11 ms·

I disagree with the author that PDFs are a terrible format. They guarantee layout, which is very important for complex scientific presentations. Even slight dif

I disagree with the author that PDFs are a terrible format. They guarantee layout, which is very important for complex scientific presentations. Even slight differences in layout can make a complex set of equations difficult to parse. LaTeX also has a much superior word-break/hyphening algorithm to the HTML engines of browsers. I find PDF math papers easy to browse, unlike the author. They're much easier and more organized than a website, can be easily searched and have a *proper table of contents* compared to websites. As for poorly browsable on a phone -- well I think that is irrelevant because nobody is going to read a complex technical paper in practise on a phone. They do look decent in tablets, and as for screen readers...well that's a valid point but screen readers don't work well for material with lots of equations anyway. I applaud the author for the effort but looking at the result, I would not want to read math that way.

jech 4y ago
> I find PDF math papers easy to browse So do I. Still, I wish LaTeX produced easily reflowable PDFs, especially when a document is formatted in two columns.
- enriquto 4y ago
  But it does, doesn't it? You add the "twocolumn" option and recompile. Unless your LaTeX is too fancy this will tipically give a very good result (at worst, some figures with hardcoded sizing will be awkardly placed).
  - jech 4y ago
    I cannot do that when I'm reading a paper written by somebody else, and I only have the produced PDF.
    - abdullahkhalids 4y ago
      That's why arxiv is a god send, because the source is available there, if the author has uploaded it there. Science needs a culture of open sharing, the same way physics and math has it.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    twocolumn is terrible for mobile. what's needed are narrow margins.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  what you are asking for is called a "round-trip" by some printers.. This was requested the week after PDF was invented! It does work, unless it does not.. the company that invented this technology is apparently infested by MBAs and charismatic nobodies, since they announced they are exiting the type "business" ? Our house of cards is showing.
- baby 4y ago
  Check zotero. It has that feature
mavhc 4y ago
Get rid of the 2 column thing and most people would be happy. What guarantees of layout do you require? In related news, MathML is back in Chrome v109
- michaelt 4y ago
  > What guarantees of layout do you require? Some people write documents that can only be clearly presented on a 15" or larger display. Maybe a comparison table with a bunch of columns, maybe a detailed chart, maybe a PCB schematic, whatever. These people, being considerate of their readers, want to ensure if someone with a 13" screen comes along, they'll get scrollbars or small text, rather than a badly reflowed table where the word 'Yes' gets split over 3 lines. Other people want to read those documents on 5" phone displays.
jmhammond 4y ago
> and as for screen readers...well that's a valid point but screen readers don't work well for material with lots of equations anyway. This is something that we’d like to change. There are many visually impaired students who need to learn mathematics the same as you and I. My “eyes were opened” when I was working with a blind student in my class. The textbook I’d written in pretext (transpiled to pdf and HTML) could be read on his BrailleNote but some of the equations were wonky, so I rewrote them to work for everyone. It would be better if we developed tools to make them work for everyone straight away, instead of relying on authors. That’s one of my career goals.
- felixfbecker 4y ago
  I applaud you for this. I think MathML (which has gotten much better in browsers, thanks to Igalia[1]) is a much better bet we have to make this possible than LaTex compiling to PDF. [1] https://mathml.igalia.com/ https://mathml.igalia.com/
hgsgm 4y ago
We need either an app that can compile LaTeX source (+all included libs, which sounds like a lot, but it's equivalent to a JS-heavy web page) on all the clients (preferably as a browser plugin or integrated feature!) or authors should distribute their PDFs as bundles that include formatted versions for all of paper, large screen, and small screen.
periheli0n 4y ago
> nobody is going to read a complex technical paper in practise on a phone I do, in fact. Or rather, I often would like to but with PDF? No chance. IEEE explore online reading sometimes works, but it would work better if they cleaned up their UI to be compatible with phones. I have read thousands of pages of fiction on a phone and quite enjoyed it. Phones are great for reading if the content reflows properly. Now publishers and content creators would need to embrace non-paginated, reflowing output. This would not only facilitate reading on phones, but also on tablets and laptop screens. O‘Reilly‘s online platform does a good job with their app. There is zero reason why paginated output should be the default in 2022.
- oplaadpunt 4y ago
  Yes, fiction works because the layout is simple, consisting of text, and maybe images? Research papers are far more complex, and have established standards that aid quick reading and parsing. I absolutely don't want to deal with reflowing equations, reflowing figures, or whatever when publishing papers. Precise margins and column widths.
  - periheli0n 4y ago
    Yet, by far the vast majority of content produced today, technical or prose, is read on screens. Responsive webdesign has been around for quite a while. I don’t see a reason, other than lack of effort/investment, why we shouldn’t be able to read technical papers on variable-width screens, in a non-paginated form. Dealing with the technical challenges should not be the task of the author, but the publisher. And indeed, most publishers are on it. What‘s missing is a standardised format that can be downloaded, annotated, re-shared like a PDF.
    - bccdee 4y ago
      I wish there were a convention for sharing whole websites. Even a zip file containing an index.html plus images, css, other pages, etc. would be fine if browsers just supported it.
ta123456789 4y ago
