Quote:
Originally Posted by petrucci
I am in the process of creating my first e-book. I was shocked to find that behind the curtain of many e-book formats there is nothing more than html. I personally feel that html is a very poor choice. It does not give the typesetter enough control of the placement of type on the page. Symbols are also difficult to use. To obtain the result I desire I will end up creating the book from jpeg images.
The sad thing is that the problem of digital typesetting was all but solved more than thirty years ago by Donald Knuth with his TeX language. I doubt there is a version of TeX for an e-reader, but I thought I would ask.
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Creating a book from a sequence of jpegs is the
worst possible way of creating it.
If you need precise layout, create a PDF. Obviously, this is a fixed size page and will only work properly on devices that have the right sized screen. If you want to create a book that will scale to different sized screens and will allow changes in font size, then html works very well. Use the right tool for the right purpose.
There's certainly scope for the current html/css standards to be expanded with support for page-relative elements, and the people writing ePub3 missed a huge trick by failing to specify a page model, but TeX is certainly not the answer.