Quote:
Originally Posted by datcha
MY experience with my Kobo ereader (a GLO HD, but I suspect it is true of other models) is that math does not look bad in epub: it does not look at all.
I bought a physics book in epub from Kobo about 18 months ago, and I had to return it because formulae and diagrams were so tiny that I could not read them, even with a magnifier. Kobo was nice about it, and gave me a valuable coupon. But I'd rather be able to read the book on my ereader.
I do not know whether that has improved.
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Sigh. It's entirely the publisher's fault and maybe even Amazon's fault(Yes, really Amazon).
Epub 3 added support for MathML, which allows typesetting of math in HTML. Kobo supports this on eInk devices. It allows stuff like resizing of equations and the like.
But a lot of publishers are lazy and instead of retyping their math epubs to use MathML they will at best put in SVG images and sometimes even .pngs or .jpgs of equations. These images are often stupidly given absolute pixel sizing which results on them being nigh unreadable on high resolution devices because they are designed for 800x600 screens and not double that.
Amazon comes in because .AZW3 doesn't support MathML(I'm not sure if KFX has something similar but they haven't crowed about it at all). And since Amazon is the largest ebook store and they don't support it I can't imagine publishers are particularly inspired to implement it. It doesn't help that there's still some crummy readers that can't handle ePub3 anyways so I doubt someone like Springer wants to spend the dough on just a Kobo edition.
With the right programming they could even include SVG or even jpg images as a fallback for readers that don't support MathML but they don't bother even though these eBooks typically cost hundreds of dollars. I certainly won't be paying hundreds, often more than the paper version for something so shoddy and lazy.
If you want a good example of a MathML supported epub the "On Optimal Bit Allocation for Classification-Based Source-Dependent Transform Coding" sample epub located
here is a good example.
Hopefully someone will write a good LaTeX to epub3 engine so the publishers can have zero excuse but I bet they will continue to muck it up anyways.