"Code Sandwiches"

[Daniel Gibson]

Am 09.03.2011 22:33, schrieb Nick Sabalausky:
> "Nick Sabalausky" <a at a.a> wrote in message 
> news:il8rmg$176i$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>
>> But why is it that academic authors have a chronic inability to release 
>> any form of text without first cramming it into a goddamn PDF of all 
>> things?
> 
> It's like how my dad tries to email photos by sticking them into a Word 
> document first. WTF's the point?
> 

No it's not.
At least PDF is a standard format with free and open viewers on about any platform.
And while sticking photos into a Word document is pretty pointless using PDF for
papers does make sense.

One thing is that papers are usually published in printed form, the PDFs are
more or less a by-product of that.
Also they're usually written with LaTeX (or something similar) and the obvious
(digital) formats to publish stuff written in *TeX are Postscript and PDF - I
guess you agree that PDF is preferable, as it can be searched etc ;)
You can also export *TeX to HTML, but that'll probably fuck up formatting and
formulas. So you'd have to use some LaTeX->HTML converter and clean up stuff
afterwards to make sure the formatting is OK, the formulas are like they were
intended to be (missing a small detail like a ' or an index or whatever will
make a formula unusable) etc..
This may not be a problem for this specific paper (it's only text, sourcecode
and some tables I think), but for many other scientific papers it is.
That's the reason why they're mostly published as PDFs.

Cheers,

- Daniel