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Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
It's XHTML. There's no difference between what you can do with any web page and ePub. Blame publishers lazyness, not "ePub". (Or blame how hard it is to do proper layouts in XHTML, which is entirely down to the W3C...)
Frabjous, looks like you need to embed the appropriate font. Or use MathML, which some ePub readers already support, and looks to be standardised fairly soon.
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Dawn, who the heck are you talking to? Please
read my posts.
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Originally Posted by frabjous
As of now, PDF is still my preferred format, since it's the only way to get proper typography in ebooks, like kerning and ligatures and end-of-line hyphenation, or to properly typeset mathematics or other formal symbolisms in a robust way. But in principle, I think once ePub supports MathML, SVG images, and gets typographically richer rendering software, it'll eventually match or surpass PDF in my estimation.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by frabjous
... don't confuse the file format with the engine that renders it. There's nothing about the HTML format that prohibits getting output as nice as one gets from running latex on its mark-up language. ... The fact that we don't get [good typography] from the ePub software on our readers isn't a fault of the ePub format, it's the fault of the software used to render it ...
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by frabjous
What I want is an ePub rendered that can make shot #2 look like shot #3 on the fly, which is certainly possible.
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The point I was making was about typography, not about the ePub format. Everything I've said so far has been pro-ePub. I just mentioned that currently my favorite format is PDF, but that once ePub gets better support for MathML and typographically superior rendering it may surpass PDF in my estimation.
I just get tired of hearing people who don't know what they're talking about bash PDF, when it's unquestionably true that
right now PDF offers things ePub doesn't. I hope in the future that changes.
But I should say that just embedding fonts won't do the trick, since you still won't get the kinds of features I was talking about. And comparing the possibilities to websites is hardly relevant. Most websites have worse typography than ADE. (Indeed I worry it's lowering people's standards.)
But which ePub renderers already support MathML, out of curiosity? I don't know of any offhand.
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Originally Posted by kennyc
Agreed. I avoid pdfs like the plague.
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Given the increased portability of ePub, I can see why you'd want to acquire an ePub originally, but that's no reason to avoid PDF. You do realize that you can make a PDF with any font, any sized font, any justification, anything else? Indeed, I think it would be great if booksellers sold ePubs, and that the software on your home computer would take that ePub and convert it to a nice PDF using your customized settings before loading it onto your reader. In fact, only DRM prevents that now, in light of, e.g.
jellby's wonderful epub2pdf script.