Ebooks and paper sizes : Output routines made easier

The idea of a book being a collection of pages is so ingrained that modern electronic book readers often try to faithfully reproduce this feature — up to elaborate simulations of page turns. However, traditional pages are not necessary and often inconvenient in electronic books. It is often easier to scroll the text than to turn the pages, and text reflowing makes the use of folios a rather strange way to refer to the position inside a text. We argue that it is more natural to paginate electronic books according to their logical structure, when a “page” corresponds to a sectional unit of the book. This leads to rather long pages, with the height of the page depending on the length of the corresponding unit. We discuss how to implement these pages in TEX and provide a basic introduction to output routines in TEX for a beginning TEXnician. We also provide exercises for a slightly more advanced reader.