[OS X TeX] eBooks with LaTex and ... ?

[Alain Schremmer]

On Jan 28, 2012, at 11:27 AM, David Derbes wrote:

> For several years now I've been working on the Great American Teach  
> Yourself Physics text which I plan to give away on line. It's all  
> in LaTeX (of course), with diagrams via Mathematica and Illustrator.
>
> Since I expect that readers (if any) will probably read it  
> electronically, it would be helpful to include dynamic  
> illustrations (as you might expect, there's quite a bit of basic  
> calculus in it). My interest was increased by the recent release of  
> Apple's iBooks Author. So I'm looking into various formats. It then  
> occurred to me that quite a bit of expertise was to be found right  
> here.
>
> The early indications with respect to Apple's Author are not good.  
> There seems to be no LaTeX support at all. There are also noxious  
> aspects to the End User License Agreement; see John Gruber's blog  
> Daring Fireball for some discussion and links.
>
> Another possibility is Mathematica's CDF. The downside is that the  
> reader is huge (half a gigabyte) and it seems not to render text  
> all that well.
>
> Maybe this is simply an idea that has yet to be well implemented.  
> I'm hoping for an Open Source ebook creator that supports LaTeX and  
> execution of some sort of code, maybe Python. If there isn't such a  
> tool, maybe someone is working on one?

I looked a bit into it as I have two books on freemathtexts.org which  
I thought I might try to convert to e-books. It seemed that the  
conversion path was LaTeX ––> html ––> epub and it did not look easy.  
However, this was a couple of years ago.

Hopeful regards
--schremmer