Quote:
Originally Posted by cmdahler
I was disappointed with the choice of ePub just because it uses HTML, which was never designed to be a true typographical engine anyway, so it only produces mediocre output at best, and come on, we are talking about reading books here, not simple web pages. It would have been much better if the industry had gone with a wrapper around a TeX-based rendering engine - that would produce output that looks ten times better than HTML right out of the gate. Oh, well - licensing to Knuth might have been an issue, who knows.
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I'm a huge fan of LaTeX, and think it would be great of a rendering engine like LaTeX were used, but don't confuse the file format with the engine that renders it. There's nothing about the HTML format that prohibits getting output as nice as one gets from running latex on its mark-up language. ePub is not a wrapper around an "engine", but a wrapper around some mark-up code. If a wrapper were put around LaTeX code, that wouldn't be an engine either.
Consider for example,
Prince XML -- which takes HTML and XHTML as input and creates a PDF, much like LaTeX takes its mark-up source and created DVI or PDF, and the resulting PDF uses end-of-line hyphens (in fact, using the TeX algorithm), ligatures, kerning. The fact that we don't get that from the ePub software on our readers isn't a fault of the ePub
format, it's the fault of the software used to render it, which knock on wood, will get better in the future. And they can port as much of LaTeX's engine as they want. The differences in the mark-up languages are trivial. MathML isn't any worse that TeX as a mark-up language. If anything it's better (though slightly less humanly readable.)