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Old 01-29-2023, 08:23 AM   #11
robertosaenz
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robertosaenz began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 12
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Join Date: Oct 2022
Device: kindle 10th gen
Question

Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch View Post
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
I have a Paperwidth, but the truth is I haven't tested it yet. I have read several books that contain mathematical formulas (although very few) and they look relatively good on my device.

I suppose that an approximate solution (without being perfect) is the one you indicate, configuring the size of the images based on the percentage of the width of the screen.

If that were the case and I were to use Media Querys to better adapt that percentage based on the size of the screen, what would happen to the old kindles when they were converted by Amazon?

I ask this because you commented that the old kindles work with html3, and of course, there are no media queries here.
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