5 ms·

I've never actually questioned the why, so maybe you could shine some light... why are they usually published as PDFs?

codeviking 5y ago
Y'know, that's a good question. I'm not sure I know the answer. My guess is it's largely for historical reasons. At the time most venues were organized PDF was probably the best (or only) mechanism for sharing documents for print distribution. But we think it's time to change that :).
kartoshechka 5y ago
Unfortunately for my mental health my thesis was exactly about converting arxiv papers to modern looking html, and there's so much more broken, unjust and ugly things in academia then using pdfs... Regarding your question, I'd say that it is a natural continuation of centuries long tradition of writing on the actual paper. The invention of TeX actually made it easier to produce more papers, then came PDF, and you could produce virtual papers. Also science journals pretty much have monopoly on scientific knowledge distribution, and they are mostly paper too
DoreenMichele 5y ago
I have no idea at all but as a wild guess, I would assume it's because you can't edit PDFs. So you know it says the same thing forever and no one went and changed it in response to reading criticism of their paper or something.
temp8964 5y ago
What alternative do you have? Word file? PDF is the only widely supported format can guarantee accurate reprint.
- miohtama 5y ago
  Are papers printed anymore? HTML for text. SVGs for diagrams. Equations can be exported as images if needed.
  - codeviking 5y ago
    That's the idea! If all goes well we won't need this software anymore. In a best case scenario the publishers start accepting HTML, and gone are the days of having to convert PDFs to something better...!
    - temp8964 5y ago
      How do you define pages in HTML?
      - codeviking 5y ago
        We don't. We extract the content and present it as a single document. Page anchors can be used for navigating between sections. We present a table of contents that makes this easy. For instance: https://papertohtml.org/paper?id=6f9fc51102cf49bff4f4e2b336739a45f8389c80#section-body-1 https://papertohtml.org/paper?id=6f9fc51102cf49bff4f4e2b3367...
        john-doe 5y ago
        Great initiative, HTML is the way to go! It would be great if you could add some basic CSS rules for print? Right now navigation elements are needlessly repeated on each page, obscuring the content. Also, you forgot to include bold and italics webfonts, so you have faux-styles for all headings and emphasis.
  - radarsat1 5y ago
    > Are papers printed anymore? You know what, they are. I like print format for reading purposes, even if it's on my epaper tablet. The other day when I took a train for 8 hours, I printed out several papers to read on my b&w laserjet. And it's more difficult to read diagrams these days because people make them all in colour, sometimes in ways that are very difficult to read when it's converted to b&w. I find it a real tragedy that all these efforts to turn papers into dynamic content, which I wholeheartedly applaud, ignore the still very relevant use case of printing. Every preview mechanism for camera-ready papers should include a b&w print-preview mode. The other advantage of PDF is that "page count" still means something. There's a reason journals limit page count, and it's not because it adds a few kbs to the download. It's because long-winded papers that don't get to the point need editing.
- nailer 5y ago
  HTML. As long as the information is preserved, the layout is not significant and actively harms viewing the content on many devices. Here's the output of this tool on this PDF - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.00031.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.00031.pdf - content is preserved, but text is readable: https://imgur.com/a/EPCaWxP https://imgur.com/a/EPCaWxP
ephbit 5y ago
I always assumed the main reason for using PDFs is, that an author/distributor can be pretty sure, that they're rendered almost exactly the same (fonts, layout) no matter with which viewer they're viewed. This probably evokes some kind of sense of authenticity. Like some physical paper document it has exactly one appearance.
- ephbit 5y ago
  There's also the annotation features in PDFs which allow me to highlight text and add a comment. I don't know of any more convenient way to directly attach my thoughts to a specific portion of text. (If there is, I'd genuinely like to know). And it even works well across multiple devices: I have a folder on my PC that's synced with my phone via syncthing containing mostly PDFs (savend web pages, papers, books, ..) and the annotations I make in those PDFs on my phone are directly available on my PC ... all without using some cloud bullsh*.

