Thread: PDF is not an eBook format
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Old 08-27-2009, 09:32 AM   #219
frabjous
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Tuna View Post
Um.. ePub is a tweaked version of HTML. Rendering engines for epub are improving.
ePub can do almost nothing that HTML can't do; that was the point. It needs to be tweaked further. I don't care if something HTML or XML based is tweaked to come closer something like TeX, or the tweaking is in the other direction, though from what I've seen TeX, or at least LaTeX, is much more user-friendly to edit directly than, e.g., MathML.

I'm not an expert about what drains batteries on the readers, but I would have guessed that processing is not what's draining the battery. LaTeX is a fast and efficient program; the core TeX algorithm is more than 30 years old, and runs on hardware from the 80s. If the hardware for readers isn't there yet, I can't imagine it's too far off.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jellby View Post
I have a dream...

Programs like Calibre could be used to turn an ePUB (or whatever) into a PDF customized for a given page and font size, with the best possible automatic layout, and even with user input in difficult cases (please mark acceptable hyphenation points for the following words). Then we'd have good things from both worlds (short of hand-tailored PDFs): ePUB for distribution, PDF for reading.
How hard would it be to combine the open source epub2html, html2tex and pdflatex tools out there to work something like this up? It might not be possible under the guise of calibre, but for a system that already had a full LaTeX distribution installed, this could be scripted using existing resources, couldn't it?
Last edited by frabjous; 08-27-2009 at 09:40 AM.
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