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It would be great to reflow the document in single column mode, not to scroll back from the bottom of the left one to the top of the right one. Actually, if th
by pmontra 5y ago
It would be great to reflow the document in single column mode, not to scroll back from the bottom of the left one to the top of the right one.
Actually, if these document are mostly consumed on screen, just write them single column, half of an A4 or Letter, or plain HTML. Do they keep creating PDFs because publishers sell paper journals?
- michaelmior 5y agoIn my field, almost no one really buys paper journals. I think it's mostly a matter of tradition at this point. However, PDF does also mean the author gets control over what the document looks like. Of course it's possible to produce similar quality work using HTML, but many authors and publishers are just so accustomed to the existing stack that a lot of it is tradition. Fortunately, it's becoming fairly common for IEEE to provide HTML versions of papers generated from the LaTeX source that are single column. They're not perfect, but they can be a nicer reading experience in some cases. Personally, if I'm doing any serious paper reading, I'm often doing it on my reMarkable so I like a nicely formatted PDF.
- kaba0 5y agoI prefer PDFs hundred times over plain HTML, both for research papers and books. HTML can only reproduce proper structuring with great pain and it is essential for most scientific content. I rather scroll sideways over not having the essential equation displayed correctly.
- kergonath 5y agoPDFs are much better to distribute. You get a consistent rendering on any device, which is particularly important for mathematical expressions, tables, and figures. I don't want to navigate the zillion libraries I can use to do this in HTML, which will break anyway because the viewer won't have the right version. PDF works just fine for scientific papers.