[frabjous]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Uh. Have you never worked with a large company* on software projects, right? If you haven't, take it from me: No, they often think value is something you have to pay for. Also, legal departments are paid to be paranoid about these things, and it's a valid issue in this case.

You may be right about current practice, that'll change. What we're discussing in this thread is what should be done. The fact that the stupidity of many companies is widespread is not a reason for endorsing their stupidity.

There also seems to be no reason why you'd need to embed TeX itself, as I've said before - it can output PDF's, which can allready be read. And there are still issues with reflow on TeX-created PDF's, which would be no different if you ran a TeX rendering engine directly.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for TeX-created PDFs being used on readers. I do it all the time, and I hope it catches on.

There is work in progress to make TeX output tagged PDF, which should partially help with the reflow. (Look at the proceedings of the latest TUG conference for evidence--there was also a session on TeX as an ebook reader there).

Still, it's not entirely true that there would be no advantage to having the TeX engine on the reader itself. You can program TeX graphics e.g., to take up a certain percentage of the screen size, or alter its widow and orphan rules according to screen size, "float" tables to where they fit best, and a number of similar things that would be greatly complicated even with a reflowable PDF.

Your claim that that there would be issues with reflow with the TeX engine on the reader is just false. I'm sorry, but it is. TeX has no trouble adjusting to new font sizes and new page sizes when given to it. I do this all the time. Check out the link above if you don't believe and look at the six different sized PDFs I made with LaTeX for the same book with precisely the same code.

ePuB has some major advantages, which are only very partially related to the fact they're XHTML - it's a standard. It's aimed directly at a reflow text standard, and will improve over time. You don't need to make the assumptions and guesses you would with a cut-down TeX renderer.

I'm all for having a standard. It just should be the best one available. I have no problems with that standard being XHTML based. XHTML and TeX code is barely distinguishable. It just needs to get a better renderer -- and since one is already available for TeX what's the point in starting from scratch?

What assumptions and guesses are you talking about? You seem to be making this stuff up.

TeX is improving over time, too, as I noted in a previous message. The difference is that it has a nearly 20 year head start.

More, no, a reader page is far, far closer to a web page - it does not need to have a fixed aspect regardless of the user's wishes. The user cand and will change things like font size, and expect the text to be readable - and the text has to be readable on multiple devices, it's not laid down in a set size...

Ugh. TeX can do that too. That was the whole point of having the renderer on the machine. TeX code is not limited to particular font size or page size or aspect ratio. Why do you persist in thinking that it does?

A e-ink screen is geometrically much more similar to a book page than a web site page. That was my point.