My recent reading list included several books which shared the same feature: there was a lot of historical geography inside. Not that the historical geography was the subject of any of them, but the series of unfamiliar and half-familiar place-names were long enough to get lost in. Still, though all of them were in this or that electronic format, the situation was no better than with paper books: either there were a few pictures with maps inserted as usual illustrations or, in worse cases, there were no maps at all. So, I want to talk about that a bit.
I will not discuss here the cases where a big and complex and detailed map is needed, such as in J.R.R.Tolkien’s books; It’s a serious matter as well, but it’s a different matter.
Maybe sooner or later a dedicated solution will appear in EPUB for custom maps. Sure, maps can be tolerably implemented using images, especially vector images; but so can formulas, and still we have MathML; history books (which need custom maps more often then not) are no worse then maths books after all. Continue reading “Maps and More: Visual Annotation of EPUB books”