Quote:
Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
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.
|
This is getting ridiculous. The whole point to embedding TeX is so your layout from the engine is properly typeset for your screen size. That avoids the whole PDF issue entirely.
Anyway, this argument is moving into the silly zone. You don't really know what TeX is or what it does, that's fairly obvious at this point. I will give you this, however: the licensing on TeX would likely need to be restructured to meet the needs of the big corporations selling the end product before TeX could be used as a rendering engine on a commercial device. This is, most likely, something Knuth would happily do.
Before something like that would happen, though, the big companies (Amazon and Sony being the only real players in this market that amount to anything serious) would have to get their heads out of their collective backsides and really come up with a true typesetting direction they want their machines to pursue. Were I in charge, I would be trying to craft my device to mimic the printed page as closely as possible. I would want to give my readers an experience that was as close to indistinguishable from reading a paper book as technically feasible. That is not where ePub is at right now. At the moment, the entire mobile reader industry is a slapped-together, get-it-out-the-door-and-charge-as-much-as-possible-for-it haberdash that's all about throwing stuff at consumers without really planning and thinking long-term about the product and what it should be. Whenever (if ever) we move away from this quick-buck paradigm and head more into the long-term-planning phase as the entire print industry slowly moves away from paper entirely (decades down the line), we'll eventually then have a product that really does look like a printed book no matter how many times you hit the zoom button. Sadly, that's not where we are right now, although we could be a lot closer if the industry had chosen a different rendering engine for its standard than ePub.