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Re:Ask HN: What file-format(s) do you prefer for highly tech... by nobody271 on Thursday October 11, 2018 @08:56PM (#18198289)
In 2018 there is no question about it. They should be done in HTML.

I have some experience with this subject on my math website (http://regressionbuddy.com, look at the appendixes). Having it be adjustable to the screen size while at the same time presenting the content in an easy to follow way is challenging. But once you get it right there's no way to beat it.

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Re:Ask HN: What file-format(s) do you prefer for highly tech... by mindcrime on Thursday October 11, 2018 @09:16PM (#18198381)
It's especially nice if you want to make it interactive. Imagine a math book written in HMTL and using something like Tangle[1] to create nice interactive examples.

The downside is that displaying formatted equations on the web is still so janky. Images suck balls, Mathjax can be slow and dodgy and adds weight to the page, while browser support for MathML is still not ubiquitous, particularly since some dumbshit at Google decided to nix MathML support[2] in Chrome.

Seems like there is some effort underway[3] to try and get MathML into Chromium which would hopefully result in it winding up in Chrome, but there don't appear to be any guarantees. :-(

[1]: http://worrydream.com/Tangle/

[2]: https://www.cnet.com/news/google-subtracts-mathml-from-chrom...

[3]: https://mathml.igalia.com/

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Re:Ask HN: What file-format(s) do you prefer for highly tech... by nobody271 on Thursday October 11, 2018 @09:37PM (#18198461)
I really agree with your first point. There is an incredible amount of potential in web pages as teaching tools. I'd love to see someone make a math notebook environment for tablets with a stylus. It could pull up a sort of intellisense as you write (for example first, second, nth derivatives, common expressions, suggestions for factoring, etc.). It could have graphs. It could have a reddit like QA section. Really, there are so many unexplored ways of connecting people who are struggling with a concept with just the information they need. Who wants to watch a ten minute video to hear about that one equation three quarters of the way through? Just learn what helps people like them and offer it up as potential solutions while they are working through problems.

There is the possibility of pre-endering Mathjax but that seems like it would be a lot of work.

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Re:Ask HN: What file-format(s) do you prefer for highly tech... by mindcrime on Thursday October 11, 2018 @09:59PM (#18198540)
Really, there are so many unexplored ways of connecting people who are struggling with a concept with just the information they need. Who wants to watch a ten minute video to hear about that one equation three quarters of the way through? Just learn what helps people like them and offer it up as potential solutions while they are working through problems.

Yeah, absolutely. There's still a lot of untapped potential in this area.

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Re:Ask HN: What file-format(s) do you prefer for highly tech... by WhitneyLand on Friday October 12, 2018 @03:28PM (#18204036)
Why do images suck balls?

What’s wrong with just inserting a URL with parms that generates the image on the fly and changes at needed?

For example, analogous to image processing services like. http://www.picresize.com

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Re:Ask HN: What file-format(s) do you prefer for highly tech... by mindcrime on Friday October 12, 2018 @03:46PM (#18204172)
The most obvious reason is that they don't work well from a copy & paste perspective. They also don't naturally fit in with the page's normal reflow / line-breaking logic, so they can look awkward and out of place depending. Your solution works to a point, but it complicates things.

Don't get me wrong... using images for equations is better than not having equations at all. But personally I consider that approach quite inferior to native MathML rendering.

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Re:Ask HN: What file-format(s) do you prefer for highly tech... by auslegung on Thursday October 11, 2018 @09:44PM (#18198485)
I've been reading programming books in PDF on my iPad, not because it's great but because PDF is (often) the only choice and PDF doesn't play nice on most readers. I would prefer HTML that an ereader could view and interact with, but I'm not aware that exists yet.
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Re:Ask HN: What file-format(s) do you prefer for highly tech... by webmaven on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:34PM (#18198992)
> PDF is (often) the only choice and PDF doesn't play nice on most readers

Yeah, that situation is the one that indirectly prompted this post. I don't really understand why the EPUB format (or .mobi, or .azw3) hasn't made significant inroads into technical books.

Print-formatted PDFs are just awful to read on anything but a medium-to-large monitor.

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Re:Ask HN: What file-format(s) do you prefer for highly tech... by ocdtrekkie on Thursday October 11, 2018 @09:53PM (#18198518)
I pretty much solely buy DRM-free PDFs. I don't trust anything else. It's a handy single file format that's stood the test of time for... decades... and doesn't screw up the presentation of the information.
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Re:Ask HN: What file-format(s) do you prefer for highly tech... by webmaven on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:36PM (#18199002)
Do you find that ebook file formats like EPUB, .mobi, and .azw (when obtained from the publisher, not ones you've converted yourself) screw up the presentation?
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Re:Ask HN: What file-format(s) do you prefer for highly tech... by ocdtrekkie on Friday October 12, 2018 @10:27AM (#18201645)
I don't trust that they won't. Things outside the flow of text definitely can be moved around, and I feel there's value in page references being accurate.

And this lies more on a feel thing: I feel that when you are looking at images of the printed page (effectively), you are looking at something relatively legitimate, I know it's an exact copy of the actual book, and that conveys with it a much more solid sense to me than looking at what might as well be a text file someone sent you.

That being said, features like table of contents links, search, being able to copy/paste from the material are huge. I probably wouldn't mind if they figured out a way to let me look at a page as a PDF and then "zoom in" on reflowable text on my phone or something. But to me, the material being presented as intended for print is pretty key, otherwise you might as well just be on someone's website.

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Re:Ask HN: What file-format(s) do you prefer for highly tech... by mindcrime on Thursday October 11, 2018 @09:19PM (#18198394)
Given the lack of MathML support in browsers, I'd have to say that as of today my preferred format is still PDF or Postscript.
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Re:Ask HN: What file-format(s) do you prefer for highly tech... by webmaven on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:50PM (#18199054)
MathJax doesn't work for you?

http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/misc/epub.html

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Re:Ask HN: What file-format(s) do you prefer for highly tech... by mindcrime on Friday October 12, 2018 @08:59AM (#18201084)
It's better than nothing, but I'd prefer native browser support.
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Re:Ask HN: What file-format(s) do you prefer for highly tech... by anon49124 on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:03PM (#18198843)
PDF and ePub. LaTeX if you want to get fancy and OSS.
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