Y'know, that's a good question. I'm not sure I know the answer. My guess is it's largely for historical reasons. At the time most venues were organized PDF was probably the best (or only) mechanism for sharing documents for print distribution. But we think it's time to change that :).

kartoshechka 5y ago

Unfortunately for my mental health my thesis was exactly about converting arxiv papers to modern looking html, and there's so much more broken, unjust and ugly things in academia then using pdfs... Regarding your question, I'd say that it is a natural continuation of centuries long tradition of writing on the actual paper. The invention of TeX actually made it easier to produce more papers, then came PDF, and you could produce virtual papers. Also science journals pretty much have monopoly on scientific knowledge distribution, and they are mostly paper too

DoreenMichele 5y ago

I have no idea at all but as a wild guess, I would assume it's because you can't edit PDFs. So you know it says the same thing forever and no one went and changed it in response to reading criticism of their paper or something.

temp8964 5y ago

What alternative do you have? Word file? PDF is the only widely supported format can guarantee accurate reprint.

miohtama 5y ago
Are papers printed anymore? HTML for text. SVGs for diagrams. Equations can be exported as images if needed.
- codeviking 5y ago
  That's the idea! If all goes well we won't need this software anymore. In a best case scenario the publishers start accepting HTML, and gone are the days of having to convert PDFs to something better...!
  - temp8964 5y ago
    How do you define pages in HTML?
    - codeviking 5y ago
      We don't. We extract the content and present it as a single document. Page anchors can be used for navigating between sections. We present a table of contents that makes this easy. For instance: https://papertohtml.org/paper?id=6f9fc51102cf49bff4f4e2b336739a45f8389c80#section-body-1 https://papertohtml.org/paper?id=6f9fc51102cf49bff4f4e2b3367...
      - john-doe 5y ago
        Great initiative, HTML is the way to go! It would be great if you could add some basic CSS rules for print? Right now navigation elements are needlessly repeated on each page, obscuring the content. Also, you forgot to include bold and italics webfonts, so you have faux-styles for all headings and emphasis.
- radarsat1 5y ago
  > Are papers printed anymore? You know what, they are. I like print format for reading purposes, even if it's on my epaper tablet. The other day when I took a train for 8 hours, I printed out several papers to read on my b&w laserjet. And it's more difficult to read diagrams these days because people make them all in colour, sometimes in ways that are very difficult to read when it's converted to b&w. I find it a real tragedy that all these efforts to turn papers into dynamic content, which I wholeheartedly applaud, ignore the still very relevant use case of printing. Every preview mechanism for camera-ready papers should include a b&w print-preview mode. The other advantage of PDF is that "page count" still means something. There's a reason journals limit page count, and it's not because it adds a few kbs to the download. It's because long-winded papers that don't get to the point need editing.
nailer 5y ago
HTML. As long as the information is preserved, the layout is not significant and actively harms viewing the content on many devices. Here's the output of this tool on this PDF - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.00031.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.00031.pdf - content is preserved, but text is readable: https://imgur.com/a/EPCaWxP https://imgur.com/a/EPCaWxP

ephbit 5y ago

I always assumed the main reason for using PDFs is, that an author/distributor can be pretty sure, that they're rendered almost exactly the same (fonts, layout) no matter with which viewer they're viewed. This probably evokes some kind of sense of authenticity. Like some physical paper document it has exactly one appearance.

ephbit 5y ago
There's also the annotation features in PDFs which allow me to highlight text and add a comment. I don't know of any more convenient way to directly attach my thoughts to a specific portion of text. (If there is, I'd genuinely like to know). And it even works well across multiple devices: I have a folder on my PC that's synced with my phone via syncthing containing mostly PDFs (savend web pages, papers, books, ..) and the annotations I make in those PDFs on my phone are directly available on my PC ... all without using some cloud bullsh*.