Quote:
Originally Posted by xristy
Hello,
There are a number of Kindle math books - from Dover, for example, that appear to have been converted from scans to Kindle/mobi.
Usually the display equations are images and sometimes inline math content is converted to some font and sometime appear as images.
I am wondering what sort of commercial software is used to produce such eBooks. In other words how do companies that produce eBooks for a living generate these sort of eBooks from "legacy" texts.
There are not so many ePubs - and I haven't yet seen any Dover eBooks other than Kindle from Amazon.
Thanks
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Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings,
but there's no such thing as "commercial software" that is used to produce such ebooks. What produces such ebooks is either scanning (from print) or OCR (from PDF's) or both (print), and/or human labor. When we make books like that, we have to take screenshots of every single equation and create it as an image. Embedding the font is useless, for Amazon, because none of the millions of K7-Kindles out there will render it. Therefore, all mathematical equations, to work on any Amazon device, have to be images.
That isn't just true of Amazon, either; the big Algebra book that everybody goes on about, that Apple points to as the darling golden-haired child of iAuthor? Every single mathematical formulae in there is an image. Every single one. Book must have cost upwards of $20K to make, I'd guess, in (offshore) manhours alone.
Most of these books are shopped to India, to take advantage of the cheap labor resources there, because these types of books are so labor-intensive (all the screenshots). There are some programs that make it faster to do, but it still all has to be done by hand, basically. (Making decisions about which screenshots, what size each is, making them consistent so that they size the same, etc.)
I don't know of any other way to make them. Some of the guys here will speak-a da Latex, but at the end of the day, once you get to ePUB or MOBI, the only reliable way to display mathematical symbols/equations, etc., is by using images. Still.
Hitch