[frabjous]

All right, just to give some initial results... I've been working on making Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (a public domain title) available in several different formats. To this end, I first generated HTML source, which I used as a master document for creating .mobi and .ePub files.

I posted these screenshots in the PDF is not... in this post (which also had some additional screenshots), but to repeat:

Here's how my first attempt at a mobi looked like as a screenshot on a Kindle:



Things to note: it looks like crap generally, and the overlining (which you'll see below) doesn't even work since mobi doesn't support it. (I've since had to modify the original notation there... I hate mobi files.)

ePub is an improvement, since you can at least overline. Here's a screenshot from ADE from the ePub version:



This looks better than on my Sony, where I can't get full justification, but it still looks pretty bad. The variables are not in true italics, but a slanted roman, and hence run into the Sheffer strokes next to them. The Sheffer strokes are not properly spaced.

I took my HTML source and converted it to TeX, and can now make various sized PDFs from that source. Here's what it now looks like if I use 12pt Bitstream Charter for the font and size it for my reader:



Very nice.. hyphenation, kerning, proper mathematical spacing, and a number of other improvements it's hard to fully list.

Nevertheless, converting it to LaTeX was a fair amount of work that I couldn't have fully scripted.

However, with Prince XML, I could have gotten pretty decent results just by sticking in a few things in the CSS of the HTML, in particular, adding just:

@page{ size: 90mm 120mm; margins: 2mm 2mm 2mm 2mm}
body
{
    hyphens: auto;
    font-family: Charis SIL
}

(I choose Charis SIL since it's based on Bitstream Charter, for ease of comparison.)

The result after running Prince, for the same page of the above book, looks like this:



Here's one page earlier, so you can see what a page of just text looks like:



This isn't as good as the LaTeX, I'll admit, but I haven't really put 1/100th as much work into it. I could probably do the Sheffer Stroke spacing better with some MathML, and I might even be able to do the original pagination in the margins, as in the LaTeX versions with the right code (--it has a lot of interesting options--) etc. The line spacing gap created by the footnote marker is definitely unsightly, but again, maybe with some tweaked CSS this could be fixed.

Still, it's much better than the original ePub (at least as displayed by ADE or on my Sony), and infinitely better than the .mobi. We've got hypenation, kerning, a nicer looking font, true italics, justification that will work even on my Sony, etc.

Changing the font or font size would just be a matter of making one minor change to the CSS before running Prince. Indeed, some of this would be easier to automate than with LaTeX.

If we could get a script working with it to extract the (X)HTML from an ePub and convert it via Prince, I wonder if I'd ever use ePubs on my reader again... I may even begin working on such a script, perhaps even with a GUI, despite my very limited programming skills. Then again, I may not have enough freetime to do anything of the sort.