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Originally Posted by calvin-c
I wasn't very clear. It's not that it can't be done it's that the economics don't work to allow rough edges to be cleaned up prior to incorporating enhancements.
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I still don't agree. The "rough edges" in EPUB are not rough because of the technology, they are rough because of sloppy work. There's no reason for a book to not have a cover, to have mistakes in the TOC, to have a bad layout.
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I'm not familiar with TeX/LaTeX. From your complaint about poor formatting it appears that it either doesn't work well or isn't widely used. I'm assuming it isn't widely used. Why not?
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It can't be used for text that changes live, by changing font sizes or the viewport (window of an application) for example. TeX/LaTeX is a typesetter geared towards printed, and therefore fixed-layout works. It's not possible to do the typesetting live because it would take multiple seconds for each page, and multiple passes of the LaTeX compiler.
Would you want to wait 5 seconds or so, for a page to be rendered if you're reading an e-book? I think not.
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I have heard that many ebooks are published without covers because the rights to the artwork are separate from the rights to the story.
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As a customer, I don't care. I only see that the paper book looks great, and the e-book looks crap without a cover and with low-res unreadable maps. If I pay close to the price of a paper book, I want the quality of a paper book.
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I assume the TOC issue would be solved by using the TeX/LaTeX system you mentioned. Again, why isn't it more widely used? That's a mystery to me. Is it possible that few publishers know about it? I didn't but then I'm not a publisher.
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See above. TeX/LaTeX is widely used in the academic world, mostly for printing textbooks (and some novels too: my copy of Lord of the Rings is created using LaTeX; I recognize the font and kerning), but it's a system for typesetting fixed-layout text. (It is especially epic in typesetting mathematical equations, for which it was originally developed.) I only mentioned it to point out that typesetting has been automated a long time ago.
LaTeX can automatically generate a TOC, but so can Sigil, if you mark your chapter-headings with h1 or h2 and so on. The system a publisher uses to create the e-books would also be able to incorporate this.