Quote:
Originally Posted by robertosaenz
Well, with respect to the formulas that are in their own paragraph, I made a script to render formulas in Latex and place them on a 5 inches wide page, with a 15pt font size. They are small images because they are math expresions.
Then, in the html and css files, play around with the width and the max-width so that the image fonts have the same (or similar) proportion of the font size in the paragraphs. The max-width is in EM, and the width is 100%, in such a way that the letters and numbers in the image may appear smaller than those of the paragraphs (if the screen is very small) but they will never appear larger than the font size in the paragraphs.
I didn't know if that would work, but that's what I was thinking of doing.
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Roberto:
May I ask, do you have any actual Kindle devices? Have you tried rendering these into MOBI and then sideloading them and trying to see if what you think is going to happen, is what happens?
I have to tell you..we've done dozens of books, maybe scores, with math formulae and various scientific/thermodynamic notation, etc. (Out of slightly over 7,000 eBooks total, over the last decade-plus.)
For one thing, using points in eBooks doesn't work worth two s**ts. It simply doesn't. It freezes the size, irrespective of the actual text font size. That's one thing. Secondly, images--of ANY KIND--are sized based
not upon ems, points or any of that, (n.b., I mean, not reliably!) but percentages of screen size, pretty much, period, end statement. How will that reconcile with your thinking around a "5" wide page with 15-point font size" and what bearing does that have, those numbers, on "font size 4" in a Kindle Voyage, let's say?
You keep saying that you're going to "...play around with the width and the max-width so that the image fonts have the same (or similar) proportion of the font size in the paragraphs. The max-width is in EM, and the width is 100%, in such a way that the letters and numbers in the image may appear smaller than those of the paragraphs (if the screen is very small) but they will never appear larger than the font size in the paragraphs," but of course, the formulae
may appear larger. They may appear
smaller. It's a...it's nightmare of juggling and testing and playing and all that, trying to make it work even remotely closely. And then what happens in the LookInside, and KCR (Kindle Cloud Reader), both of which are basically KF7 "devices" or readers, which will promptly ignore almost everything?
I know, I know, I sound like Dora Doom here and that's not my intention, but you need to realize that the best you're going to do is get close. It's not going to be like print and LaTEX. It's really not.
Okay? Listen...if you find some magic way to make that crap work, go with God, contact me and I'll pay you for the coding. Seriously. But don't beat your brains out against the wall on it. I have bookmakers here at my office still wearing gauze around their own head-wounds, trying to make this sort of thing "perfect." We've done a lot fo them--and we've done a ton of painstaking coding, trust me, and in these instances, yes, perfect is the enemy of really quite good enough.
Hitch