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> A PDF isn’t for storage it’s for display. It’s the equivalent of a printout. This conjecture would have some practical relevance if I had access to the same
by aasasd 7y ago
> A PDF isn’t for storage it’s for display. It’s the equivalent of a printout.
This conjecture would have some practical relevance if I had access to the same papers in other formats, preferably HTML. Yet I'm saddened time and again to find that I don't.
In fact, producing HTML or PDF from the same source was exactly my proposed route before I was told that apparently Tex is only good for printing or PDFs. I hope that this is false, but not in a position to argue currently.
- alkonaut 7y agoBut when you access a paper it’s for reading it, correct? It is worrying if places that are “libraries” of knowledge aren’t taking the opportunity to keep searchable/parseable data, but it’s no worse than a library of books.
- aasasd 7y ago> but it’s no worse than a library of books That's not my complaint in the first place. The problem is that while we progressed beyond books on the device side in terms of even just the viewport, we seemingly can't move past the letter-sized paged format. The format may be a bit better than books—what with it being easily distributed and with occasionally copyable text—but not enough so. I'm not even touching the topic of info extraction here, since it's pretty hard on its own and despite it also being better with HTML.
- floriol 7y agoYeah, it's better with HTML than with PDF, but it's still pretty terrible... Use some actually structured data format like XML (XHTML would be good), because you don't want to include a complete browser just to search for text