Agreed, with most everything you wrote in your last message.
Quote:
Originally Posted by frabjous
I'll certainly settle in the meantime for TeX-advocacy, hoping to be sent the source to create my own appropriately sized PDFs.
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I think advocating for the availability of TeX source files is brilliant! What would make it even more brilliant would be:
1) A tool that would create a TeX source bundle--a .zip basically containing all dependencies that aren't part of the TeX base, and are actually referenced/used during the compilation. (i.e.: A compilation under a valid TeX variant [unless there are necessary ties to XeLaTeX of course] should never result in failure due to missing dependencies.)
2) The creation of a TeX distiller, if you will, that can take one of these TeX source bundles, and, with some minimal run-time control (over display size and/or font size), generate a PDF out of them with little more than drag and drop by the user.
The combination of the two would basically mean that the typesetter could pre-customize the TeX source for specific sized outputs via use of the ifthen package (your idea, I believe)... meaning that PDFs of whatever size could be readily distilled, but anticipated size/font-size combination would look even better than merely auto-generated ones.
Even this, I do not think is ideal for run-time use... but it would make for an eBook distribution system (with a minor intermediary step that could even be integrated into the download workflow of the particular file type, once default parameters have been set) superior to basically anything else. Albeit without addressing the need of people who demand different font-sizes for different lighting conditions, instead of resigning themselves to having to read with adequate light.
Edit: Although, it might not be impossible to get LaTeX to output reasonably accurate HTML... not that I've seen any tool that does so tolerably. Usually the output is really quite ugly... though that might have more to do with the given approach's specific aims not simply being the generation of pretty (even if simplified/less than 100% accurate) HTML output from the LaTeX source.
- Ahi