"Code Sandwiches"

[Daniel Gibson]

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.
> 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

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..