Accessible open textbooks in math-heavy disciplines

Richard Zach et al. logic textbooks are a work of art: https://slc.openlogicproject.org.

Aside, I'd be happy to pay for great classic math textbooks in a well typeset edition.

Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces is one such example. The text is fantastic, but everything is too cramped and hard to read compared to a modern book from the 1970s onward.

A newer edition typeset in LaTeX would be great.

By my estimation, it’ll hit the public domain in 2053. Not that long of a wait, and in any case math typesetting should be much improved by then.

2053 is pretty far. I wish Dover, who hold publication rights, improved typesetting of this and a few other classic textbooks.

It's probably not hard to use an LLM to do the bulk of the conversion to TeX work cheaply, and then some human input to polish the final document and fix errors.

2053 is too far away indeed.

“It’s probably not hard…” - how many such wishful thinking statements were uttered by humanity.

Have you tried image to LaTeX translation? It works fairly well already for text plus equations.

I've done this for a 30-page manuscript with no sources, and I was able to recreate the entire document with minimal manual intervention to get a correct PDF.

This is not programming, it's OCR and translation to a very simple markup language. It's a very easy mechanical task.

There was a project a while ago to do exactly this (in general, not for Halmos's book specifically. I assume that's the one you mean). I can't find it by Googling, but here's an Internet Archive capture of a Project Gutenberg page that collected books for which this had been done: https://web.archive.org/web/20120502091427/https://www.guten... .