[OS X TeX] LaTeX to ePub Format ???

[William Adams]

On Apr 4, 2010, at 12:14 PM, Sam Bradley wrote:

> Folks, with the recent interest in the Apple iPad (even my wife wants one to read books in bed), I wondered if there is a way of 'compiling' LaTeX into the ePub format (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB) instead of .pdf format. 

As Alan noted, ePub is really just a zipped up wrapper for a specific dialect of xhtml.

Best thing to do is to apply some sort of high-level markup, then use an XSLT or other tool to convert to xhtml --- TEI is IMO the best for this sort of thing and there already exist TEI to epub conversion tools:

http://code.google.com/p/epub-tools/

Probably one could go from LaTeX into an html format, then into ePub if desired, but such a conversion would likely not be optimal.

Arguably, ePub itself is not optimal, since the format is so limited in formatting options....

William

-- 
William Adams
senior graphic designer
Fry Communications
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.