Quote:
Originally Posted by sanders
For my book (shameless plug) I made a specially formatted version for 8" ebook readers (I have an iRex iLiad myself) and that was a lot more work than just changing some parameters of the geometry package. I had to move illustrations around, and even re-word some of the paragraphs to fit. Fortunately, I did manage to include both versions in the same source file, so I can select at "compile time" which format I want. But doing this again for a 6" version or perhaps a separate 10" version would be getting progressively more difficult, and I'm not sure the extra sales would warrant the effort. |
I don't doubt it in your case. To be fair, however,
the book I've been working on typsetting is a technical work in the philosophy of mathematics, and has things like equations, graphs and matrices in it -- though probably only a fraction of what your book does. I'll admit that I definitely did do more than just change the settings for the geometry package and let 'er rip. I did move some figures, and introduce different break points in long displays, etc.
What we'd need is a number of people--not necessarily the author--who are especially trained at writing code in a way that uses ifthen or, better, some new LaTeX packages especially for the purpose, to make the necessary conditional adjustments -- you've done it for a couple sizes; I've done it for a couple more. When people get more experience with this, and new packages are created, I imagine it could get easier to do this, and even more towards arbitrary sizes.
Mentioning something that would take the code and insert some geometry package options was just something I had in mind as something I might even be able to script with my very limited skills, which would work on many documents, including nearly all nontechnical ones, and even some technical ones, though not all.
Is it worth the effort? With the current market for digital books, probably not. But digital publishing is already becoming more and more common, and I don't think the trajectory is going to slow down anytime soon. Already, most academic libraries have moved towards having most of their journal subscriptions being electronic only. As long as they're doing this, why force a fixed format on the end-user, as you must with paper? And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Congrats on your book, by the way.