[tex4ht] dvilualatex and tex4ht

[Johannes Wilm]

On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 10:59 AM, Victor Ivrii <vivrii at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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".


I was merely asking what the plan was (and whether there was one) -- whether
the idea was to move these things to Luatex (something which does not seem
that far-fetched or impossible) or to continue the development of Tex4ht.
That was all. The reason for the question was the discussion on whether
tex4ht should be fixed to work with luatex or not. K didn't seem to like any
of the suggestions presented on fixing it, so it was me saying "well, maybe
it doesn't have to be fixed."

>
> 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.
>

Anthropology mainly has the problem of being under-read as in most
humanities. The point is therefore to push it to as many devices as possible
and the ereaders are using epub/mobipocket. Some of the newer ones can read
PDFs, but it's really just a hack -- particularly text-reflow is an issue.
Of course we also work with PDFs for other purposes such as 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.
>

Yes, I don't know how you could get the impression that anyone ever asked
for that. Kb just seemed to be unhappy with every suggestion on how to do it
and stated a believe that pdftex will live forever.

Then he wrote his comment on open source (probably believing that I had no
idea what that is) and created his blog-post promoting the idea to boycott
epub -- which in real-life terms would seem to mean to make sure that tex4ht
will not work until rms and Amazon have reached some kind of deal.

Again, no-one is asking KB to do anything.

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