That's the right answer, and it's pretty much what I’ve been considering since someone earlier in the thread asked about figures.

Epub makes it manageable because the images are just files in the zip. They are positioned at a set point in the spine, so I know exactly where in the word stream a figure belongs. Show it there, pause, and wait for a press to continue instead of auto advancing. You can pace text, but you can't pace a graph. There’s no sensible way to guess how long someone needs to view it.

The detail I keep reconsidering is captions. Right now, a caption flows into the stream as regular words, so you see "Figure 3 shows the relationship between" appearing one word at a time with no figure in sight. Those should be linked to the image and displayed alongside it instead.

Your question also made me realize that tables should probably be images too. Extracting text flattens a table into a series of values in reading order, which is worse than useless. Rendering the region as an image and pausing would be much better than what I do now.

Pdf is more challenging since I’d have to determine which images are real figures and which are rules and logos. Storage increases significantly too; everything is stored in IndexedDB on your device. So, a book full of plates is very different from a novel. I’ll probably need to downscale on import.

Where did you see it before? I’d really like to check out how they handled it.