Re: Maths in ebooks

[Raniere Silva <raniere-Xhq86aZylhRTIXuwt5Zssw@public.gmane.org>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2739 bytes --]

Hi Thomas,

Paulo Ney de Souza wrote a amazing reply for you. I just want to add some
points,

> I have been experimenting with including maths in ebooks (ultimately 
> because I would like to be able to publish my research as ebooks instead of 
> PDF which I think is suboptimal for tablets etc.)

I also do that in the past few months.

> One approach that sort of 
> works for me is converting from Markdown with LaTeX maths to ePub where I 
> can make Pandoc turn the maths into MathML.

I try this same approach and was a little unhappy due
https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/1764.

> My problem is just that the 
> MathML looks quite horrible in comparison to what LaTeX can usually produce 
> in PDF etc.

MathML rendering tools isn't as good as LaTeX. Firefox/Gecko has the best
implementation so far. "Community WebKit" (e.g. used by [Epiphany]) and
"Apple Webkit" (e.g. used by Safari) have some basic support to MathML 
but Chromium/Chrome don't have neither Internet Explorer.

Most of the EPUB readers that support MathML use Gecko as rendering engine or
MathJax that requires Javascript enabled.

> A fall-back solution for me could be to render the maths bitmapped and then 
> include the images in the document.

This is the recommendation if you read EPUB specification.

> However, I recently figured out that 
> ePub seems to support SVG as well and it is actually possible to turn LaTeX 
> into SVG output (see e.g. http://dvisvg.sourceforge.net/ and 
> http://svgkit.sourceforge.net/SVGLaTeX.html).

That's true. Wikipedia does it.

> So far I have succeeded in 
> doing this quite manually, but I was wondering if it would be possible to 
> make Pandoc able to automate this conversion of math formulae into SVG with 
> subsequent inclusion of the SVG into the ePub?

LaTeX math or MathML to SVG isn't a easy task and also have the problem that
some rendering engine will not work as expected.

I don't know if you know [LaTeXML]. It convert LaTeX to HTML with support for
math as bitmapped, SVG and MathML. I will invite you to try using it.

Cheers,
Raniere

[Epiphany]: https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Web
[LaTeXML] https://github.com/brucemiller/LaTeXML/

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pandoc-discuss" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pandoc-discuss+unsubscribe-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFF+G/Ez6ZCGd0@public.gmane.org
To post to this group, send email to pandoc-discuss-/JYPxA39Uh5TLH3MbocFF+G/Ez6ZCGd0@public.gmane.org
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pandoc-discuss/20150116021144.GW19197%40buriti.rgaiacs.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[-- Attachment #2: Digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 819 bytes --]