4 ms·
Why PDF? Why not ePUB or .tex? Especially since "Preface" is already badly formatted (text too far to the left overlapping line numbers).
by deepsun 5y ago
Why PDF? Why not ePUB or .tex? Especially since "Preface" is already badly formatted (text too far to the left overlapping line numbers).
- colesantiago 5y agoI agree. Was very surprised that most academic documents aren't being published in DjVu [0] format anymore, very sad. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu
- jstx1 5y agoIf it was epub or tex, the first thing I would do is look for a way to make a pdf out of it.
- deepsun 5y agoSure, it's easy. But it's hard the other way around. It's similar to publishing a binary program with or without source code.
- rsfern 5y agoOne nice upside to having tex source is that you can set the page size to match e.g., a phone screen. Reading standard pdf textbooks and papers on a phone isn’t very fun. I used to do this for reading arxiv preprints, but the script I wrote was kind of brittle and it doesn’t really work out with figures anyway Honestly if the scientific community moved to something that could be interactive and reflowable I would be so happy
- benrbray 5y ago> Why not ePUB ePUB is notoriously bad at displaying mathematics. It also takes away the author's control of the page layout. To me there is nothing more satisfying than a well-crafted PDF.
- amelius 5y agoYes! And maybe someone can write some Machine Learning tool to "unformat" the PDF into ePUB.
- modernpink 5y agoWhy complain?
- quantumduck 5y agoI'm fairly certain that PDF was generated using LaTeX, everyone in academia uses it. Besides, it's not fair to complain about formatting in a very early draft.