[HN Gopher] Generating ePub from LaTeX
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Generating ePub from LaTeX
        
       Author : ivan_ah
       Score  : 75 points
       Date   : 2021-03-05 13:59 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (minireference.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (minireference.com)
        
       | OldHand2018 wrote:
       | I enjoy reading descriptions about how various people solve their
       | problems. This is nice! One question I had was why the author
       | uses softcover instead of pandoc. Is it a preference or a
       | technical reason?
        
         | ivan_ah wrote:
         | The main reason is to have more control of how the math
         | equations are rendered (the way softcover converts math to
         | images is best-in-class). I also had a bunch of custom macros
         | and environments that I knew how to do by adapting/extending
         | softcover, and comparatively little experience with pandoc
         | filters.
         | 
         | That being said, I've recently used pandoc for another project
         | (a paper) and I really liked the result and the functionality
         | (references using BibTex). Also, I see modern pandoc has
         | support for MathML and even image math
         | https://pandoc.org/epub.html#math so will be doing some testing
         | to see how it works...
        
           | OldHand2018 wrote:
           | Thanks, that is a great answer!
        
           | jordan_curve wrote:
           | If you find success doing this with pandoc, please consider
           | writing another blog post! I've had a ton of similar issues
           | in this space and reading your solutions has given me a bunch
           | of ideas.
        
       | jordan_curve wrote:
       | Nice work. There is not enough support for stuff like this.
       | 
       | I've wanted forever to have a nice way to convert latex files to
       | html. I wish I could use latex for my static site instead of
       | markdown and I've tried a few things but nothing is consistent
       | enough. This gives me a ton of hope!
        
       | jimhefferon wrote:
       | What an interesting article! I learned a couple of very useful
       | things from it for a project I am starting, so thank you. I
       | wonder, OP, if you looked into TeX4ht
       | (https://www.tug.org/tex4ht/) at all?
        
       | nullifidian wrote:
       | Just want to note that EPUB 3.0 supports MathML.
        
         | ivan_ah wrote:
         | Interesting. Do you happen to know which eReader devices (and
         | ePub readers in general) support it?
         | 
         | MathML would be so much easier than images!
        
           | acabal wrote:
           | Webkit-based renderers support it, and AFAIK that means just
           | iBooks, Kobo when using its kepub flavor of epub (but not in
           | regular epubs, which trigger its inferior renderer), and
           | software like Foliate. At Standard Ebooks we use MathML in
           | our core source (see for example the Tractatus[1]) and during
           | build it's rendered to PNG for maximum compatibility since so
           | few ereaders support MathML right now.
           | 
           | [1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ludwig-
           | wittgenstein/tracta...
        
         | felixr wrote:
         | Which readers support ePub 3.0 and MathML? I don't think (full)
         | support is that common. Would be interested in a caniuse.com
         | like overview
        
         | contravariant wrote:
         | In what sense? I thought epub was just the container format,
         | you could put raw LaTeX in it if you really wanted to (though
         | I'm not sure if there's a mime-type for it).
        
           | pjscott wrote:
           | If ePub were _just_ a container format, there would be
           | interoperability headaches galore. Part of the ePub standard
           | specifies how to format a book 's contents as a mixture of
           | HTML, CSS, and a handful of basic image types that readers
           | are required to support. And now, apparently, MathML.
        
       | ivan_ah wrote:
       | The code repo containing the automation scripts and a "demo" book
       | is here: https://github.com/minireference/sample-book
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-03-05 23:02 UTC)