Hi,

Is there a way to use AI tools to automate different tasks on Prince?
For example, have an AI to automatically check the output in PDF and then go back to the HTML/CSS to fix any issues and export the PDF again?

I think it might take a lot of work to do that, why not have the AI do the HTML to PDF conversion as well

Another way of looking at that might be to say that it's Prince for Books' job to convert HTML to PDF and to guess how the user would want to fix any issues.

I'm currently working on giving Prince for Books more ways to avoid pagination issues such as widow lines. The current work is especially of use for books that look a lot like a novel: no space between paragraphs, justified text, and not many headings or illustrations or similar opportunities for adjusting spacing to avoid pagination issues.

I hope to have a release containing some of that work quite soon, though I expect to continue working for quite some time on pagination.

After that, I intend to work on that problem of guessing the right fix for a particular typesetter (or publisher): more precisely, on training Prince for Books to better adapt to individual typesetters' / publishers' preferred trade-offs (how much of one type of problem a typesetter is prepared to accept to avoid another type of problem).

However, other than the technical difficulty of trying to learn trade-offs just based on choices made in books submitted as training data, there are social difficulties: the way I currently intend for this to work would involve a typesetter sending Prince input (without typesetting adjustments) and the final PDF after applying typesetting adjustments. This involves permissions difficulties: permission from various rights owners to send us that input (text, styling, fonts etc.), or for that typesetter to choose to use fonts etc. that we do have permission to access.

So we'll have to see whether that turns out workable in practice; though I do hope to find some way for you to get output closer to what you want regarding how much cost in loose lines etc. you're willing to incur to avoid short last lines, or last full lines ending in a hyphen, or other areas where you would want different trade-offs than what Prince for Books currently chooses.