PDF papers are also much easier to save/archive and use offline. And great for printing
TacticalCoder 4y ago
> LaTeX also has a much superior word-break/hyphening algorithm to the HTML engines of browsers. And because the PDF has a fixed layout it's also much easier to prevent "rivers" in paragraphs. Which hence makes it a no-brainer to use justification. To me many print publication using justified text (including LaTeX documents) are a thing of beauty and I do hate how "left align" breaks the flow of reading. I'm taking slightly different spacing between words due to justification every day over horizontal lines of different length, which I find fugly and confusing beyond repair. More hyphenation controls are coming to CSS and, one can dream, it may be possible one day to programatically detect rivers? Meanwhile rivers be damned, I override anyway many sites and add "text-align: justify". The nice thing is: because "text-align: left" is the default many sites and minifiers do not bother with text-align at all, so adding "text-align: justify" works for many, many, many sites. And I only half-buy anyway the justifications (ah!) for left alignment on the Web. It's basically saying: "We know better than people who've been working in print since decades (or more), left align is easier to read". I don't buy it. Left align breaks my reading flow. And I cannot be the only one. To me left align is trading potentially ugly looking paragraphs (due to rivers) for certainly ugly looking paragraphs (due to left justification: just look at the right of each paragraph... Such lack of clarity, such chaos cannot be unseen. It's pure fail). P.S: I've actually typeset books both in LaTeX and QuarkXPress and their were justified, not left-aligned.
- extra88 4y ago
  > I override anyway many sites and add "text-align: justify". I think you're an outlier in your strong preference for justified text but this serves as an example in favor of using HTML to present content. Well made web content is much more malleable by users to make it meet their needs and preferences.
godelski 4y ago
You can't have animations with PDFs. Anyone using beamer is familiar with this frustration. But animations are incredibly helpful in explaining many works. 3Blue1Brown became so popular in major part due to his use of (fantastic) animations that more easily explain the material than any static image could.
- jimhefferon 4y ago
  The animate package from CTAN draws animations in PDFs. It has limitations (most pdf readers won't show them because they rely on some JavaScript), but it does work.
  - godelski 4y ago
    Maybe that's my issue. But I've tried about a dozen pdf readers and failed.
    - jimhefferon 4y ago
      Adobe works. I've heard of at least one other but I couldn't get it to go. People say Adobe Reader is bloated, but if you need it then it is not bloat.
CJefferson 4y ago
Screen readers work perfectly fine with mathml. At worst one can just get the screen reader to read the latex for maths and browse the rest in nice HTML. On the other hand, PDFs generated from Latex are completely useless for screen readers.
gnull 4y ago
If your equations are in MathML, the browsers should be able to screen read them at some point. > Even slight differences in layout can make a complex set of equations difficult to parse. Such set of equations should normally be represented by a single block, I can't imagine a reason why layout should change inside that block. The layout of pdf is unnecessarily rigid. When I'm reading it on my screen, there's no reason the text should be split into A4 pages with very specific margin values. Latex also often moves your figures a few pages ahead because they didn't fit on the specific page. There's absolutely no reason for that when you have access to the big continuous canvas of an html page. This works for equations too; if you have a long equation block that happens to be right between two pages, you either have to let one page have a gap, or reorder/rewrite your paragraphs to make the equations fit. None of this has a good excuse when it's read on a screen. I don't think we need a website, but a js-free webpage with hyperlinks would be a lot better than pdf. Pdfs I find imperfect but ok.
- periheli0n 4y ago
  > I don't think we need a website, but a js-free webpage with hyperlinks Wasn't this precisely the use case for HTML and the WWW as originally conceived by Berners-Lee and his fellow internet pioneers?
  - oplaadpunt 4y ago
dan-robertson 4y ago
I think you give latex more credit than it deserves. It gives little straightforward control over layout and the only reason documents are manageable is that pages are fixed size and layout changes are mostly local. It’s paragraph breaking was state of the art when it was new but other systems break paragraphs now and potentially better. I also think ragged margins aren’t really a problem. I think if layout mattered as much as you imply, scientists would have to use a tool that offers more control like indesign. None of this is to say that getting good layout in HTML is easy, of course.
- periheli0n 4y ago
  > I think if layout mattered as much as you imply, scientists would have to use a too that offers more control like indesign. Yes, precisely that. As a scientist I don't even want to have to deal with layout. That's what publishers are paid extremely well for. When I self-publish content I want the process to be as simple as possible. If this means ragged margins, browser-default styles for headings etc., default colors and fonts — so be it. (but to be fair, optimising the layout is an excellent way to procrastinate on doing hard research)
patrick451 4y ago
The standard single column of content layout of nearly every webpage is a bad fit for scientific content because the information density is way too low. A pdf, where I can display multiple pages, each with two columns, side-by-side is much better. This is really handy when you need to do something like refer to a figure/equation/table on the last page. I have yet to see any website solve this lack of density problem in any meaningful way. Of course, paper is still better, but I'll take a pdf over a web site any day. A pdf is also much easier to archive. The job of sci-hub would but a lot more difficult if every paper came with separate html, css, javascript, and images.

