I was going to save this for an Aperiodical Round Up but it’s such a good thing I thought I’d post it straight away. Project Gutenberg has moved on from offering just plain-text transcriptions of books: volunteers have been outstandingly generous with their time and produced LaTeX versions of many maths books, producing versions that are considerably more readable and resemble the original editions much more closely.
Not all the books in that list have been converted to LaTeX yet. Of those that have, GH Hardy’s A Course of Pure Mathematics leaps out as a good place to start. Compare it with this book still in HTML format to see the difference.
(via reddit)
It is a step in the right direction but if they really wanted to use modern technology, they could offer HTML with equations displayed directly from LaTeX via MathJax (www.mathjax.org). Readers could then copy them to the clipboard as MathML to be pasted into such apps as Mathematica, MathType, and hundreds more. Such equations would also be accessible to readers with disabilities.
Yes, that would be nice. They don’t seem to be using any non-standard packages in Hardy’s book (and I assume the rest are the same), so I wonder if something like Pandoc could be used to convert the LaTeX to HTML+MathJax straightforwardly.
Perhaps you at Design Science could help?
Thanks a lot for providing LaTeX versions of many maths books. They are indeed way more readable than original version and helps to understnad the concept better.