# Why do Kindle books look so bad with mathematical formulas?



## Julius Caesar (Oct 15, 2012)

Every time I want to buy a book that contains some mathematical formulas, there is always a problem with the way the formulas are formatted. This book for example: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004DI7JIQ

Download a sample and go to location 454 or 453. Equation (1-1) is just too small and barely readable. True I could enlarge it but I don't want to do that for each and every formula.

This is just one out of thousands of technical books out there that have similar problems. And it doesn't matter who do the conversion. All of them have the same problems.


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## NogDog (May 1, 2009)

I didn't look at that example, but from your description I would guess that the formula was rendered into an image file* which was then embedded into the ebook file. Some programming books do the same for source code samples in order to maintain the indenting and such. While it might have looked okay in larger formats (such as web pages or PDF files viewed on a computer screen), they often don't translate well into a 6-ince screen. 

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* Any formula you could not pretty easily type out in one line in, say, Notepad, probably will be difficult to render in any medium designed primarily for text. Just try rendering some complex formula in plain HTML some time, if you're into web page mark-up.


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