jech 4y ago

> I find PDF math papers easy to browse So do I. Still, I wish LaTeX produced easily reflowable PDFs, especially when a document is formatted in two columns.

enriquto 4y ago
But it does, doesn't it? You add the "twocolumn" option and recompile. Unless your LaTeX is too fancy this will tipically give a very good result (at worst, some figures with hardcoded sizing will be awkardly placed).
- jech 4y ago
  I cannot do that when I'm reading a paper written by somebody else, and I only have the produced PDF.
  - abdullahkhalids 4y ago
    That's why arxiv is a god send, because the source is available there, if the author has uploaded it there. Science needs a culture of open sharing, the same way physics and math has it.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  twocolumn is terrible for mobile. what's needed are narrow margins.
mistrial9 4y ago
what you are asking for is called a "round-trip" by some printers.. This was requested the week after PDF was invented! It does work, unless it does not.. the company that invented this technology is apparently infested by MBAs and charismatic nobodies, since they announced they are exiting the type "business" ? Our house of cards is showing.
baby 4y ago
Check zotero. It has that feature

mavhc 4y ago

Get rid of the 2 column thing and most people would be happy. What guarantees of layout do you require? In related news, MathML is back in Chrome v109

michaelt 4y ago
> What guarantees of layout do you require? Some people write documents that can only be clearly presented on a 15" or larger display. Maybe a comparison table with a bunch of columns, maybe a detailed chart, maybe a PCB schematic, whatever. These people, being considerate of their readers, want to ensure if someone with a 13" screen comes along, they'll get scrollbars or small text, rather than a badly reflowed table where the word 'Yes' gets split over 3 lines. Other people want to read those documents on 5" phone displays.

