[OS X TeX] Configuring LaTeX produced PDF's for a Kindle

[William Adams]

On Jan 4, 2011, at 3:06 PM, Louis Talman wrote:

> Kindle books are .mobi, not ePub.  

Good point --- that was a bad segue on my part which indicated that. 

> Amazon does offer Kindle users a free service for converting .pdf to Kindle format---see the documentation for Kindle regarding this.  It works fairly well for text, but it scrambles mathematical symbols, resulting in unreadable chaos.

Because the converter has no proper support for equations.

> The .mobi format is probably robust enough to display mathematics correctly:  Many standard mathematics books are available in Kindle format---but they're almost as expensive as the real books, and I haven't bought any simply to see what they look like...

A quick search indicates that they work well (but I may be conflating them w/ people pointing out .pdfs work)

> Maybe the thing to do is for the TeX community to approach Amazon with a request that they implement a Kindle service for converting .dvi to readable e-text. (The carrot would be that many TeX-users might then self-publish mathematics via the Kindle Store.)  Or maybe (and to my mind, preferably) one or more of the wizards that frequent this forum will write a .div t0 .mobi conversion program under GNU licensing.  (I would consider it myself, but I flunked out of Hogwarts and so remain a mere muggle.)

Why bother w/ a proprietary format? Getting MathML into ePub would be of greater benefit and would be openly documented so that anyone could create an implementation.

William

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