Request: LaTeX Input

[Haidon]

Calibre does a great job converting most ebook formats into LRF or ePub, but one format that I cannot get to convert is LaTeX documents.

Could conversion from this format be added in a future version of the application?

Thanks

[kovidgoyal]

I don't knwo of any good way to convert LaTeX to a reflowable format, which is a prerequisite for converting it to ebooks. Indeed LaTeX is not designed to produce reflowable documents, so conversion from it will always be hit and miss at best

[Haidon]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I won't pretend to know alot about the technical aspects of the various markup languages and whatnot, but would such a conversion be able to work if perhaps the LaTeX document were first converted into HTML and from there into the ebook formats? I have seen various Latex-HTML converters that are open-source, so if such a utility were bundled with calibre, and automatically used in the conversion, would Calibre then possibly be capable of making the conversion?

[Jellby]

I've seen good comments about tex4ht as a LaTeX-HTML converter, but I haven't mastered it myself... maybe because my LaTeX was too customized to start with.

[tompe]

I tested latex2html and the result from that could be converted to a Mobi book. It worked OK but I think you need to enhance the handling of the symbol images a bit to fit the small screen on your reader.

[kovidgoyal]

I've never liked the output of latex2html much. It only works if you use very simple Latex, anything fancy and it fails. Plus representing symbols as images is ridiculous.

With latex, you're better off using the geometry package to create PDFs sizedto fit the reader screens

[tompe]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Plus representing symbols as images is ridiculous.

I always thought that was a clever solution to a problem that probably cannot be solved in any other way if you want a solution that always works.

[kovidgoyal]

Why, all that's needed is font support to display symbols. See for example asciiml or mathml

[tompe]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Why, all that's needed is font support to display symbols. See for example asciiml or mathml

And how do you handle symbols defined by macros using for example eepic? Or am I optimistic thinking latex2html handle this?

[kovidgoyal]

What I would do for pictures in latex is export them to SVG. Shouldn't be too hard using a pdf2svg tool.

[anywho]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

I don't knwo of any good way to convert LaTeX to a reflowable format, which is a prerequisite for converting it to ebooks. Indeed LaTeX is not designed to produce reflowable documents, so conversion from it will always be hit and miss at best

Since it's just in readable text, couldn't you just convert it?

\emph{text} is the same as <EM>

\bf{bold} is same as <B>

Doesn't seem like it would be impossible to convert...


Also, I registered to request a tex output format. Same story. Since LaTeX is so incredibly I would think it's easier than several other of the output formats.