[OS X TeX] LaTeX conversion to eBook?

[William Adams]

On Apr 25, 2012, at 1:47 PM, David Derbes wrote:

> Well, my guess is that some very smart people are going to solve this problem (LaTeX --> ePub/Kindle/iPad.) It may be a while...

That's an understatement, at the last TeX conference I attended a presenter was showing creating pages as images.

On Apr 25, 2012, at 1:49 PM, Victor Ivrii wrote:

> ibook and ebooks are very different animals.

But the former is one of the premiere editors for the latter.

> my experiments with ibooks shows that equations could be inserted
> (LaTeXian -> ibook) as images (approximately like in Keynote)

Which has been possible ever since the beginning of the web --- the problem is one loses all the semantics and much of the expressiveness of the equation:

 - it can't be broken if the text width is narrow and it falls near the margin
 - unless one makes it as an SVG enlarging or reducing it is ugly
 - it won't work for speech recognition, so isn't helpful for visually-impaired users
 - it's not text, so it can't be copied or pasted for use in a student's notes
 - it can't be made use of in a computer algebra system w/o re-keying

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.