Re: Re: Would like your feedback on free ePub edition of 'My Antonia'

jon_noring wrote:
>>    - like Stanza - with horrible line breaks under right-margin 
>> justification
>>     
>
> The problem with mobile device readers is the need to filter the rich
> formatting possible in ePub (because of CSS 2.1 and richer markup) for
> viewing on limited screens. 

We have a substantial disagreement here. You saw the example of 
Bazargan. An IBM PC-XT circa 1982 was capable of producing and 
displaying the page as you saw in that iPhone, with character protusion, 
margin kerning and line-breakings that are beautiful, in fact the iPhone 
is thousands of times faster and way more capable. The reason why the 
display in Stanza is so bad and the line-breaks horrible is caulky  
attitude of young programmers ignoring 30 years of research in 
text-display and line breaking algorithms... and probably reinventing 
the wheel at every turn. From things that I have seen on my own IPhone 
in the last few weeks, they are probably writing their own algorithm for 
syllable separation, while these things are ready and in the public 
domain since the PDP-11 in 1978.


>> and even IDPF that puts out standards that do not address footnotes
>> or, for example, MathML.... and worst of all - it seems that none of
>> us are outraged!
>>     
>
> Since I am one of the main technical contributors to the OPS/OPF/OCF
> specs since 1999, I can say that the specs are mostly "prepped" for
> inclusion of MathML. Right now MathML is not "blessed", but can be
> included in content documents using the mechanism given in the OPS
> spec.
>   

I would love to read more about it. Can you point me to the right 
documentation ?

> I actually pushed for "blessing" MathML, but there were reasons not
> to yet bless it as a supported vocabulary. One can convert MathML
> to SVG and include that natively in ePub since SVG is blessed, but
> I am not familiar with how well that works.
>   

It works kind of okay, but far from optimal .... see example here:

   http://downloads.hindawi.com/journals/rlsp/2008/421650.epub


> (Hmmm, one can certainly include TeX as well...)
>
> Regarding text annotations, that is a difficult feature to specially
> address and support in OPS since OPS currently only supports XHTML and
> CSS, and that paradigm (which has its roots back in the early days of
> HTML) does not have special annotation capability (e.g., there is no
> <note> tag in HTML with special requirements for browsers to handle.)
>
> I'd like to see something done, though.
>   

We need it urgently, but in the absence a link is probably the most 
ergonomic way to deal with the issue.

> Interestingly, observe how annotations can be rendered in digital
> presentation in a way that, in my opinion, is better than the
> footnote paradigm used in print (which is a limitation of
> ink-on-paper, not a feature.)
>
> Microsoft Reader LIT uses the OEBPS "out-of-spine" construct (which
> still exists in ePub but is pretty buried and is currently not
> supported by any ePub reader). This feature is called a 'pagelet'. For
> one of my e-books with a lot of notes, I place them into a pagelet.
> (Paulo, I'll be happy to send you my Kama Sutra LIT e-book where
> pagelets are used to display notes in a way superior to anything that
> can be done with ink-on-paper.)
>   

I would love to see that!

Paulo Ney


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