[OS X TeX] eBooks with LaTex and ... ?

[Chris Goedde]

On Jan 28, 2012, at 10:27 AM, David Derbes wrote:

> For several years now I've been working on the Great American Teach Yourself Physics text which I plan to give away on line. It's all in LaTeX (of course), with diagrams via Mathematica and Illustrator. 
> 
> Since I expect that readers (if any) will probably read it electronically, it would be helpful to include dynamic illustrations (as you might expect, there's quite a bit of basic calculus in it). My interest was increased by the recent release of Apple's iBooks Author. So I'm looking into various formats. It then occurred to me that quite a bit of expertise was to be found right here.
> 
> The early indications with respect to Apple's Author are not good. There seems to be no LaTeX support at all. There are also noxious aspects to the End User License Agreement; see John Gruber's blog Daring Fireball for some discussion and links. 

Are you familiar with MathJax (http://www.mathjax.org/)? It is a javascript library for rendering LaTeX in html. Since iBooks 2 supports javascript, it's conceivable that MathJax could be used to wedge LaTeX support into iBooks 2. I have no idea if this is actually true, but it was something I was going to look into at some point since I'm interested in the same thing.

For a different perspective on the iBooks Author EULA, you might check out this post by Jeff LaMarche: http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love.html

Chris