Because I felt like ranting

I'm this close to calling this week a wipe out. Not that I didn't get anything done (I actually got a lot done), but that it feels as though I didn't get anything done due to the relatively serene behaviours of all those around me who are taking good advantage of the usual end-of-year lull and just chill out.

Of course this is a bad segue. It's me ranting; what were you expecting?

I'm a little bit pissed off with the way e-books are currently being handled. The popular formats of ePub and/or the Amazon Kindle format are no better than a highly restricted version of HTML, which of course means that the typography is completely at the mercy of the rendering device. Given the variety of screen real estates co-mingling with the varying visual acuities of people using devices with the said screen pixel real estates, it seems to make a lot of sense to surrender the typographic rendering to that of the program that is running on the specific device.

It makes it all very accessible, particularly when the document can be reflowed and the fonts be adjusted to reach a certain level of viewing comfort.

But it pisses me off big time. I try to write, and now for the sake of pseudo compatibility isues I need to blast myself back to the stone age and forsake lovely laid out text just to support all these... things. In other words, if I choose to want to write using the ePub format (for example), I need to redo everything as though I were writing in Word or even (shudders) HTML, therefore leaving behind all the loveliness of what LaTeX brings.

That's just stupid. I refuse to do so.

Also, by virtue of design, these so-called e-book formats stink for presenting mathematical statements, since there isn't really a ``math-rendering'' mode. I doubt they even support MathML, the XML/HTML equivalent of what LaTeX does for rendering the mathematical statements. This means that to publish a work with more than mere paragraphs requires wrangling with generated images of the relevant symbols and statements, which of course defeats the whole purpose of hte format in terms of reflow and readability.

Anyway, not sure why I wanted to rant on that. It's not like I use the ePub format for my writing, yes? I still generate PDF files from LaTeX input, and it works well enough for me. Screw market forces, particularly when one isn't an active participant within it.