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Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

Typesetting a longish (~800k plain text) novel using XeLaTeX and the microtype package takes my 2Ghz CPU about 30 seconds, and produces a 1.8MB PDF.

Current tablets should be able to re-render an individual chapter in a second or two, and it would not be any trouble for ebook distributors like B&N and Amazon to pre-render portrait and landscape versions at several different type sizes.

Fixing the abysmal typography of ebooks really wouldn't take much work, and would probably be the best thing ebook publishers could do to woo serious book-lovers who aren't also geeks. Why aren't they even trying?

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I'm with you; I think ebooks should be distributed in some variant of XeLaTeX and rendered using its toolchain. You retain the structure and can change the size of the text, font, etc. as the user desires. It would be leaps and bounds better than the current level of typography you see on the iPad and Kindle.

The only thing I can think of is that normal people, even book-lovers, don't care. We have been trained by reading webpages so much of the time that we have low standards. But the sad thing is, ebooks generally have worse typography than your average blog post read in a typical web browser. I'm looking at you, iBooks. Jesus.

XeLaTeX? Why do you prefer xelatex over lualatex? I would be interested in hearing if you actually had any concrete reasons for your preference.

Hmm, I had no need for the programming additions in LuaTeX; my main concern was using UTF-8 and having better integration between LaTeX and my system fonts. XeLaTeX offers a great out-of-the-box experience for using commercial, "pro" fonts, particularly on a Mac; check out the 'fontspec' package. However, I've heard the LuaTeX can do microtypography really nicely, and I haven't checked if they've made using system fonts easier, so maybe it's work a second look.

There is a beta 'microtype' package for XeTeX but it doesn't have all the features that LuaTeX has (font expansion?).

That's kind of what I expected you would say;) You like fontspec and utf, both of which work in lualatex.

Lualatex/pdflatex are the future.

I think its probably a little more involved than prerendering each page at the different font sizes. For each individual location (I don't know the b+n equivalent term) you need to prerender a page that starts with that location at each font size.

I take it that your 800k novel does not have an index and/or a lot of intra-text references. 30 seconds would be a great time with indexes and references. Why don't you use fontspec too?

No cross-references, just a table of contents, but fontspec was used.

I don't believe that you need to render a new PDF for every possible location in the book. It's ok for a hyperlink to point to something in the middle of a page.

Thats a pretty decent time for laying out that much text. I would like to point out that if you throw in indexes or a complete "book environment" like memoir that time is going to change remarkably.

Why are we talking about PDFs now? If you seek to a location in the kindle it takes you to a page with that location at the top. That location might be in the middle if you read from cover to cover.

I'm already using the memoir class, albeit with a fairly minimalist theme. And indexes can be partially pre-computed if necessary, though it may require some changes from how it's done in stock LaTeX.

The reason we're talking about PDFs is because that's the quickest and easiest way to get good typography on screen. And being able to scroll to put an arbitrary line at the top of the page is not a killer feature for a book replacement, and certainly doesn't make up for a book that is hard to read due to poor line spacing, justification, and kerning.

You are not using indexes if you are laying out 800k of text in 30 seconds with memoir+fontspec+microtype. I'm not sure what a partial index even is but whatever it is you are right its vaporware at the moment.

As far as PDFs go what ebook reader uses pdfs as the native ebook format?

Out of curiosity if you set the paper size to ebook in memoir how does the compilation time change?

With

    \documentclass[twoside,12pt,openany]{memoir}
    \usepackage{fontspec}
    \usepackage{hyperref}
    \hypersetup{bookmarksnumbered}
    \setmainfont{Baskerville}
    \usepackage{graphicx}
    \usepackage{microtype}
    \raggedbottom

    $time lualatex *.tex

    real        0m16.498s
    user        0m14.291s
    sys         0m0.395s

Adding ebook to the memoir options,

    real        0m18.642s
    user        0m15.243s
    sys         0m0.449s

Removing the use of fontspec and typesetting with pdflatex:

    real        0m5.946s
    user        0m3.601s
    sys         0m0.179s

Enabling SyncTeX (which does half the work of building an index):

    real        0m11.652s
    user        0m5.449s
    sys         0m0.250s

Are those advanced packages needed for ebooks? Consider Knuth's TeXbook, written in plain TeX (the source is available on CTAN) and which looks good enough for me:

    $ time tex texbook.tex
    Output written on texbook.dvi (494 pages, 2029384 bytes).
    Transcript written on texbook.log.

    real   0m0.615s
    user   0m0.584s
    sys    0m0.024s

(And an e-book reader would only need the information in a DVI file, assuming the fonts are built-in.)

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