alternatives to the concept of a page, Gutenberg press vs LCD screen

[Doug McKenna]

Richard Kotucha wrote:

>|  Technology is by far not advanced enough to make
>| e-books a serious replacement for printed books.

I might agree, but only after deleting "by far".

I've enclosed a screen shot from a page being turned (a simulated animation using Apple's eBook tools) from my recently released eBook/app for iPads and iPhone.  Each page has 100% TeX quality typesetting on it (including as you can see, math layout), yet there is no PDF used at all.  This eBook reader is simulating pages similarly to how a PDF reader would render them, but in an eBook interface backed (invisibly) by all the usual TeX-language-created data structures (plus some extras I've added).

Is it general?  No, there's lots more work to be done.  But nothing in principle prevents this app from becoming a more general TeX-language-based eBook reader for more than just my own document and illustrations (interactive or not).  And the TeX language interpreter in it seems fast enough that an entire book can be re-typeset to accomplish things like interactively changing page size, or other typesetting parameters (time will tell on that front).

Anyway, just sayin'.  Plugging away, one step at a time.


Doug McKenna
Mathemaesthetics, Inc.
Author of "Hilbert Curves" eBook/app for iOS

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: iPadEBookPageTurn.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 311566 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/attachments/20190829/7cc31451/attachment-0001.jpg>