The PreTeXt Guide

EPUB is the standard format for electronic books. Books in EPUB format can be read using applications on a variety of platforms. (Apple Books across the entire Apple ecosystem. Calibre²² is open source and cross-platform for desktop usage. Android devices have options as well.) Amazon’s Kindle devices use a proprietary format that is derived from EPUB. Through much experimentation, the PreTeXt team has determined that SVG mathematics, generated by MathJax offline tools, works well in all ebook readers other than Kindle apps and devices. For Kindle, MathML is the best format. (Apple’s MathML implementation is very poor as of July 2021, and so we cannot recommend math formatted using MathML for situations where readers may use the Apple Books app.) Thus, we provide two pathways for production of electronic books. These formats are useful as an offline version, which is superior to a PDF in some ways, such as font face and font size being controlled by the software in an e-reader device. However, it is inferior to the online version (Chapter 29), since many interactive features cannot function within the EPUB version.