Anything that uses e-Ink technology still uses "pages" -- we press a button and get a completely different stock of words. It's not a "scroll" like with a browser. For most purposes, I'm happier with pages.
Maybe if devices like iPhones, etc., or portables with more computer-like monitor scrrens, took off and e-Ink died out there will come a time when page-based typography will go away, but not anytime soon, I don't think.
I actually don't think a tweaked version LaTeX would do *that* poorly transitioning to a scroll-like environment, so long as its paragraph and line-breaking algorithms were left mostly untouched.
There's little point in using LaTeX rather than the presently available epub renderers if you don't even want that much traditional typography.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
Might you be better suited, frabjous, to approach them?
|
I'll bring it up at the latex-community forms. I don't subscribe to comp.tex.tex -- my ISP doesn't have usenet, and going through Google groups is too much of a hassle. But perhaps the idea may spread from LC to comp.tex.tex, which I think has more of the real TeX pros on it. I'm probably not much more TeX-savvy than you are (if at all), so I'm not sure it would come off as more technically competent coming from me, but from what I've seen, the people in these communities are friendly folks who realize that not everyone knows everything from the get-go.
EDIT:
Kovid, most of your points have already been addressed in our discussion in the thread ahi linked to. Ahi's idea now is to have scripts for making the PDFs run on our desktops/laptops, and then just using the resulting PDFs on our readers, not trying to include TeX in the firmware of the reader (though I maintain that would still be a great thing as a long-term goal). So the size and slowness issues should be fairly minimal. (And not to put down your wonderful work, but compiling a book in TeX to PDF takes no longer than converting one in calibre--if anything, it takes less time, in my experience, for the same sized/complexity book.) The idea would be to distribute the .tex source so that the end user could make their own PDFs with their own preferred page and font sizes (which is why any dependent packages would have to be included); not to distribute the PDFs.
Scripts that automatically determine how many times LaTeX needs to run already exist. I'll see if I can find one...
Edit x2: Here are three such scripts:
latexmk
latex-mk
latexmake