[frabjous]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Technophiles are indeed using ebooks.

The publishing industry does not particularly cater to technophiles. ...

They shy away from utilizing the features that ebooks offer that don't exist in pbooks. They don't tag. They don't bookmark. They're sloppy with metadata--either they have a program that manages that, or they ignore it entirely. They certainly don't provide an extra page at the end with links to the publisher's/author's website and more books.

It's a new industry; people are adjusting. I think these are things that will iron themselves out as people become better trained.

ME: Do you want that in TIFF or PDF format?
A: Ummm... I don't know what that is. Let me check with [person]; I'll have to get back to you about that.

ME: How do you want these files named?
A: Oh, don't name them anything. Just scan them onto the CD.

ME: What format do you want these in?
A: I want searchable tiffs.
ME: There are no searchable tiffs. There are tiffs with OCR text, either in a database load file, or separate text file; which would you...
A: No, I want searchable tiffs, just like I got from [rival company] last time.

I don't know if these make me want to laught or cry...

(I think I like the idea of a TeX rendering ebook reader, but agree with the people who think it's too complex and potentially too much of a resource drain to be practical. One could be created; it's not going to overtake the current ebook formats. Especially not without a do-it-yourself converter program.)

Again, I'm not convinced that TeX is really that complicated or resource-dependent... it's a nearly 30-year old program, remember! If we're not there yet, we will be soon.

A do-it-yourself converter program doesn't sound too difficult to fashion using existing tools.

Originally Posted by Ankh

The size of the resulting PNG image is 38918 Bytes. Although not all pages in the publication are full of text (chapter headings, for example, leave lots of white space, which compresses better) an "average" publication will cost you:

40 KB * 500 pages = 20000 KB.

How many 20 MB files fit on 2GB SD stick ($10)?

The size of publication is not an issue.

The file size does more than take up space on your card: it takes longer to load into RAM, it takes up more RAM (very limited on readers), it takes longer to transfer, download, upload, etc. There's also the space your permanent library takes up, and while having thousands of books you'll never read permanently on your harddrive doesn't really make any practical sense, there are still those who will want to do it just out of principle.

But more importantly what does this offer that PDF doesn't?

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Yea, well, you're not a major book publisher or hardware device maker with millions to lose if you're wrong. I know it's been veto'd from a tool it would of been useful in at least one place I've worked over the liscence issue.

Local ignorance is all I can figure. Thousands of books and journals made by TeX have been sold commercially. Almost every math journal uses it. What exactly is the worry?

You can make assumptions about what's needed, but you've just made a dangerous assumption there - that books should be allowed to embed code. Can't you see the potential for security problems there?

Not remotely. TeX code is no different than HTML code. How is embedded TeX code more dangerous than HTML code?

You have to start making huge assumptions about which parts to leave out,...

You'll know what to include, because presumably you'll test it to make sure.

and you're going to force people to use specalists to get their book laid out in TeX, it's effectively asking them to code rather than script, as WISYWIG editors provide.

There's absolutely no difference between TeX and HTML here either. WYSIWYG TeX editors exist, though you usually don't get as good output with them as you do writing the code yourself, but exactly the same is true of HTML/CSS.

And... I don't want the "quality" of TeX. It's aimed at the print book market, and has very little relevance to what I want in an ebook. The goals of rendering an ebook are very different. How does TeX markup reflow?

I don't know what you mean by "mark reflow" but LaTeX code, like HTML code, is semantic. It codes things like paragraph breaks and chapter breaks. Line breaks and page breaks are typically not in the code at all. It's the renderer, when the file is processed and displayed, that decides how lines are broken up, and thereby, which words need to be hyphenated. Typically, the TeX file itself contains information about the page size and font size, but turning these into variables that can be changed globally, and re-rendering the document at a push of a button is certainly possible, which is exactly what your reader is doing with an ePub file. The only difference is that TeX's algorithm is more sophisticated since it knows how to hyphenate most words, it does widow and orphan control, it does font kerning, rubber lengths, etc.