On Mar 7, 2012, at 3:34 AM, Nicola wrote:
It's worse than pre-TeX printed books. Which makes me wonder: is anyone in the world addressing this? Are there people in the TeX community involved in the standardization processes (say, Epub3, but also the various W3C specifications), who could push forward ideas from TeX, like minimum requirements for the algorithms that rendering engines should use? These questions (together with sighs) arise every time I see a web page especially with mathematical notation…
The problem is, since the rendering is based on HTML, people just grab a web browser framework and build on that to make an ebook viewer. Here's a post I wrote up once comparing a specific ePub display on a specific viewing program w/ a hand-tweaked Plain TeX version: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1371218&postcount=7
those who're curious may find it educational to compare my .pdf w/ this ePub version to see the sort of typographic infelicities which even in the best ePub version can't be controlled for ---
- one word last lines - # of lines on a page constantly changing to prevent widows / orphans - overly loose line on the middle of pg. 20 - 3 word stack on pg. 21 (meditation/Meditation) - 2 word stack on pg. 32 (black) - 2 word stack on pg. 37 (the) Twice! - six word river on pg. 40 (the/their/the/the/its/we) - 2 word stacks on pg. 40 (a & We) - 3 word stack on pg. 46 (the/the/The) - 2 word stack on pg. 47 (a) - awkward break at the bottom of the first page of Chapter VII where the poem is referred to, but appears on the following page
(when viewed in Sony's ebook viewing program)). In the .pdf I believe there were only one or two places where I let two word stacks stand (because they were intractable) --- will have to try again using xetex and margin protrusion and character expansion (I'd used DEK's macro for hanging punctuation from _The TeXbook_).
William -- William Adams senior graphic designer Fry Communications Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.