[tex4ht] dvilualatex and tex4ht

[Victor Ivrii]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Johannes Wilm <mail at johanneswilm.org> wrote:
>
>

>
> Sorry, I got carried away. I know this list is not the place for  such
> discussions. I thought Mr. Berry's note on his blog was a clear answer to my
> previous email. Basically it says that ebooks should e boycotted until Mr.
> Stallman has made some kind of deal with the commercial company Amazon
> because you guys have some kind of issue in the US with them. "Boycotting
> them" would effectively mean to make sure that any LaTeX -> epub conversion
> will be impossible.

Please note that tex4ht was made by late Eitan Gurari (who definitely
had a master plan but not necessarily one you want) and KB took it
after E.G. sudden death and it became an extra "daypack" on the top of
very heave "expedition pack".



> Of course anyone is allowed to have their opinion, and this email list is
> not the place to discuss them. Given that I wrongfully had started the
> discussion anyway,  thought it made sense sense to show you that my usecase
> certainly has nothing to do with controlling people's usage of books. In
> fact if you had googled me, you'd realize that I was involved in the
> liberation of the Chinese Onyx Boox ( http://www.booxusers.com ) precisely
> to make people be able to control their own ebooks completely.
> It may be that laTeX at one time was a mathematics-only thing, but in Oslo,
> Norway we working with anthropology certainly found it quite helpful as
> well. The microtyping, biblatex and indexing are something that are very
> useful to the humanities as well.
> Sorry again, I will not bring this subject up here again.


I am aware that TeX is not limited to people who use mathematics
(there are linguists, musicians, chess players, etc  ) but people who
use TeX mainly to typeset math are clearly in majority. For them epub
does not seem to be a correct format, but pdf is. And pdf was invented
by Adobe not for printing but for digital distribution. If you tell me
that for anthropology epub is better, I would not argue.

Actually I believe (and wrote about this many times) that majority of
printed math journals are walking dead and the future is in electronic
journals (but in contrast to existing digital editions they will be
optimized for on-screen reading).


KB answered that tex4ht is an open source and everyone who wants can
use it to develop either a more capable tex4ht or just tex4epub. I
believe if the interested person/group starts such project, LaTeX
community will help; however demand that KB *must* develop such thing
does not fly.


> --
> Johannes Wilm
> http://www.johanneswilm.org
> tel: +1 (520) 399 8880
>
>

Victor

-- 
========================
Victor Ivrii, Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
http://www.math.toronto.edu/ivrii