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Old 05-22-2009, 02:09 PM   #39
ahi
Wizard
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby View Post
Note that there is still room for improvement with purely automatic typesetting. The ebook readers could use a paragraph-breaking algorithm similar to the one in TeX instead of simplistic Word-like they're using now, and hyphenation could be greatly improved, and some automatic ligatures used... There are some things that are not possible and would need human intervention, but still without that a much more pleasant typesetting can be achived without sacrificing flexibility.
LaTeX makes (not quantitatively but qualitatively) considerable use of hyphenation for paragraph breaking and related tasks, but it still trips up on words I would expect to long have made it into the hyphenation dictionaries, not to mention proper names... and let me not even imagine the horrors that my Hungarian books would be subjected to via any sort of real-time LaTeX style hyphenation on a device with only a (relatively neglected or non-existent) Hungarian hyphenation dictionary.

Even in the best of times, this is one of the big things in LaTeX based typesetting that doesn't work well without human intervention.

But I grant you, progress is certainly possible. I'm just not convinced the best that can be achieved via this methodology is going to make me any less regretful that I am not reading a PDF customized for my device and font-size preference.

- Ahi
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