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I think there is a spectrum of commodity vs. artistic mediums in all forms and we often talk past each other when debating the finer points. If your goal is to
by systemvoltage 6y ago
I think there is a spectrum of commodity vs. artistic mediums in all forms and we often talk past each other when debating the finer points. If your goal is to send out a press release to the public, perhaps layout/aesthetics isn't as important (sometimes it is though so its not a hard/fast rule). In artistic media, especially in magazines and mixed-media books, layout and aesthetics are an integral part of print media. It is inseparable. Just as in music, you don't want to add an equalizer ruining the original intent of the artist, books created by artists in 1890 still are with us in print format - exactly how they were intended to published to readers. But it is entirely different if the "music" is a podcast - I want to use an equalizer to bring up the higher frequencies for better audibility. Similarly, if I am reading a novel on an epaper display and I want to increase the font-size or type, we should allow that as you said.
- ivanhoe 6y agoWhat you're saying is enjoying in the fine details. However you can do that only if those details in different parts of the page are not too correlated, so you can zoom in one part of the page, without it really be dependent on some other details somewhere else. In some situations, like say in comic books having to constantly zoom in/out totally kills the artistic impression that you'd have with an actual 2 pages book opened in front of you. Only having a bigger screen can really help with that.
- DiggyJohnson 6y agoAre you open to the argument that PDFs are not trying to solve the issue that you’re describing?
- fauigerzigerk 6y agoDepends on what the question is. If we‘re debating pros and cons of document formats, and not solving a particular problem is a con, then not trying to solve that problem doesn‘t make it a non-con.
- Nullabillity 6y ago> Just as in music, you don't want to add an equalizer ruining the original intent of the artist You might not. Does that mean that music should only be distributed in proprietary formats designed to prevent anyone from plugging in an equalizer? What about the naturally different frequency response curves of different speakers? What about room acoustics?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- BlueTemplar 6y agoI agree. What annoys me is when not very artistic mediums like scientific articles force a fixed page layout. It gets even worse when you have to hunt down the relevant figures over the following pages because they couldn't be put on the same page due to lack of space. Also opening a figure in a separate window isn't much a thing either for pdfs.
- akhilpotla 6y agoI definitely prefer to read research papers in html. I like to zoom in a lot when reading a long piece on my computer since it helps me read faster and keeps me from getting distracted. I've been thinking about working on a side project where I convert pdfs to html for academic papers.
- pvorb 6y agoOne benefit of PDFs for research papers is that you can easily save them to your own computer, build up a library of them, highlight lines with functionality built into most PDF readers. I generally prefer HTML for reading, but PDF has some benefits, too. Granted, most of these features are also available for HTML. But for some reason you need to look for browser plugins in order to highlight HTML pages, whereas in PDF you can just use the feature. And PDF is always about the content whereas HTML also typically contains navigation and other distractors.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoI really don't get why mhtml has been discontinued by browsers??
- int_19h 6y agoIt hasn't. Chrome can still save .mhtml just fine, and will also open them if you copy/paste the path into the URL bar.
- 6y ago