[ahi]

Originally Posted by frabjous

Unfortunately, the fate of readers are already in the hands/mercy of manufacturers that have such little tangible motivation, and you've seen the results. I can't even find a darned way of putting a single Hebrew letter into a .mobi file I'm working on without using an inline image that gets pixelated horribly on a Kindle.

However (with regards to your Hebrew issue), there would be few (if any) problems if you used PDFs made by yourself/somebody that knows what they are doing. And just about all eBook reading devices support PDF... so, in my mind, PDF is a format with a promise of lessening that dependence on manufacturers caring about stuff beyond original language Koontz novels.

The key, for me, is that LaTeX is great primarily because the people doing the typesetting with LaTeX know more than LaTeX does by itself. The moment you move all that work to render time, LaTeX (or whatever you use) suddenly needs to no a hell of a lot more... because there's no human to fix things prior to it getting into the reader's hands.

It's this transfer of miscellaneous knowledge that isn't encoded into software automation (because it is vastly better handled by a human being) that I see as a practical stumbling block, even if it is not a downright computational/mathematical one.

Originally Posted by frabjous

But surely it's not some horrendous multinational tragedy, if for those languages in which a renderer that does decent typography and allows for arbitrary reflow at the same time IS possible, we actually use such a renderer.

It is, if this results in lesser/abandoned support for PDF... which can already handle it all as perfectly as the generating software/typographer can muster.

Originally Posted by frabjous

I'm surprised at your skepticism about the firmware though: one possibility that is still live in my mind is using (pdf)LaTeX itself, or a tweaked derivative, as the renderer -- if it does the good job with these other languages that you say, why couldn't it do as good a job on our devices? (It would merely be a matter of preloading certain packages as default for different markets.) And even if there are legal barriers to this, to quote myself from earlier in the thread, the fact that the wheel has been invented once gives us all the more reason to think that reinventing it is not an impossibility.

I am skeptical because LaTeX works to automate typesetting work done by a human being, and was never intended to replace said human being. If it is possible for it to evolve to do so while still generating documents as good as even a mediocre typographer can with nary more than a few hours' worth of work, it would be through thousands upon thousands of man-hours of work thrown at a myriad problems that aren't problems at all with fixed layout eBooks or with present-day quality dynamic layout eBooks (which, by all indication, are perfectly satisfactory to the majority of eBook reading device owners, perhaps with the addition of mediocre quality hyphenation algorithms).

And why? Because multimillion dollar publishing houses should be spared the few hour travail of generating 2-6 PDFs from a common LaTeX source (that they could [or might already] also be using for their printing)? Or because we don't want two to six 200 KB to 400 KB PDF files bundled along with the 100 KB to 200 KB HTML in an eBook, despite the cost of memory storage distinctly heading toward dirt-cheap, and people seemingly having no inclination to store more than 200 books at a time on their eBook reading device?

This doesn't make sense to me.

Let my skepticism not stop work/research on automating more and more typographical/layout tasks... but a lot of it seems to me like a fool's errand that only exists because of a tacit disinterest in doing the work the right way and at the right stage.

- Ahi