Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
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Thanks.
First, some observations.
1. There is no MathML in that document. The equations are done using embedded SVGs, which is why it works so-so on Sonys.
2. This also explains why a relatively short article (which wouldn't be more than 10 pages printed) takes up a whopping 2.1 MB.
3. It is clearly not adequate for anything. And it certainly refutes your own argument that this format works better across different devices.
Here's what it looks like in calibre.
I get significantly better results in EPUBreader for Firefox, though it's still not adequate. You'll see that parts of the equations are printed on top of each other, tops of characters are often shaved off (this was worse elsewhere in the document) and the whitespace usage is wildly inconsistent. You'll also notice that italics text both uses an italics font, but is
also made oblique, thus making it look pretty bad.
Here's what the extracted XHTML and SVGs look like together in Opera (presumably also anything based on Opera mobile)
And in Google Chrome:
If you were reading this on anything Safari-based (which would be most people using iPads or IPhones, etc.), the SVG support isn't terrible (though notice again that parts are shaved off), but the real problem here is how terrible the text looks. (And yes, this is exactly how it looked.)
By far the best representation was in ADE. I guess ADE does support SVG (not MathML, but as noted, there is none here). But as I predicted, when you change the screen size to use shorter lines, the whitespace usage is very noticeable... notice the huge gaps between certain words. This could all be fixed with hyphenation, and something like the breqn package for LaTeX that knows good places to put line breaks in equations.
I accidentally left my Sony at work on Friday, but I'll test on there next week.
Now I realize that these are not problems with the format, or this document in question, but with this software. My original point in this thread was that in the future, when ePub rendering improves, when support for MathML and SVG became consistent and reliable, at that point, perhaps ePub will surpass PDF in my estimation. But at the moment, the PDF format is still necessary for getting quality results.