Quote:
Originally Posted by frabjous
We were discussing what LaTeX could or couldn't "find". I had in mind was something that knew, for every word in a book, where the syllable breaks are, and so knew where it was even appropriate to hyphenate. I won't speak for other languages, but for English, this is not at all infeasible or even far from reality. (In fact, I'll go further: it is reality for LaTeX, so long as a book maker manually sets it for words LaTeX doesn't know, which in most cases will be few and finite.) All the things that have been said against it are just mistaken, as far as I can tell.
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LaTeX doesn't necessarily know what words it doesn't know how to hyphenate properly. The LaTeX hyphenation patterns are just that--patterns, not lists of specific words. This means that after LaTeX's hyphenation, you are left with potentially up to four categories of words:
1. Those that LaTeX knows how to hyphenate correctly.
2. (ERROR) Those that LaTeX thinks it knows how to hyphenate, but--the word being an exception to whatever LaTeX hyphenation pattern matches is--in fact hyphenates incorrectly.
3. Those that LaTeX has no hyphenation patterns for, and rightly so, because the word should not be hyphenated.
4. (ERROR) Those that LaTeX has no hyphenation patterns for, but which should be hyphenated.
The "traditional" approach is to not worry about all this nonsense, and proofread the book to catch #2's, and manually fix badboxes to catch #4's. This is particularly sensible, since LaTeX has no way whatsoever to autodetect #2 type hyphenation errors, and has no way guaranteed correct way of separating #4's from #3's. Not to mention that the number of words needing to be fixed are likely to be fewer than an exhaustive list of hyphenation errors and unhyphenatable words.
Basically, I'm yet to be convinced that any alternative way of handling hyphenation in LaTeX beats the traditional way without needlessly compromising quality or actually upping the necessary manual work.
Quote:
Originally Posted by frabjous
Well, you don't seem to have any desire for reflowable format. I think you'll have to admit that many other people do. That's the unsolved problem.
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I've already done so, possibly as much as a dozen, but certainly at least half a dozen, times in this thread... along with repeatedly stating that I thought the best solution was having an eBook file contain multiple fixed-layout versions for the most popular display size/font size combinations while also containing a reflow version.
As for the unsolved problem... it's unsolved, but not a problem. People who are fine with reflow formats do not complain about poor hyphenation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by frabjous
I agree with this: there is no reason why publishers couldn't offer a fixed format, or 3 or 5, for each book they sell, and I think they should continue to do so
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That's good to hear. A point of agreement.
Quote:
Originally Posted by frabjous
until a much better unfixed-format renderer is found or used.
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Such a renderer, unless you only care about English language books, would have to be several magnitudes more complex than the most sophisticated typesetting systems that exist today.
I can, with remarkable ease, use LaTeX to create typographically correct documents in English, French, Hungarian, et cetera. Hanzi documents, either horizontally or vertically, that respect the rules of Chinese typography. Documents with Thai, Georgian, Korean, Ethiopian text that respects those languages typographic and hyphenation rules (or lack thereof). Etruscan and Old Hungarian runic texts running either left, right, or even in boustrophedon. Documents that contain a mixture of greek, hebrew, arabic, and syriac texts. Or even Klingon, Tengwar, or Shavian.
The fact that I can do all these things, and infinitely more, is what makes the LaTeX/PDF/Fixed-layout option basically (given some small improvements in the resolution and contrast) as good as paper... and anything that cannot at least offer the same all-but-limitless possibilities "functionality" of paper (independent of whatever
else it may be capable of) is not a viable replacement for paper (or paper books).
Unless of course one holds that in eBooks function should follow form, instead of the other way around.
- Ahi