HTML book-like pagination

Maybe it would work to use XSL-FO. This seems heavy for a mobile device, and maybe it's overkill, but it should work, and you wouldn't have to implement the complexities of good pagination (e.g. how do you make sure that each screen doesn't cut text in half) yourself.

The basic idea would be:

• transform the XHTML (and other EPUB stuff) to XSL-FO using XSLT.
• use an XSL-FO processor to render the XSL-FO into a paged format that you can display on the mobile device, such as PDF (can you display that?)

I don't know whether there is an XSL-FO processor available for Android. You could try Apache FOP. RenderX (XSL-FO processor) has the advantage of having a paged-HTML output option, but again I don't know if it could run on Android.

There is several ways this could be done. If every line is in its own element all you have to do is to check if one of it's edges goes outside of the view (either the browsers, or the "book page").

If you want to know how many "pages" there is going to be in advance, just temporary move them into the view and get what line a page ends. This could potentially be slow because of that page reflow is needed for the browser to know where anything is.

Otherwise I think that you could use the HTML5 canvas element to measure text and / or draw text.

Some info on that here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Drawing_text_using_a_canvas http://uupaa-js-spinoff.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/uupaa-excanvas.js/demo/8_2_canvas_measureText.html

You could split the pages in separate XHTML files and store them in a folder. Eg: page01, page02. You can then render those pages one by one underneath each other.