A while ago I grabbed some mathematics book samples for the Kindle.  These
were books produced by well-known publishing companies, retailing for
considerable sums (even in the electronic versions), and in all of them the
mathematics typesetting was atrocious.  I think that in most (all?) ebook
formats, a formula is included as an image, which means that it
automatically resizes.  This means that formulas may be of all different
sized fonts, which gives the result a very scrappy look.  At least PDF -
even if not designed for ebook reading - provides decent layout.

The problem is not just mathematics.  I have some ebooks about poetry, and
in them the included poems (as set off from the surrounding text), seem to
be typeset almost randomly, with regard to layout, font size and spacing.
 And these are commercial ebooks, for which I paid real Earth dollars!

-Alasdair

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.
>
>
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