jmhammond 4y ago

> and as for screen readers...well that's a valid point but screen readers don't work well for material with lots of equations anyway. This is something that we’d like to change. There are many visually impaired students who need to learn mathematics the same as you and I. My “eyes were opened” when I was working with a blind student in my class. The textbook I’d written in pretext (transpiled to pdf and HTML) could be read on his BrailleNote but some of the equations were wonky, so I rewrote them to work for everyone. It would be better if we developed tools to make them work for everyone straight away, instead of relying on authors. That’s one of my career goals.

felixfbecker 4y ago
I applaud you for this. I think MathML (which has gotten much better in browsers, thanks to Igalia[1]) is a much better bet we have to make this possible than LaTex compiling to PDF. [1] https://mathml.igalia.com/ https://mathml.igalia.com/

hgsgm 4y ago

We need either an app that can compile LaTeX source (+all included libs, which sounds like a lot, but it's equivalent to a JS-heavy web page) on all the clients (preferably as a browser plugin or integrated feature!) or authors should distribute their PDFs as bundles that include formatted versions for all of paper, large screen, and small screen.

periheli0n 4y ago

> nobody is going to read a complex technical paper in practise on a phone I do, in fact. Or rather, I often would like to but with PDF? No chance. IEEE explore online reading sometimes works, but it would work better if they cleaned up their UI to be compatible with phones. I have read thousands of pages of fiction on a phone and quite enjoyed it. Phones are great for reading if the content reflows properly. Now publishers and content creators would need to embrace non-paginated, reflowing output. This would not only facilitate reading on phones, but also on tablets and laptop screens. O‘Reilly‘s online platform does a good job with their app. There is zero reason why paginated output should be the default in 2022.

oplaadpunt 4y ago
Yes, fiction works because the layout is simple, consisting of text, and maybe images? Research papers are far more complex, and have established standards that aid quick reading and parsing. I absolutely don't want to deal with reflowing equations, reflowing figures, or whatever when publishing papers. Precise margins and column widths.
- periheli0n 4y ago
  Yet, by far the vast majority of content produced today, technical or prose, is read on screens. Responsive webdesign has been around for quite a while. I don’t see a reason, other than lack of effort/investment, why we shouldn’t be able to read technical papers on variable-width screens, in a non-paginated form. Dealing with the technical challenges should not be the task of the author, but the publisher. And indeed, most publishers are on it. What‘s missing is a standardised format that can be downloaded, annotated, re-shared like a PDF.
  - bccdee 4y ago
    I wish there were a convention for sharing whole websites. Even a zip file containing an index.html plus images, css, other pages, etc. would be fine if browsers just supported it.

ta123456789 4y ago

PDF papers are also much easier to save/archive and use offline. And great for printing

TacticalCoder 4y ago

> LaTeX also has a much superior word-break/hyphening algorithm to the HTML engines of browsers. And because the PDF has a fixed layout it's also much easier to prevent "rivers" in paragraphs. Which hence makes it a no-brainer to use justification. To me many print publication using justified text (including LaTeX documents) are a thing of beauty and I do hate how "left align" breaks the flow of reading. I'm taking slightly different spacing between words due to justification every day over horizontal lines of different length, which I find fugly and confusing beyond repair. More hyphenation controls are coming to CSS and, one can dream, it may be possible one day to programatically detect rivers? Meanwhile rivers be damned, I override anyway many sites and add "text-align: justify". The nice thing is: because "text-align: left" is the default many sites and minifiers do not bother with text-align at all, so adding "text-align: justify" works for many, many, many sites. And I only half-buy anyway the justifications (ah!) for left alignment on the Web. It's basically saying: "We know better than people who've been working in print since decades (or more), left align is easier to read". I don't buy it. Left align breaks my reading flow. And I cannot be the only one. To me left align is trading potentially ugly looking paragraphs (due to rivers) for certainly ugly looking paragraphs (due to left justification: just look at the right of each paragraph... Such lack of clarity, such chaos cannot be unseen. It's pure fail). P.S: I've actually typeset books both in LaTeX and QuarkXPress and their were justified, not left-aligned.

