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Amazon KFX Format Updated With Support for MathML

Yesterday’s changelog for the Kindle for PC update mentioned that you could use the app to zoom in on math equations, and now we know why.

Amazon released a new version of the (technical) Kindle Publishing Guidelines last week, and buried in the long and detailed changelog was a one line mention of MathML. This is a markup language that is used to write math equations in much the same way that html is used to format ebooks.

Amazon’s KFX ebook format now supports MathML – mostly. The guidelines name seven tags that are explicitly listed as not supported, and there could be more that aren’t mentioned (I have not been able to find a list of all MathML tags).

Edit: Actually, it doesn’t support MathML at all. Amazon was being misleading when they said it was supported; what Amazon actually does is convert the equation to an image and display that.

While Amazon had announced last December that screen readers could read aloud math equations in Kindle ebooks, there was no information at that time on how one would go about inserting an equation into a Kindle ebook.

Today’s news filled in that knowledge gap.

 

 

 

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Comments


Commenter April 20, 2018 um 9:47 pm

>>> "The guidelines name seven tags that are explicitly listed as not supported, and there could be more that aren’t mentioned (I have not been able to find a list of all MathML tags)."

All of MathML can be found at the W3C’s specs:

https://www.w3.org/TR/MathML/

You could also use Mozilla’s documentation for some more examples:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/MathML/Element/mn

Nate Hoffelder April 20, 2018 um 10:10 pm

thank you.


Commenter April 21, 2018 um 1:04 pm

You’re welcome.

Mozilla also has a few other MathML pages (easier to read than the links above):

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/MathML

and they have this "MathML Torture Test", where you could see a few really hard MathML test cases rendering in the browser:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/MathML_Project/MathML_Torture_Test


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