Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson (1910) • Hacker News Board

Re: Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson (1910)

#61

Post by fasterik » Mon, Oct 30, 2023, 6:09 PM UTC

xcjs wrote: post #44

Almondsetat wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Epubs are horrible for technical documents

Only if they exist as poor conversions. Properly formatted epub documents are worth their weight in effort. Epub documents _are_ HTML files in a zip archive - I'd argue that if a web site is a proper presentation of the source material, an epub is even better. Additionally, PDF documents _are_ worse for any kind of document technical or otherwise. PDF documents are primarily Postscript instructions without any relati…

EPUB works fine for documents that mostly consist of easily reflowable text. For documents with lots of equations, diagrams, tables/charts, footnotes, etc. I would much rather have a PDF.

Re: Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson (1910)

#62

Post by xcjs » Thu, Nov 02, 2023, 2:40 AM UTC

gilcot wrote: post #54

xcjs wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if they exist as poor conversions. Properly formatted epub documents are worth their weight in effort. Epub documents _are_ HTML files in a zip archive - I'd argue that if a web site is a proper presentation of the source material, an epub is even better. Additionally, PDF documents _are_ worse for any kind of document technical or otherwise. PDF documents are primarily Postscript instructions without any relati…

I think that what previous poster is pointing is that technical documents as epub are often difficult where they're no textual contents. Images may be the easiest case. Things are a bit more clunky when code source are involved and it's weird with complex formulas.

A competent stylesheet will sidestep all those issues. Admittedly, I do wish MathML were in place to be used online and in epub documents as that would make the problem much more easily solvable.

Re: Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson (1910)

#63

Post by gilcot » Fri, Nov 03, 2023, 1:21 AM UTC

xcjs wrote: post #62

gilcot wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that what previous poster is pointing is that technical documents as epub are often difficult where they're no textual contents. Images may be the easiest case. Things are a bit more clunky when code source are involved and it's weird with complex formulas.

A competent stylesheet will sidestep all those issues. Admittedly, I do wish MathML were in place to be used online and in epub documents as that would make the problem much more easily solvable.

Epub3 (not previous versions) does support MathML. The main concern is that most e-readers are not as capable as main browsers we use. Very few e-readers have good support of Epub3 features, and maths rendering is limited when available.

For codes, `pre` tag should be enough, stylesheet just adding some enlightenment. What I'm pointing is that many source code are more than 80 columns wide and that often make you scroll like with PDF. Physical readers are best for content that use aspect-ratio of pocket paper books and as far I can remember coding paper books are more (at least twice) wider and may even suffer that problem (they're often hacks I dislike to split lines.)

To short, Epub per se is not the limiting factor. Vendors must update their hard and soft (even then, things will improve only when everybody has upgraded.) Authors also must take more care to technical contents for that media (some of them convert formulas and codes to image, oooch…)

Re: Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson (1910)

#64

Post by schoen » Sun, Nov 05, 2023, 3:17 AM UTC

schoen wrote: post #51

andrewfromx wrote: post #41

When they came to require still smaller subdivisions of time, they divided each minute into 60 still smaller parts, which, in Queen Elizabeth's days, they called “second minùtes” (i.e.: small quantities of the second order of minuteness). Nowadays we call these small quantities of the second order of smallness “seconds.” But few people know why they are so called.

A "third minute" (of 1/60 second) could be useful in talking about human reaction times. We could say that people commonly have a reaction time of 7 to 15 thirds, and that alcohol consumption may slow that reaction time by a further 8 thirds or more. Or, speedrunners and professional musicians can practice motions (relative to their own motions or to an ongoing rhythm) that are accurate to about 1 third. I assume the…

I should follow up and say that I learned that this unit has already been referred to under the name "tierce", although it's not at all common.

It could also be useful for measuring latency of Internet connections, although these have commonly gotten faster over time and many latencies can be under a tierce. On the other hand, the round-trip latency to a satellite in geostationary orbit is about 14 tierces.