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No, I'm aware of that. However, as far as I know, Tex is largely used in the academia to produce PDFs—I've been told in person that this is the process. (And I'

by aasasd 7y ago

No, I'm aware of that. However, as far as I know, Tex is largely used in the academia to produce PDFs—I've been told in person that this is the process. (And I'm guessing that it outputs PDFs with text layers because that's what I see.) What I don't know is why anyone would prefer PDFs nowadays instead of more flexible formats, namely something HTML-based in the vein of Epub. I've seen people argue vehemently that PDF's exact formatting is necessary but I fail to see why, when most papers I see differ from Markdown only in having two columns and formulas. I asked a friend, and apparently some journals are still printed on paper but no one buys them on paper. So the practical reason for the use of PDFs seems to be that people can print them at home to avoid reading from the screen. One actual reason for non-adoption of HTML, that I can see, is that there's lots of tooling available for collecting, organizing and annotating PDFs. But it doesn't look insurmountable, since files with metadata could just as well be HTML-based, and there are already multiple tools exactly for annotating HTML, only they position themselves for different audiences.

simonh 7y ago
Oh right, academic culture I suppose. Anyway nowadays with tablets PDFs are much easier to consume than they used to be. The thing is ePubs and such aren't all that easy to consume. They don't provide standardised predictable layout, so you can't control how it will be presented to the reader. HTML and ePub only provide layout hints to the device or reader app. Even the reader doesn't have much control how the document is displayed. In contrast PDF provides complete, precise control over presentation. If it looks bad or is misleading due to layout issues or truncated tables and such, all of which are possible and can be very significant in scientific or technical material, it's all on the publisher. I read a ton of PDFs, but then I'm a gamer and most tabletop RPGs are published in PDFs. In that case it's because many of them contain a lot of tables, forms and illustrations. They're also trying to create an atmosphere and express a theme, so layout matters. For a lot of material layout makes such a big difference to how material is interpreted that it is content.
- aasasd 7y ago
  The thing is, your game manuals approach fancy magazines in the complexity of the layout—that's where PDF is justifiable. Though I'm pretty sure atmospheric look can be created with HTML without much difficulty, as countless entertainment sites prove. Meanwhile, I'm browsing the web all day every day and yet to see what is there to fail in a simple text-and-images, black on white layout that most academical and technical papers need. Complex formulas and legend positioning is solved with images for now—and I'd guess that with some industry effort MathML and SVG could replace them. Discrepancy in the support of HTML formatting features is solved with standardization of the current state-of-the-art for some ‘paper viewing software,’ just as PDF is standardized. And regular browsers could switch on the ‘paper reader’ mode for the format. IMO it's inevitable that fixed sizes for layout will go away, for the simple reason that it's not how screens work. The sooner it happens in tech writing, the happier the rest of my life will be. Also I just remembered that one studio specifically makes online ‘books’ to control the layout on the screen: https://bureau.rocks/books/ https://bureau.rocks/books/ (though the use of the scroll-activation is questionable to me). Of course, they likely had to expend considerably more effort than is needed for either regular pages or PDFs. Alas, their explanation of the reasoning is not in English—basically, they don't like how formats like Epub are displayed but don't even consider PDF: https://bureau.ru/books/manifesto/ https://bureau.ru/books/manifesto/
  - simonh 7y ago
    No such paper mode exists, and HTML is too vague and imprecise a format to express one anyway. Ok, failure modes. HTML does not have the concept of a deterministic page size and length or predictable pagination. In academic papers references, figures, footnotes and titles need to be presented in a deterministic way so that when text refers to a figure, or a footnote is referenced, etc, they exist in a predictable and know relationship to each other. If the text refers to a figure that is supposed to be on the same page, the author wants to be absolutely sure it appears on that page. HTML can't even guarantee that a given image will be displayed at all. have you never been to a web page where some images were not shown or just appeared as placeholder boxes? Device and image library and support limitations might lead to an image not appearing at all, or at an unpredictable relative size so it's not easily readable, appearing in a form such that details are not easily discernible such as with bad gamma or transparency settings, or with colours not shown with fidelity. This can actually change the meaning or interpretation of a result. Information that belongs together, that the author intends and needs to be together, had better be together. None of this can be guaranteed by HTML or ebook formats. These formats can't guarantee what fonts information will be represented in, they can't even guarantee whether text will he shown in italics, bold, what relative font sizes they will have, etc. Reference formats are very precisely specified, but these formats simply don't support that level of precision. So ok, you can say you don't care about these levels of precision, but your asking why other people do and these are the reasons.

