It's a tough problem to solve and the computation of it all is sufficiently expensive that doing it on a battery-powered device is a significant drain.
A further difficulty is the file formats being used --- ages ago, I tried to argue for an ebook format which specifically noted markup and content as being decorative or semantic and looking over the specification I don't see that that was ever really worked up.
That said, a further difficulty is even if a feature is in the spec, it's not certain if the various hardware and readers would actually be implemented.
One back-burner project I've had for a while is to take a publication, make it into an ePub, then use the ePub as the source for a nicely typeset version (or more likely, series of versions) --- gotta finish a bunch of other projects first.
FWIW, it seems to me that a lot of the effort into nice typography/appearance is going into the "coffee table" sort of books which these days are stand-alone apps such as:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/...
and it seems to me that there is a lot of potential for such documents which is as-of-yet only poorly explored --- some examples which seem to be reaching towards this:
- Bembo's Zoo --- this used to be a Flash-based website which was delightful: https://jilltxt.net/bembos-zoo/ --- it really needs to be brought back
- Euclid’s Elements Joyce's Java Version --- https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm... --- I refer to and link to this version by preference
- Motion Mountain: The free physics textbook --- https://www.motionmountain.net/ --- if this would read well in a PDF viewer on the Kindle Colorsoft, I'd get one --- as it is, I've been reading through it on my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360, and it's done a lot to help my understanding of physics
- various CD-ROMs and other multimedia efforts --- "The Manhole" became Myst which became a franchise unto itself, Broderbund's "Living Books" are now a popular line of apps, the Voyager series which was _amazing_ and I'd dearly love to see revisited https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1995/01/02/t...
- Leonardo da Vinci CD-ROM which was a wonderful interface for exploring the "Codex Leicester" --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_(video_game)
I'd be very interested in other texts which explore this space and which have the potential for nice typography.
That said, I am fine with just reading ebooks on my Kindle w/ flush-left, ragged-right and having the ability to report the (apparently inevitable) typo.