extra88 4y ago
> I override anyway many sites and add "text-align: justify". I think you're an outlier in your strong preference for justified text but this serves as an example in favor of using HTML to present content. Well made web content is much more malleable by users to make it meet their needs and preferences.

godelski 4y ago

You can't have animations with PDFs. Anyone using beamer is familiar with this frustration. But animations are incredibly helpful in explaining many works. 3Blue1Brown became so popular in major part due to his use of (fantastic) animations that more easily explain the material than any static image could.

jimhefferon 4y ago
The animate package from CTAN draws animations in PDFs. It has limitations (most pdf readers won't show them because they rely on some JavaScript), but it does work.
- godelski 4y ago
  Maybe that's my issue. But I've tried about a dozen pdf readers and failed.
  - jimhefferon 4y ago
    Adobe works. I've heard of at least one other but I couldn't get it to go. People say Adobe Reader is bloated, but if you need it then it is not bloat.

CJefferson 4y ago

Screen readers work perfectly fine with mathml. At worst one can just get the screen reader to read the latex for maths and browse the rest in nice HTML. On the other hand, PDFs generated from Latex are completely useless for screen readers.

gnull 4y ago

If your equations are in MathML, the browsers should be able to screen read them at some point. > Even slight differences in layout can make a complex set of equations difficult to parse. Such set of equations should normally be represented by a single block, I can't imagine a reason why layout should change inside that block. The layout of pdf is unnecessarily rigid. When I'm reading it on my screen, there's no reason the text should be split into A4 pages with very specific margin values. Latex also often moves your figures a few pages ahead because they didn't fit on the specific page. There's absolutely no reason for that when you have access to the big continuous canvas of an html page. This works for equations too; if you have a long equation block that happens to be right between two pages, you either have to let one page have a gap, or reorder/rewrite your paragraphs to make the equations fit. None of this has a good excuse when it's read on a screen. I don't think we need a website, but a js-free webpage with hyperlinks would be a lot better than pdf. Pdfs I find imperfect but ok.

periheli0n 4y ago
> I don't think we need a website, but a js-free webpage with hyperlinks Wasn't this precisely the use case for HTML and the WWW as originally conceived by Berners-Lee and his fellow internet pioneers?
- oplaadpunt 4y ago

dan-robertson 4y ago

I think you give latex more credit than it deserves. It gives little straightforward control over layout and the only reason documents are manageable is that pages are fixed size and layout changes are mostly local. It’s paragraph breaking was state of the art when it was new but other systems break paragraphs now and potentially better. I also think ragged margins aren’t really a problem. I think if layout mattered as much as you imply, scientists would have to use a tool that offers more control like indesign. None of this is to say that getting good layout in HTML is easy, of course.

periheli0n 4y ago
> I think if layout mattered as much as you imply, scientists would have to use a too that offers more control like indesign. Yes, precisely that. As a scientist I don't even want to have to deal with layout. That's what publishers are paid extremely well for. When I self-publish content I want the process to be as simple as possible. If this means ragged margins, browser-default styles for headings etc., default colors and fonts — so be it. (but to be fair, optimising the layout is an excellent way to procrastinate on doing hard research)

patrick451 4y ago

The standard single column of content layout of nearly every webpage is a bad fit for scientific content because the information density is way too low. A pdf, where I can display multiple pages, each with two columns, side-by-side is much better. This is really handy when you need to do something like refer to a figure/equation/table on the last page. I have yet to see any website solve this lack of density problem in any meaningful way. Of course, paper is still better, but I'll take a pdf over a web site any day. A pdf is also much easier to archive. The job of sci-hub would but a lot more difficult if every paper came with separate html, css, javascript, and images.