Quote:
Originally Posted by WillAdams
Dawnfalcon said:
>A LaTeX install is also, at a minimum, hundreds of meg in size.
>This is one of the things I'm on about - it's not suitable as a
>typological processor in a low-resource environment. Typography
>is demnstrably mostly-solveable, by brute force, but that that
>soloution is not applicable to low-power devices.
Actually, a LaTeX install can easily be done in 10s of megabytes:
http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/
For PCs there's an even more granular install set:
http://w32tex.org/
I've seen TeX installations done for pen top computers and a colleague is working on an implementation for the Apple iPhone / iPod Touch.
Moreover, an ebook reader wouldn't need a general LaTeX installation, but rather a specific one w/ a specific subset of fonts and the desired documentclass, so could easily be stripped down to the bare essentials which would be quite small --- remember TeX dates back to a time when a 25MHz 68040 w/ a 105MB HD was a professional workstation --- these days most cell phones have more processing power.
William |
Hmmm... I suppose LaTeX files that include all their various .sty and whatever else dependencies would be a step up.
But even there, I personally have reservations as to why such an approach would be taken instead of multiple layouts for popular font/display size combinations, and HTML reflow for the rest. (After all, even LaTeX can't produce typographically decent documents for unrealistic font/display size combinations. If your screen is a few words wide, and less than ten lines in height... may as well leave it as unjustified free-flowing text at that point.)
- Ahi