Quote:
Originally Posted by frabjous
Once again, I'm not arguing against ePub. The things I'm saying about TeX is just to get a sense of what's already possible as a way of gauging what reasonable expectations are with regard to ebooks. No one need write a DVI driver for ARM if they provide something analogous with whatever they want to use instead.
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It's probably important to separate out the various features and abilities of the formats and renderers being discussed. From the point of view of ebooks, the 'headline feature' of TeX is the combination of a mature and highly evolved renderer and fonts that have been analysed for the best possible layout and spacing rules. Neither of those are inherent in the document format - they're features of the software.
TeX does of course allow much more than this, but which of those other features are a priority for ebooks? Why have the manufacturers chosen PDF and ePub over TeX?
In general, PDF has a lot of disadvantages for ebooks - it obfuscates the information required to do reflow, it has issues of legacy support, it's 'expensive' to render and it's a proprietary format. Most of the discussions in this thread have focussed on over-complex work arounds for the reflow issues which at least acknowledges that the future of e-readers will encompass a wide range of screen sizes. Rather than trying to fix a format that is out of our control and inherently incapable of reflow, wouldn't it make more sense to improve a format that can do reflow but is weak in the area of rendering hints?
There's a strong argument for a community effort to develop a 'better' epub renderer as an open source project. It's quite widely recognised that the existing renderers are inconsistent and do a less than optimal job. Again, that's not something inherent in the format - it's the software that is letting the reader down. If such a renderer were developed, it could be used by future readers, and could also be used as a lever by which the community could push the evolution of the format. As ePub has become the de facto alternative to PDF, it would be better to work with it than attempt to introduce another format. Applying the TeX reflow and rendering rules to ePub could produce a dramatically improved experience and open the path to extending ePub to support further rendering hints and advanced layouts for things like formulae.
The point is that epub could be improved by extensions that allow for more complex layout and rendering. The format itself can be extended and renderers can be designed to degrade sensibly where extensions are not supported in the software. PDF however is resistant to reflow and extension and is likely to remain so for many of the reasons discussed.
Other formats like TeX are interesting for showing what is possible, but not really an option for e-readers now that ePub is becoming standard. The trick is picking out which benefits of other formats such as TeX are down to software, and which are down to the format itself.