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Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

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Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#51

Post by Skeime »

WalterBright wrote: post #26
jll29 wrote: post #20

Not to mention the ugly/unusable rendering of mathematical formulate in ebooks on my Kindle, which is gatherig dust. Layouting is an art and a craft, and the fact that it's automated by people who lack the specialized knowledge, or for whom it is not a priority (quarter century old bug reports, really?) suggests that in 2025, you should still avoid ebooks if you care about quality and aesthetics. This is a shame beca…

You could include the formulae as jpg's, not html.

I have not once seen a formulae-as-images solution that I would consider acceptable, aesthetically. Common problems are:

- It almost impossible to align the baseline of the formula to the baseline of the surrounding text.

- Often, images are only used for "complex" formulae, while simple ones are implemented using normal typesetting. This resolves the baseline issue for simple formulae, but now the fonts between simple and complex formulae don't match. (This requires extra concentration for the reader, as in other contexts, different font styles are frequently used meaningfully.)

- The images often have sub-par resolution.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#52

Post by nextIt »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #42
philk10 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First half of my career was at a company writing pagination systems for books/magazines and so I can now never not notice such things as widows, orphans, kerning...

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to notice an improper keming and he would curse you for the eternity.

I see what you did there...

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#53

Post by willvarfar »

pseingatl wrote: post #45
cratermoon wrote: post #4

Maybe the reason we're still stuck with LaTeX and PDFs because ebook software can't be bothered to implement decent typesetting.

PDF's are size agnostic, by the way. We think of them as being restricted to A4 or letter paper, but you can generate a pdf of almost any size.

Do you mean they can be created for any page size, or do you mean they sensibly resize when you change page size?

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#54

Post by nosianu »

WalterBright wrote: post #26
jll29 wrote: post #20

Not to mention the ugly/unusable rendering of mathematical formulate in ebooks on my Kindle, which is gatherig dust. Layouting is an art and a craft, and the fact that it's automated by people who lack the specialized knowledge, or for whom it is not a priority (quarter century old bug reports, really?) suggests that in 2025, you should still avoid ebooks if you care about quality and aesthetics. This is a shame beca…

You could include the formulae as jpg's, not html.

One advantage of ereaders is that the fonts an be set to any size convenient for device and the person reading it.

A fixed pixel size image of something you want to read does not go well together with rendered text at all. It's okay for photos, but very definitely not for formulas, which are basically mostly text.

I'm not even talking about the aesthetics, different fonts because they too can be set by the user, and layout, since what's inside the image is fixed and untouchable by the renderer that handles all the rest of the text.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#55

Post by zargon »

Another frustrating thing with ebooks is that you can't get them in PDF format any more. So much time is spent making a nicely fomatted hardcopy edition, then the ebook is only available as a terribly auto-converted epub that throws away all the layout and style. Particularly cookbooks, as well as anything technical, I just can't stand how lazy, ugly, and difficult to read the epubs are. All the tooling already exists to produce PDFs identical to the print version, but no, we can't have those.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#56

Post by WalterBright »

pseingatl wrote: post #43
WalterBright wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can ship an ebook as a pdf file! Then no rendering problems.

You can't, at least on Amazon. Amazon is the largest ebook market; no pdf's allowed. You could use Gumroad or sell from your own site, but these are not attractive alternatives.

Then you can use jpgs in the ebook format! That's what I did for the hieroglyphs in a history book I put up on Amazon.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#57

Post by WalterBright »

nosianu wrote: post #54
WalterBright wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could include the formulae as jpg's, not html.

One advantage of ereaders is that the fonts an be set to any size convenient for device and the person reading it. A fixed pixel size image of something you want to read does not go well together with rendered text at all. It's okay for photos, but very definitely not for formulas, which are basically mostly text. I'm not even talking about the aesthetics, different fonts because they too can be set by the user, and…

On my tablet I can use two fingers to zoom. But I pretty much never need to do that with a full size tablet. That's why I bought one with the retina display.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#58

Post by auggierose »

WalterBright wrote: post #26
jll29 wrote: post #20

Not to mention the ugly/unusable rendering of mathematical formulate in ebooks on my Kindle, which is gatherig dust. Layouting is an art and a craft, and the fact that it's automated by people who lack the specialized knowledge, or for whom it is not a priority (quarter century old bug reports, really?) suggests that in 2025, you should still avoid ebooks if you care about quality and aesthetics. This is a shame beca…

You could include the formulae as jpg's, not html.

That attitude leads to the shitty epubs we currently have. You either do a fixed-size PDF layout, or you have a proper dynamic solution. For technical/mathematical content, I am not interested in anything in between, given that PDF just works for me, and is easily achieved with tools today.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#59

Post by benrutter »

Ebooks where such an exciting prospect when they came out, but whether it's because of anti consumer monopolies, focus on DRM protection instead of features, or just plain old inertia, they haven't really advanced at all passed their first ever implementation.

I sometimes read interactive fiction, and even a format as intentionally simple as Twine supports variables so content can be dynamic. There's no reason ebooks couldn't do things like that, but they are so far behind that they haven't even caught up with where print publishing was 50 years ago yet.

Re: Pagination widows, or, why I'm embarrassed about my eBook (2023)

#60

Post by lou1306 »

willvarfar wrote: post #53
pseingatl wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF's are size agnostic, by the way. We think of them as being restricted to A4 or letter paper, but you can generate a pdf of almost any size.

Do you mean they can be created for any page size, or do you mean they sensibly resize when you change page size?

He (probably) means that the geometry of a PDF "page" can be customized. You can even have different sizes within the same document. But most people using LaTeX or even basic plotting utilities which export to PDF know this.
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