HP Functions

[Han]

(10-07-2014 11:44 PM)dbbotkin Wrote:  Comments about "better text processors" and use of special fonts are helpful only if the publishing medium will reflect the effort properly.

Had you considered doing an iBook? Apple seems to be more oriented to education and more likely to support equations, etc.

The sample PDF file heavily suggests that the original document was produced on a word processor (presumably MS Word) and then saved as a PDF file. If that is indeed the case, then I don't see why the use of a Truetype font would not be properly supported. As for my suggestions...

A sample: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...sample.png
The "source" vs. the output: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX

Until you have actually used TeX or LaTeX (in particular for technical work such as scientific or mathematical articles, books, etc), you won't really be able to appreciate the world of difference between this publishing toolset versus your typical word processor. With respect to "publishing medium" the most common file types for fixed-layout publishing are DVI, Postscript, and PDF -- all of which are standard output formats for TeX and LaTeX. Despite being fixed-layout formats, TeX and LaTeX allow users to easily customize the layout to create files for specific ebook readers (to address the issue regarding screen/display real estate).

Should you prefer something that isn't so restrictive with respect to the layout (i.e. supports reflow), you're still better off avoiding word processors if you require a lot of technical details (e.g. equations and graphs). If you look carefully at the preview PDF, you can see lots inconsistencies in the variable \( X\) and \(x \). This is easily avoided with TeX/LaTeX, but very annoying, tedious, and time-consuming to go back and fix in something like MS Word. Anyway, for reflowable ebook formats such as that used by iBooks (which even you suggested), one may still use LaTeX for mathematical equations (http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5321).


Even the very forums on which we type (and many other forums elsewhere) support TeX/LaTeX:
\[ f(x) = \int_a^x \frac{\partial}{\partial y} F(t,y)\ dt \]

You can even go as far as using the same source files to create two different outputs (fixed-layout vs reflowable) and each having specific content not available in the other. That's for another post on another day, I suppose...