iBooks in LaTeX, anyone?

In case you had not noticed yet, Apple announced a rather smart move into the textbook market, among other things by releasing an app that allows you to create your own (iPad compattible) iBook.

Interesting move. But, what about all the stuff you have written in LaTeX? Ok, first the bad news: the app is not compatible with LaTeX (interestingly enough, this sparked a widespread debate on the web, immediately after the announcement). Come on, you Cupertino people, get with the program (or rather, the markup language)!

However, all is not lost: searching for some alternatives, I came across one that seems very interesting indeed. Pandoc is a program that allows you to convert documents, from one type to another. There is a catch, but it is not a big one: the document has to be of the 'markup' type. However, since pretty much any decent text editor uses markup these days, that is not much of an issue.

Dec 28, 2011