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As somebody who's written papers for scientific conferences and journals, I can tell you that this just isn't going to work. I'm not a designer and making a LaT

As somebody who's written papers for scientific conferences and journals, I can tell you that this just isn't going to work. I'm not a designer and making a LaTeX-generated PDF with few frills look decent is enough work already. Generating HTML and having to verify that it looks good on every major browser whether it's a mobile or desktop device is just completely out of the question. Seriously, think about it -- plenty of "professional" webpages with full time designers and UX engineers look like shit on mobile or Firefox or whatever (as you'll know if you've ever read reddit/HN comments). Imagine what a shitshow HTML papers from academics who are desperately doing whatever they can to get a readable version of their paper formatted during the 20 minutes before the deadline would be.

aasasd 8y ago
For some reason I have to battle the same argument again and again in this thread. It's like people are blinded from having seen glamour magazines with crazy layouts. The solution is that you don't use fancy layouts for papers. Imagine that you only have HTML 2.0. Put your text in paragraphs, put images and large formulas in separate paragraphs between those of text. Now chuck that into a ready-made styling template that applies modern typographic conventions. Voila, you have a great-looking article that can be read on a display of any size, be that today or three decades from now. It can be reformatted into columns or stringed into a horizontal ribbon, printed on paper of any size, read aloud by a text-to-speech engine, saved in apps like Pocket or Evernote. Most popular content sites today use this layout for the main content column, and the pages can be read fine on phones or saved in apps. Markdown readmes on Github use this layout, and it's smooth sailing with them. Pages in HTML 2.0 from the 90s display just fine on modern devices, aside from the different text size. You don't need to be a designer or make sure that your articles look fine on different devices if you stick to this simple layout and use tested styling. Pages with full-time designers have problems on mobile devices because those people try to do fancy layouts. Don't use fancy layouts for papers. I've spent zero time fixing problems with layouts in Markdown or, by the way, in posts and comments on sites like Reddit and HN, because they don't allow me to do fancy layouts—and they stay readable on phones. If authors have to spend time fixing layouts of their papers, it's because they use too complex layouts which indeed would have problems displaying on different devices.
- throwaway287391 8y ago
  Okay, I could be convinced that a Markdown-type format with HTML output and very restrictive formatting could work, as long as it really includes (nearly) all of the support for tables, images, and math notation that LaTeX does, and displays well in any reasonable browser/platform. But is there an implemented working compiler of such a format? I sort of doubt it. (But if I'm wrong, please do post it.) Going back to Reddit comments again, even Reddit's version of Markdown (which only allows basic text formatting and simple tables, no images or math notation) is broken as hell in their own official mobile app (at least the iOS one). Tables are screwed up, and even bold/italic is somehow buggy. And there are (probably multiple) engineers paid full time SF salaries to work on Reddit's mobile app. Also, there would still need to be a canonical print format for this to work with current conference/journal rules, which typically include page limits. And for good reason: nobody except the authors (least of all reviewers) want papers to be any longer than they are. (Sure, you could change to a word or character limit, but then you'd have unlimited images, which would incentivize stuffing tons of information and text into figures and using tons of those. So you'd have to bring in another requirement on total image size, or something. And you can see how this quickly gets overly complicated and you'd really rather just have a simple page limit.)
  - xfer 8y ago
    You should look at several papers written in scribble(racket doc templating language), they are beautiful, not hard to author(compared to latex). Here is an example: http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/scope-sets http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/scope-sets . Although some of the models on semantics are pictures generated from latex :p
    - danso 8y ago
      Wow, that indeed is a beautiful online book, better than any Sphinx template I've so far come across. You've got me interested in checking out Scribble.
    - throwaway287391 8y ago
      Thanks for the link -- this does look really nice. But I do think the fact that they resort to using LaTeX-generated images for text [1] (as you mentioned) sort of proves my point that the existing implementations of this sort of format aren't really flexible enough for a lot of scientific papers yet. However, I admit this could be a reasonable way for even impatient and stubborn researchers to publish papers, given the right implementation. I'll withdraw my initial arrogant "I can tell you that ..." :P [1] http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/scope-sets/model.html#%28part._.Single-.Phase_.Expansion%29 http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/scope-sets/model.html#%28part._.S...

aasasd 8y ago

For some reason I have to battle the same argument again and again in this thread. It's like people are blinded from having seen glamour magazines with crazy layouts. The solution is that you don't use fancy layouts for papers. Imagine that you only have HTML 2.0. Put your text in paragraphs, put images and large formulas in separate paragraphs between those of text. Now chuck that into a ready-made styling template that applies modern typographic conventions. Voila, you have a great-looking article that can be read on a display of any size, be that today or three decades from now. It can be reformatted into columns or stringed into a horizontal ribbon, printed on paper of any size, read aloud by a text-to-speech engine, saved in apps like Pocket or Evernote. Most popular content sites today use this layout for the main content column, and the pages can be read fine on phones or saved in apps. Markdown readmes on Github use this layout, and it's smooth sailing with them. Pages in HTML 2.0 from the 90s display just fine on modern devices, aside from the different text size. You don't need to be a designer or make sure that your articles look fine on different devices if you stick to this simple layout and use tested styling. Pages with full-time designers have problems on mobile devices because those people try to do fancy layouts. Don't use fancy layouts for papers. I've spent zero time fixing problems with layouts in Markdown or, by the way, in posts and comments on sites like Reddit and HN, because they don't allow me to do fancy layouts—and they stay readable on phones. If authors have to spend time fixing layouts of their papers, it's because they use too complex layouts which indeed would have problems displaying on different devices.

throwaway287391 8y ago
Okay, I could be convinced that a Markdown-type format with HTML output and very restrictive formatting could work, as long as it really includes (nearly) all of the support for tables, images, and math notation that LaTeX does, and displays well in any reasonable browser/platform. But is there an implemented working compiler of such a format? I sort of doubt it. (But if I'm wrong, please do post it.) Going back to Reddit comments again, even Reddit's version of Markdown (which only allows basic text formatting and simple tables, no images or math notation) is broken as hell in their own official mobile app (at least the iOS one). Tables are screwed up, and even bold/italic is somehow buggy. And there are (probably multiple) engineers paid full time SF salaries to work on Reddit's mobile app. Also, there would still need to be a canonical print format for this to work with current conference/journal rules, which typically include page limits. And for good reason: nobody except the authors (least of all reviewers) want papers to be any longer than they are. (Sure, you could change to a word or character limit, but then you'd have unlimited images, which would incentivize stuffing tons of information and text into figures and using tons of those. So you'd have to bring in another requirement on total image size, or something. And you can see how this quickly gets overly complicated and you'd really rather just have a simple page limit.)
- xfer 8y ago
  You should look at several papers written in scribble(racket doc templating language), they are beautiful, not hard to author(compared to latex). Here is an example: http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/scope-sets http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/scope-sets . Although some of the models on semantics are pictures generated from latex :p
  - danso 8y ago
    Wow, that indeed is a beautiful online book, better than any Sphinx template I've so far come across. You've got me interested in checking out Scribble.
  - throwaway287391 8y ago
    Thanks for the link -- this does look really nice. But I do think the fact that they resort to using LaTeX-generated images for text [1] (as you mentioned) sort of proves my point that the existing implementations of this sort of format aren't really flexible enough for a lot of scientific papers yet. However, I admit this could be a reasonable way for even impatient and stubborn researchers to publish papers, given the right implementation. I'll withdraw my initial arrogant "I can tell you that ..." :P [1] http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/scope-sets/model.html#%28part._.Single-.Phase_.Expansion%29 http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/scope-sets/model.html#%28part._.S...