by aasasd 7y ago

simonh 7y ago

Oh right, academic culture I suppose. Anyway nowadays with tablets PDFs are much easier to consume than they used to be. The thing is ePubs and such aren't all that easy to consume. They don't provide standardised predictable layout, so you can't control how it will be presented to the reader. HTML and ePub only provide layout hints to the device or reader app. Even the reader doesn't have much control how the document is displayed. In contrast PDF provides complete, precise control over presentation. If it looks bad or is misleading due to layout issues or truncated tables and such, all of which are possible and can be very significant in scientific or technical material, it's all on the publisher. I read a ton of PDFs, but then I'm a gamer and most tabletop RPGs are published in PDFs. In that case it's because many of them contain a lot of tables, forms and illustrations. They're also trying to create an atmosphere and express a theme, so layout matters. For a lot of material layout makes such a big difference to how material is interpreted that it is content.

aasasd 7y ago
The thing is, your game manuals approach fancy magazines in the complexity of the layout—that's where PDF is justifiable. Though I'm pretty sure atmospheric look can be created with HTML without much difficulty, as countless entertainment sites prove. Meanwhile, I'm browsing the web all day every day and yet to see what is there to fail in a simple text-and-images, black on white layout that most academical and technical papers need. Complex formulas and legend positioning is solved with images for now—and I'd guess that with some industry effort MathML and SVG could replace them. Discrepancy in the support of HTML formatting features is solved with standardization of the current state-of-the-art for some ‘paper viewing software,’ just as PDF is standardized. And regular browsers could switch on the ‘paper reader’ mode for the format. IMO it's inevitable that fixed sizes for layout will go away, for the simple reason that it's not how screens work. The sooner it happens in tech writing, the happier the rest of my life will be. Also I just remembered that one studio specifically makes online ‘books’ to control the layout on the screen: https://bureau.rocks/books/ https://bureau.rocks/books/ (though the use of the scroll-activation is questionable to me). Of course, they likely had to expend considerably more effort than is needed for either regular pages or PDFs. Alas, their explanation of the reasoning is not in English—basically, they don't like how formats like Epub are displayed but don't even consider PDF: https://bureau.ru/books/manifesto/ https://bureau.ru/books/manifesto/
- simonh 7y ago
  No such paper mode exists, and HTML is too vague and imprecise a format to express one anyway. Ok, failure modes. HTML does not have the concept of a deterministic page size and length or predictable pagination. In academic papers references, figures, footnotes and titles need to be presented in a deterministic way so that when text refers to a figure, or a footnote is referenced, etc, they exist in a predictable and know relationship to each other. If the text refers to a figure that is supposed to be on the same page, the author wants to be absolutely sure it appears on that page. HTML can't even guarantee that a given image will be displayed at all. have you never been to a web page where some images were not shown or just appeared as placeholder boxes? Device and image library and support limitations might lead to an image not appearing at all, or at an unpredictable relative size so it's not easily readable, appearing in a form such that details are not easily discernible such as with bad gamma or transparency settings, or with colours not shown with fidelity. This can actually change the meaning or interpretation of a result. Information that belongs together, that the author intends and needs to be together, had better be together. None of this can be guaranteed by HTML or ebook formats. These formats can't guarantee what fonts information will be represented in, they can't even guarantee whether text will he shown in italics, bold, what relative font sizes they will have, etc. Reference formats are very precisely specified, but these formats simply don't support that level of precision. So ok, you can say you don't care about these levels of precision, but your asking why other people do and these are the reasons.