"Code Sandwiches"

Nick Sabalausky a at a.a
Wed Mar 9 14:38:14 PST 2011


"Daniel Gibson" <metalcaedes at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:il8t79$2t70$2 at digitalmars.com...
> Am 09.03.2011 22:49, schrieb 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.

Vaguely free, open and standard. Only in the same sense that swf, doc and 
docx are free, open and standard. HTML (bad as it may be) still wins here.


>> 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,

Still?


>> 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 ;)

*Some* PDFs can be searched.


>> 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..

So after 15 years there still isn't a good Latex->HTML converter? Sounds 
more like the matter is a lack of interest in using anything other than PDF 
rather than a lack of a good Latex->HTML converter.


>> 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
>
> One more thing: Published papers will probably be cited by other papers or
> theses. With PDF this is easier, you can write "XYZ, page 42, l 13" - with 
> HTML
> pages it's not that easy, you could maybe write "in chapter 3 somewhere in 
> the
> 5th paragraph" or something like that, but that sucks.
> Or worse "on the fourth page in the third paragraph" and once a new CMS is 
> used
> that splits pages differently that is completely meaningless..

These formal papers are divided into sections and subsections, plus HTML 
supports links and anchors, and even supports disabled word wrapping if 
that's really needed, so those are non-issues.







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