Hi Terisa, on principle, there is
no problem displaying mathematical formulas (or whatever!) properly in EPUBs. I know it's a common
prejudice to say they can only be properly displayed in PDF files, but that's nonsense. It's true it may sometimes take
much effort on the part of the
publisher to ensure that mathematical formulas (and such) are displayed properly in EPUBs -- and that is why, publishers being human beings and therefore lazy, they instead prefer to push a button and spit out an unwieldy PDF file at the hapless reader.
After all, EPUBs are nothing but modified HTML files (or webpages, if you will) -- and you
can properly display anything you want, on a webpage. Even if it were in the shape of inserted glyphs (small pictures) embedded within standard text -- that would
still be preferable over hitting users over their heads with unwieldy PDF files, just to save the publishers the effort required to produce a
proper EPUB edition.
When our fellow poster ilovejedd said he/she preferred PDFs for reading technical stuff, I wonder if he/she ever also reads technical stuff on the iPhone?
I do -- not that I
wish to, but that's life: you get distracted all the time, so that I constantly need to take turns between reading the same books on
both the iPad and the iPhone. I spend perhaps 90% or 95% of my time reading books on the iPad, but the remaining 10% or 5% of reading the same books on the iPhone, are
not negligible.
Sorry, but the PDF files'
fixed page layout is exactly the problem here -- what makes PDFs totally unusable for electronic publishing. If we could ensure we would only
ever be reading PDF files on comfortable 10-inch iPad screens, everything would be fine. That's far from reality, however. We often also need to read technical stuff on 3.5-inch or 4-inch or 5-inch iPhone or Android screens, even if only intermittently. At
that point, at the very latest, PDF files and their fixed page layout,
pretending as if the tiny smartphone screen were an entire standard sheet of
physical paper (!), become an intolerable nuisance.
Bottom line: PDF files are a hopelessly outdated concept trapped within the 20th century universe of physical office sheets of paper.
Nothing could be more irrelevant today, in the age of mobile devices. Like Jakob Nielsen said, PDF files are superb for one thing, and one thing only:
printing. (One might also add: for capturing the graphical layout of anything that has been scanned/photographed for posterity.) For pretty much everything else, PDF files suck mightily --
especially for reading (and therefore also for publishing) books, regardless of the book's genre: technical or not, textbook or not. PDF, go away at long last and leave us alone.
