On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 3:30 AM, William Adams
<will.adams@frycomm.com> wrote:
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.