Thread: which format will win?
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Old 02-25-2010, 10:52 PM   #193
frabjous
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Quote:
Originally Posted by nick_ View Post
Typography (pdf, latex) is important only when you want to print something on fixed sized paper.
Oh, it is, is it? Thank you for informing me. That stuff I wrote earlier about advantages to PDFs that have nothing to do with pages, like hyphenation and kerning and ligatures and consistent uses of whitespace, not to mention stack and river control and all the other aspects of typography not mentioned, are obviously not important to anyone. (I don't count obviously.) The entire art of typography of the past 500 years was a waste, and good riddance. Good thing we have insightful people like you around.

We have YouTube now, so what's with all this industry trying to make high quality movies and TV shows? Don't they know that's not necessary anymore?

(Geez. Not to mention that e-Ink readers do display one page at a time, so page-typography is relevant to them.)

Quote:
For screens the HTML format is much better. Therefore, epub will definitely win.
Care to give a single reason for the claim that HTML is better?

Such claims are only made by people who are completely ignorant of one side of the argument. I know both HTML and LaTeX mark-ups; they're barely different. The latter is just a little easier to read, and more powerful. (Though the tide is shifting.) HTML is in some ways more convenient to parse, and is a little more consistent in its syntax, at least if it conforms to XHTML guidelines.

The real difference is not so much in the mark-up languages but the fact that there is already a typographically rich renderer for one, though it could be adapted to use the other's mark-up easily enough. In fact, there are LaTeX packages that can take (at least a subset of) HTML as input and deliver nice results, and things like Prince XML do pretty well with their own superior algorithms.

In any case, I'm not saying that ePub will lose. I don't think it will. I'm saying that in the future, hopefully, the display software for ePub will give typographically pleasing results. This is important whether on real paper or virtual paper.
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