eBook production is tough and requires an awful amount of expertise to get around Reading Systems’ overrides and provide compliance with user settings.
The web has demonstrated that anyone has a role to play and that making knowledge + tools freely accessible benefits the ecosystem as a whole.
Progress is made when we strive for more, we must stand together and push for better eBooks. This is the reason why we decided to release Blitz under the MIT License.
Currently, compatibility is provided but not limited to:
Nope.
Blitz was sunset in 2020. As of July 1st, 2020 the entire project is no longer maintained and its repositories read-only. You can still fork them.
We deemed Blitz feature-complete though, and it should consequently be still useful for a couple of years.
Nope.
It grew organically out of the desire to learn CSS preprocessors, then improve at JavaScript and make Progressive Web Apps, etc. It just seemed that side projects sharing knowledge that would be useful to the ebook production community was the best way to achieve those goals.
At some point, sponsoring was considered but quickly dismissed due to the relatively small size of the ebook production community: it was simply too much to ask.
Quite a lot, actually.
epub:type to DPUB ARIA, clean DTP outputs’ markup, etc. (would have required GUI since everyone is not comfortable with the command-line and npm).But maybe you could successfully build a business out of that list…
Better internationalization.
By improving support for the 24 additonal languages we added at some point, Blitz would better cover the needs and requirements of 3,049,150,507 speakers.
JavaScript has quite a bad reputation in publishing, especially as Kindle and eReaders relying on Adobe’s RMSDK don’t support it. So it was not worth pursuing JavaScript exploration despite all the Research and Development that had gone into it.
A library of custom elements almost happened after successful initial testing, but one careful review later, it was clear most authors wouldn’t even bother trying such a library. That wasn’t a hill to die on when most authors want Reading Systems to handle that out of the box.