Three years ago, my colleagues and I in O’Reilly Media’s Production department made the decision to rearchitect our print-publishing software toolchain to support typesetting print books in HTML and CSS. Doing print layout with web technology was a fairly radical notion at the time (and still is today!), especially in traditional publishing-industry circles where commercial desktop-publishing software continues to hold sway. But we were convinced that aligning our publishing tech with the web stack would pay dividends. Short-term, we knew it would enable us to simultaneously produce print and digital media more efficiently. And long-term, we felt that placing our bets on HTML+CSS was the best way to future-proof our workflows as electronic publishing, both online and offline, continued to evolve.
Transitioning to HTML as our canonical content source format immediately allowed us to realize many benefits, including Web-based authoring and a digital-first approach to next-gen ebook development. Building print templates in CSS also proved to be surprisingly straightforward, once we got up to speed on Paged Media, and the particular dialect of it spoken by our PDF formatter software.