Quote:
Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
More, again, it has little to do with ebooks. As you yourself note, it output's PDF's, and solves precisely the same problems PDF's do, and PDF's are a format for books, not for reading. Using a PDF and not having to expensively render the page layout as well as the text itself in the first place by using a PDF makes a lot more sense, if you demand fixed page layouts.
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It doesn't have to be expensive in terms of processor overhead. Epub and TeX are essentially the same type of engine: plain marked-up text is provided to a rendering engine. When you open an EPub document in your reader for the first time, it takes a few seconds to as much as a minute, depending on how complex the document is. That's because the EPub engine is taking the plain text in the EPub file and typesetting it according to the mark-ups. It then saves this result so the next time you open the document, it is much quicker to open. Ever notice that the first time you hit the zoom button, at least on the Sony, it takes a few seconds before you get the zoomed text? That's because the engine is re-typsetting the new document. The next time you move to that zoom level, it takes much less time.
For pure text rendering, EPub is no different from a hypothetical device that would have TeX as its rendering engine. The main differences lie in the limitations and capabilities of each engine. TeX is light-years ahead of EPub because it's been around so much longer. EPub could eventually get to that level of professional typesetting, but who wants to wait 20 years for EPub to evolve to that stage when there's a perfectly good, open-source, free alternative right now? Sometimes big corporations just astound me in the levels of sheer stupidity they manage on a daily basis.