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Originally Posted by Tex2002ans
As was stated, most of this is made by hand. If it is built from an actual SCAN, the only way you can do it is extremely labor intensive snapshots (as Hitch mentioned).
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Yes.
That thread alone will be enough to put anybody off. I love ya, BUT...
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If the conversion company is deriving the book from an actual SOURCE document, the conversion would be infinitely easier.... but still a complete pain.
The current state of the EPUB/MOBI market is not designed well for extremely complex mathematical books.
EPUB would be able to handle this easier than Amazon. You would at least be able to use SVG or MathML... but again, if you are working from SCANS, you have to manually recreate all those algorithms.
MathML is not supported on many devices at all, and only a few readers can use it (See MathJax: http://www.mathjax.org/resources/epub-readers/) and good luck trying to sell that anywhere besides your own dedicated store.
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Well, that's why I think even discussing MathML is a bit...fruitless. I am not criticizing; what you are saying is true. If the source material is true source, great, but MathML doesn't really save you on the creation, unless you disagree? (I don't get to play with MathML much, as we never, ever get source, so...)
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Older Kindles can't handle SVG, and according to the Kindle Guidelines when you use SVG, you need to include an image fallback. See Section 8.4.2:
kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf
I think that sort of defeats a lot of the purpose, since you would have to double-up on every single formula in the book (SVG + PNG/JPG). With such an image heavy book, I think this would start cutting into those distribution fees that Amazon/other stores charge for really large books.
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Eactly. It's useless for this type of application, and what's the point? It's silliness, unless, like K7-K8, they can choose to 'serve' the correct version only and not charge the publisher, but I can't see how that can occur. Unless they only accrue the SVG to the K8 document. Nah. I don't believe that.
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Mind posting a link to this sample?
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Hmmm...lemme see. I don't have a link, TBH, because I'm not a big iBooks user, but I have the sample on my iPad...it's "McGraw Hill's Algebra 1, Aligned to the Core" book on iBooks. I mean, listen, don't get me wrong, for a textbook, it's fabulous, but, I took that and...well, let's say, I examined it. And I played with iAuthor, trying to cogitate upon how they made it. I had a request to make a similar book--for Amazon. Suffice to say, the reply I gave the guy didn't make him happy, as I had to explain what had to be done.
I'd say that it's possible that some of the equations were output from MathML...but many of the tabular equations are, I believe, embedded in there as images. Perhaps those were exported from MathML as-is? Don't know. I'd be very interested, Tex, in your thoughts. But I guarantee you, this entire book cost them every penny, in manhours in admin and labor, of $20K.
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I haven't messed around with such a complex book before, but I believe if you are a conversion house, and get the ACTUAL source documents from the publisher (lets say it was written in LaTeX), it would be a pain to transfer to EPUB, but nowhere near as horrendous as working backwards from a scan!
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Of course. Not fun in either direction.
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If the company actually wanted you to recreate a math book backwards from a scan... may the gods help you!!! It takes me forever just to handle a book with maybe 20 formulas... handling one with HUNDREDS?
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Yes. We've made books with 468 images, and those weren't teeny-weeny things, and they were helpfully provided by the client. Still...craploads of manhours. Craploads. And we spend forever doing various compression algorithms, etc., trying to make it "fit" in 20MB at Nook and 50 at Amazon. FOR-ever.
Hitch