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I'm with you; I think ebooks should be distributed in some variant of XeLaTeX and rendered using its toolchain. You retain the structure and can change the siz
by pak 15y ago
I'm with you; I think ebooks should be distributed in some variant of XeLaTeX and rendered using its toolchain. You retain the structure and can change the size of the text, font, etc. as the user desires. It would be leaps and bounds better than the current level of typography you see on the iPad and Kindle.
The only thing I can think of is that normal people, even book-lovers, don't care. We have been trained by reading webpages so much of the time that we have low standards. But the sad thing is, ebooks generally have worse typography than your average blog post read in a typical web browser. I'm looking at you, iBooks. Jesus.
- dfc 15y agoXeLaTeX? Why do you prefer xelatex over lualatex? I would be interested in hearing if you actually had any concrete reasons for your preference.
- pak 15y agoHmm, I had no need for the programming additions in LuaTeX; my main concern was using UTF-8 and having better integration between LaTeX and my system fonts. XeLaTeX offers a great out-of-the-box experience for using commercial, "pro" fonts, particularly on a Mac; check out the 'fontspec' package. However, I've heard the LuaTeX can do microtypography really nicely, and I haven't checked if they've made using system fonts easier, so maybe it's work a second look. There is a beta 'microtype' package for XeTeX but it doesn't have all the features that LuaTeX has (font expansion?).
- dfc 15y agoThat's kind of what I expected you would say;) You like fontspec and utf, both of which work in lualatex. Lualatex/pdflatex are the future.