[frabjous]

Originally Posted by DawnFalcon

CSS is not XHTML. Please don't conflate them...it's not even using XML markup, which is puzzling as heck given it's used to modify XML-based...

I havent conflated them, but how else do you style XHTML (currently)?

Well, as you can evidently see by browser non-compliance, the lack of usable WYSIWIG web-building tools and so on, surely your contention falls flat...

Which contention is that? I'm completely lost.

Oh sure, tell the people out there using Word and Excel they're doing it wrong. Please record it so I can laugh at their reactions to you, for that matter.

If I found out that a professional publisher were using MS Word to typeset a book or article that I had spent years writing (and I am a published author, with two books and dozens of articles in print), I would be very upset, and justifiably so. I would then proceed to explain to them why that is not the right tool for the job. Thankfully I have never had this happen.

Frankly it's you who would be laughed at if you went to Taylor and Francis and suggested they use Word!

My point was about published works made for wide distribution and consumption, not about causal writing. Word is fine for that. I don't see why we can't expect copy editors and typesetters at presses to know mark-up languages. (Perhaps this is why the past couple articles I've published have had so many errors.)

Excel is not a WYSIWYG editor of any sort, so it's completely irrelevant.

Websites should be that simple - there were some quite usable WYSIWYG editors which were developing nicely before CSS2 came along and basically made them more trouble than they were worth because of how badly CSS was designed. In a day and age when the web is this important to the lives of so many people, that websites are so hard for the layman to create is a massive, massive outrage!

By your own contention, websites should be simple. There's nothing about CSS that prevents providing people a simple quasi-WYSIWYG interface for entering content. If you want regular people to create their own websites, I don't see what the problem would be with just offering them their choice of a number of pre-set styles, much like, e.g., Blogspot or Blogger do. Or consider the options we're giving for posting here on MobileRead. How is that not adequate for this kind of online publishing? CSS is compatible with that...

I've been using the web since before Mosaic was released, and I think it's been looking better and better. I used quasi-WYSIWYG HTML editors in the early 90s and I've used them recently and didn't notice much difference.

I say "quasi-WYSIWYG" since there is no such thing for the web, or for ebooks for that matter (at least not without PDFs as output!) What you get is going to be different on different screens, so how could what you see match it? Surely, the movement towards ePublishing makes true WYSIWYG an obsolete concept.

Originally Posted by charleski

Interesting. I remember coming across many papers in LaTeX in the early-mid 90s (mostly in papers that were heavy with equations, raw postscript was probably a little more popular in general), but those died out as PDF became accepted as a delivery format.

I think the turning point was 2000, when Hàn Thế Thành released pdfTeX, which is now the default engine -- more or less superseding Knuth's original engine, with PDF creation in mind. (Though of course the typesetting algorithms are still based on Knuth's work.) But recently pdfTeX itself has been modified, mainly with the possibility of using (X)HTML as output in mind.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

My Sony Reader PRS-595 can handle that ePub made with MathML and SVG just fine. Where did you get the idea that none of the portable devices can handle it?

Do you mean 505? Really? Could you upload the ePub in question so I could test this on mine? While I gather they do handle SVG OK, support for MathML is news to me. (It's fantastic if it's true, but is it?)

In any case, ADE doesn't support MathML or SVG, and making an ePub that won' t work on it would be a bit like making a PDF that doesn't work in Adobe reader, or making HTML document that doesn't display in IE or Firefox.

And you somehow found a way to make a 505 produce justified text from ePub?

Especially if all you're after is an equation, SVG creation is much more work than TeX code would be. SVG is supposed to be for graphics, not equations. And my own experiments with SVG have lead me to believe that the same SVGs look completely different on different software, which kind of defeats the purpose.

One of the funniest things about your "better looking example", however, is that it uses the default LaTeX font, a font specifically created by Knuth (with the help of H. Zapf) for TeX. It's a nice mathematics font, but I think there are better fonts for the text part of a book, especially on an pixel-based medium. But I've already admitted that's subjective.

The reason the ePub looks better is because it is ONE document that works on myriads of devices whereas PDF doesn't work and an unknown screen size if it's way off from the screen size.

??? You're confusing how it looks with how many devices it works on? How does how many devices it works on affect how it looks on any given one? Are you reading it on multiple devices at once?

My contention all along has been that a PDF made for my device looks better than an ePub made for my device. This alone establishes that PDF is still a useful format. If you're arguing a different point, then we're just talking past each other.

Let's say you made that PDF to be printed on letter paper. It'll look not nice on a 6" screen.

Why would I make a PDF sized for letter paper if I was going to read it on a 6 inch screen?

Please actually read my posts. I have not been arguing in favor of PDF as something to be distributed. I have been arguing in favor distribuing source documents from which PDFs can be custom made to the specifications of the user, which may well include ePub. Indeed, I've only been arguing in favor of that as a stopgap until such time as ePub rendering improves.

If you're going to have a conversation with someone, it is important to try to understand the position of your conversants. I have made my position on this crystal clear in many posts throughout this thread. If you are going to continue to make irrelevant comments about irrelvant matters, I don't know how anyone is served by continuing this conversation.

It just seems to me as if some people have a kneejerk reaction against PDF just because of bad experiences they have had with trying to make PDFs not made for their devices work on their devices. But that's not relevant to anything I'm discussing.