It's definitely made to print books and pages from the web. You can preview in a browser, but that's not the goal. It's a polyfill for CSS properties made for print.
Although, you can't tell for sure what people want to do with tools and library right? :)
I don't get the appeal. This isn't anything like a book, since I'm still scrolling, squinting, and reading words from a backlit screen instead of a physical page. Not to mention, using the browser's zoom functionality just straight up doesn't work (the pages and text stay the same size). So much for accessibility?
I really dislike everything about this.
[0]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/pagedmedia/pagedjs/examples/index.h...
[1]: But actually, JS is supposed to be pretty fast nowadays - so let's not build this bloat into the browser's rendering engine please?
I don't see any evidence on their website this is intended for reading in the browser, and tons of clues that it's intended for printing books from the browser. I mean, there are tools for physical page sizes, blank pages, front/back matter, page counters, etc. Things that make zero sense in the browser and are necessary for a nice book printing.
So, what makes you think this is intended for reading in web browsers? As you note, it's horribly unpleasant in a browser...seems like they would have noticed that if they were testing in the browser, rather than using it to print books.
You would either use this for stuff that is only useful printed (e.g. a boarding pass could be HTML instead of PDF) or as secondary, print-specific styling for web content that is frequently printed to paper.
print is just another aspect of responsive web design. And paged.js add the possibility to add things that the paper need and the browser don't (page number, cross rereferences, running-head, etc.)
A bit more info about css print: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/05/print-stylesheets-i...
We're sending webpages to printing press, and it becomes a book. That's it.