About This eBook

The eBook production of The LaTeX Companion, Second Edition, is based on the camera-ready PDF copy of the printed book. From this PDF source an ePUB document was produced (from which in turn the mobi format was compiled for Amazon Kindle devices). While the text was kept unchanged, the content was enhanced during this transformation with appropriate links in various places, for example, to chapters, sections, figures, examples, and bibliography entries, and from the index back into the book.

All examples and multi-line code fragments have been treated as images to ensure that they correctly show the input and its typeset result (without being garbled by text reflow). The downside of this approach is that material within the examples is not directly searchable through full text search (except for the PDF version of the book), but after a number of different trials I felt that this was the best compromise possible to ensure a pleasant reading experience. After all, all important commands are typically nearby in the text (where they will be found by search) and all examples are fully indexed and cross-referenced.

One other challenging typographical detail was the treatment of the side notes that highlight important aspects in the book, a device used fairly regularly in the printed version. Because the eBook reader screens (except perhaps on large tablets) are too narrow to allow for large margins a different solution had to be found. After some experiments we settled on displaying the side notes as indented headings in an italic font, which I feel works well without being intrusive; judge for yourself. In the same way, the example numbers moved from the margin to the center preceding the example.

Due to the reuse of the original text this eBook edition has a few idiosyncrasies that the reader should be aware of. For one, textual references often refer to “see section X on page Y”, but only some eBook readers display the original page number. Others show only a reading position because page numbers have no direct meaning in this reflowable format. However, all such references are correctly linked, so if you follow the underlying link, you will navigate to the appropriate place. There are a few other places where the origin of the text shines through: Appendix D talks about the TLC2 TeX CD at the end of the book, something you will have a hard time finding in the eBook. The most important content of the CD included with the print book is the full text of the examples. You can find the examples easily on the Internet, for example at http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/examples/tlc2 as well as in many LaTeX installations.

ePUB is an open, industry-standard format for eBooks. However, support of ePUB and its many features varies across reading devices and applications. I personally tested both ePUB and mobi format of the book on a number of different devices and each and every one behaved slightly differently. Thus, to get the best reading experience you probably will have to customize the presentation to your liking using the features of your particular device or application.

On many devices the original book fonts will be shown (they work fairly nicely on screens) but on some devices a sans serif font is used by default. In that case the font menu of your reader is your friend. My experience was that on most devices, portrait mode works fine, especially if the device supports tap or click to enlarge a graphic. However, if the display on your device is too small, switching to landscape mode might be the better choice. For details on this and other customization possibilities, consult your reader or app manual. I certainly learned a lot during the development of this eBook about the different ways readers use the “back” button, hide the customization menus, and so on.

When we wrote the original book, we were convinced that it could never be adapted to an eBook, because of the complexity of its content. After several people asked us about an eBook version, we finally thought to give it a try, with the clear target to provide an eBook only if we felt comfortable with the quality. To be honest, the result has surprised me; it is far better than I thought it could ever get.

Enjoy.

Frank Mittelbach

Mainz, September 2013