ENTRIES TAGGED "MathJax"
A Kindle developer’s 2013 wishlist
Despite a huge leap forward there's still plenty of room for improvement
2012 was a good year for Kindle developers. With the unveiling of the first-generation Fire tablet in late 2011 and the release of the KF8 Mobi format in early 2012, designing beautiful ebooks for the Kindle platform became a reality. KF8 introduced a fixed-layout specification for Kindle Fire, which opened the door to graphically rich titles—children’s books, graphic novels—in Mobi format. KF8 also greatly increased CSS2 compliance for standard reflowable ebooks, implemented a handful of CSS3 features (text shadow, rounded borders), and added support for embedded fonts. The subsequent rollout of KF8 to Kindle eInk readers running firmware 3.4 (including the new Kindle Paperwhite) and KF8’s support for @media queries to enable fallback styling for non-KF8 devices helped to increase rendering parity within the diverse Kindle ecosystem.
WYSIWYG vs WYSI
WYSI editors enable a whole new level of interaction
Since HTML is the new paper and the new path to paper online editing environments are becoming much more important for publishing. Dominant until now has been the WYSIWYG editor we all know and…err…love? However the current WYSIWYG paradigm has been inadequate for a long time and we need to update and replace it. Producing text with a WYSIWYG editor feels like trying to write a letter while it’s still in the envelope. Let’s face it…these kinds of online text editors are not an extension of yourself, they are a cumbersome hindrance to getting a job done.
Math typesetting
Why are we leaving such an important issue to under-resourced volunteers and small organisations?
Typesetting math in HTML was for a long time one of those ‘I can’t believe that hasn’t been solved by now!’ issues. It seemed a bit wrong – wasn’t the Internet more or less invented by math geeks? Did they give up using the web back in 1996 because it didn’t support math? (That would explain the aesthetic of many ‘home pages’ for math professors.)