Is D the Answer to the One vs. Two Language High ,Performance Computing Dilemma?

Nick Sabalausky SeeWebsiteToContactMe at semitwist.com
Mon Aug 12 00:12:00 PDT 2013


On Sun, 11 Aug 2013 16:33:26 -0700
Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

> On 8/11/13 12:00 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> 
> > B. There's nothing stopping authors from making their PDFs a
> > single-column at whatever line width works well. Like I said,
> > personally I've never found 8" line width at a normal font size to
> > be even the slightest hint harder than 10 words per line (in fact,
> > sometimes I find 10 words per line to be *harder* due to such
> > frequent line breaks), *but* if the author wants to do 10 words per
> > line in a PDF, there's *nothing* in PDF stopping them from doing
> > that without immediately sacrificing those gains, and more, by
> > going multi-column.
> 
> This started with your refutation of my argument that two columns
> need less space. One column would fill less of the paper, which was
> my point. This is, indeed, the motivation of conferences: they want
> to publish relatively compact proceedings.
> 
> There is a lot of research and practice on readability, dating from 
> hundreds of years ago - before the start of typography. In recent
> years there's been new research motivated by the advent of new media
> for displaying textual information, some of which supports your view,
> see e.g. http://goo.gl/qfHcJz. However, most pundits do suggest
> limiting the width of text lines, see the many results of
> http://goo.gl/HuPEXV.
> 

FWIW, I should clarify that I'm not necessarily advocating a complete
and total lack of "max-width".


> > Bottom line, obviously multi-column PDF is a bad situation, but we
> > already *have* multiple dead-simple solutions even without throwing
> > our hands up and saying "Oh, well, there's no good *multi-column*
> > solution ATM, so I have no way to make my document readable without
> > waiting for a reflowing-PDF or CSS5 or 6 or 7 or whatever."
> >
> > An obsessive desire for multi-column appears to be getting in the
> > way of academic documents that have halfway decent readability.
> > Meanwhile, the *rest* of the word just doesn't bother, uses
> > single-column, and gets by perfectly fine with entirely readable
> > documents (Well, except when they put out webpages with gigantic
> > sizes, grey-on-white text, and double-spacing - Now *that* makes
> > things *really* hard to read. Gives me a headache every single time
> > - and it's always committed by the very people who *think* they're
> > doing it to be more readable. Gack.)
> 
> Again, two-column layout is being used as a vehicle for putting a
> wealth of information in a good quality format that is cheap to print
> and bind (most conference proceedings are simply printed on letter/A4
> paper and bound at the university bindery). The rest of the paper
> publishing world has different constraints because they print
> document in much larger numbers, in a specialized typography that use
> folios divided in different ways, producing smaller, single-column
> books. It strikes me as ignorant to accuse the academic world of
> high-brow snobbery because it produces good quality printed content
> with free software at affordable costs.
> 
> > I *really* wish PDF would die. It's great for printed stuff, but
> > its mere existence just does far more harm than good. Designers are
> > already far too tempted to treat computers like a freaking sheet of
> > paper - PDF just clinches it for them.
> 
> Clearly PDF and other fixed-format products are targeted at putting
> ink on paper, and that's going the way of the dinosaur. At the same
> time, the publishing industry is very much in turmoil for the time
> being and only future will tell what the right replacement is.
> 

I'm seeing a lot of focus here on the printed page. People can do
whatever the heck they want when they go print handouts and such.
But that doesn't mean they have to, or should, shoehorn their
electronic publications into a form that's poorly suited for
electronic use.

Didn't someone here say not too long ago that most of those
publications are just written in latex anyway? If that's the case, then
I really don't see any issue with having separate formats for print
handouts vs electronic distribution (But then I'm not versed in latex, so maybe I'm missing something).




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