On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 2:52 PM, William Adams
On Dec 3, 2009, at 8:22 AM, luigi scarso wrote:
Not really.
My apologies, lost the thread of the discussion. I agree w/ this.
With mkiv you can typeset xml files as pdf, so you can also (using modes) convert it to xhtml (we have lua now). Writing a css is not a problem, and you can also manage fonts -- after all you know them because you need for pdf . Other infos are trivial.
Following this route you can also make an (x)html for a WOFF enable browser like firefox 2.6 beta -- it's almost the same of epub, after all Cfr people.mozilla.com/~jkew/woff/woff-spec-latest.html
Of course none can say that epub is like pdf from a typographical point of view but for low energy devices can be better epub than pdf.
I'll grant that .epub can be more flexible and more appropriate, but one has to keep in mind that one is giving up quite a bit of typographical quality, and that one is at the mercy of the h&j of the viewing program and I've yet to see one which puts more than a minimal / brain-dead / greedy --- set as much as will fit on the current line and then break to the next algorithm in. It's true of course. anyway have you seen http://people.mozilla.com/~jkew/woff/woff-spec-latest.html http://people.mozilla.com/~jkew/woff/ ?
I was at guit meeting this year, and Kaveh too, and I have seen his device with TeX. It's really cool: it's not a simple dvi reader, it's a TeX implementation+dvi reader so one can exchange tex snippets with similar devices Next release will use xetex. I have some experience to port pdf in similar devices too (it was 3years ago, too much time ago, really) and in the end I'm convinced that (x)html is still the first choice. -- luigi