[frabjous]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

Well yes, but it's important. You have to match the features of the program you're making with TeX file with with the ones avaliable in the DVI driver. This isn't allways easy or obvious.

Maybe it's me, but I don't understand what you're talking about. You don't need to use DVI driver with LaTeX--pdfLaTeX exists after all--and the only "program" that interacts with DVI driver that would need to be created already exists.

With ePuB being a standard, you know what features you can drop back onto, with TeX this would be a real issue and incompatability would not only be possible, it'd be highly likely between different vendor's e-readers.

Again, I don't understand what you're talking about. What's the relevant difference?

It's necessary to understand it, and a bunch of other commands, for debugging the output. HTML and ePuB's XHTML are close in scripting language terms, TeX is different. This isn't trivial.

Converting between standard TeX and XHTML most certainly is trivial. You're talking to someone who has done so multiple times. The only part of it that isn't trivial is the vast array of TeX code that currently has no counterpart in XHTML, since the latter is more primitive.

Just another advantage of TeX--really all you can do now for graphics in an ePub is embed JPG, GIF or PNG images, none of which are infinitely scaleable. With TeX you could put the TikZ code right in, or use .eps, and then you can zoom in to your heart's delight.

Of course you need to understand something to debug it directly, but how is that relevant? If you want people to use WYSIWYG editors or write their source in HTML and convert, debugging won't be necessary. Of course if they write directly in TeX, they'll need to understand TeX anyway.

In legal terms, "think" is meaningless. The issue to be considered is risk. Use under a CC liscence is a valid liscence, but when there's an attempt to put conditions on something supposedly in the public domain, it can and has been argued that it is not only not public domain, but that no liscence exists.

I don't understand the above sentences. What are you trying to say? If these sorts of legal issues aren't sorted now, they will be soon since this kind of endeavor is becoming more and more common.

Of course if something isn't unqualifiedly public domain, it's not public domain, but it doesn't have to be public domain if it's something in between, but their use of it falls under the usage restrictions of that in-between. And believe me, putting a TeX renderer on a device is certainly allowed by the TeX license, even if the full details of that license aren't entirely legally clear. If companies are scared away by the gray area, so much the worse for them.

But you're going to have to add another DRM system in to handle TeX, further fragmenting the market. How is that helpful?

The DRM system isn't going to be "handling TeX". What would that even mean? The DRM system just needs to be involved in en/decrypting the document's code, and I can't think of any reason why precisely the same system couldn't be used that works with HTML code.

And you say Tex "could" be expanded. Well, again, ePuB is having these things dicusssed now.

Don't put "could" in scare quotes. Dozens of new packages are added to CTAN every month. There already are LaTeX packages for embedding audio and video -- in that sense, it's further along that merely being "discussed".

Getting ebooks into doing the things that only they can do is a far better way of pushing their adoption, as a standard, and speeding up work on the rendering engine, than doing the things print books can do and being as marginalised as they are now before slowly bringing in vendor-specific ways of doing ebook-only things.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. "Doing the things print books can do"--how are print books relevant here? Are you going back to your untrue belief that TeX is currently being used only to produce print books?

And yes, you /do/ want tags for dictionary referencing (there are multiple leanings for some words, you know, and it's useful to indicate which applies, for instance!).

LaTeX already has a way of marking what language a word is. That's all that is needed.

Then, as I said, there are things like embedded bookmarks (ones set in the book, not user-defined ones), popup text and so on...these can and should be in the book format, if they're to be adopted. They are clear areas where TeX is tied to print books and does not take into account the medium.

There is no reason to think this would be harder to add to TeX than it would be with ePub.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

No, they are not. CC licenses are no different from the note that gaming books add to their character sheet pages--"permission is granted to copy for personal use." Or from licensing a nonprofit org to make copies of a book to distribute.

The license is offered to the general public, but it's still very much a license on use that could be restricted by copyright. The fact that we've come to think of copyright as meaning either "nobody can use it unless they pay me" or "PD; anyone can do anything they want with it" is a problem resulting from litigious corporations; copyrighted material that's widely used with permission has been around for a long time.

As mentioned, I imagine some of this stuff will be sorted out as this kind of endeavor becomes more complicated. At least I hope so. I'll be very depressed otherwise.

I suspect that the issue is not whether Knuth would sue (see me pretend I know who or what Knuth is),

Donald Knuth (homepage / Wikipedia)

He's made it pretty clear that he considers TeX in all intents and purposes in the public domain, with one exception: he thinks any significant derivatives should have a different name, which is all he requires. If some reader company made their own version, and renamed it, there is no way anything would stand up in court against them. Again, if they're scared off by this, it's their loss.

but whether Sony, for example, were to put months and thousands of dollars into developing a TeX interpreter in an ebook reader, only to have that research snatched out from under them by their competitors, who could buy a reader, and grab the software to install on their own devices.

Sony's not worried about Knuth suing; they're trying (I'm hypothesizing) to protect their ability to sue Amazon for copying their code. If the code is open source, or some variant of a CC share-alike license, that may not be possible.

Sony right now doesn't use its own code. The OS is a free linux system that probably use precisely because they don't pay for it. The other elements, such as the PDF renderer, they pay for from software designers like Adobe. The attraction to using TeX is that they wouldn't have to pay for it. Yes, Amazon would be free to use the same code, but Sony is really making their money on selling you the hardware and the books from the store as is, and all that would be retained.

Originally Posted by Moejoe

You can all stop arguing now. ePub is the standard, Sony have backed it exclusively, everywhere outside of North America is using it. Sony does it, Waterstones, Borders do it...even educated fleas do it.. let's do it...let's... oh wait, I've lapsed into Cole Porter again

Actually, what I'm suggesting isn't necessarily incompatible with ePub being the standard. It'd probably be easier to modify the TeX renderer to directly render ePub/HTML source (since HTML and TeX source is pretty similar as is) than to produce an entirely new high-quality renderer for ePub.