6 ms·

> There are two main mediums for digital documents: PDFs and web pages. PDFs were designed to mirror physical documents, so they impose the real-world constrain

by jxf 3y ago

> There are two main mediums for digital documents: PDFs and web pages. PDFs were designed to mirror physical documents, so they impose the real-world constraints of paper: page breaks, fixed width, and immutable styling. Web pages, by contrast, provides an essential dynamism. Web pages are undeniably the future of digital documents. I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it's not needed is actually a feature, not a bug.

DistractionRect 3y ago
> I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it's not needed is actually a feature, not a bug. I couldn't agree more. Dynamism is great for web _apps_, but it's the last thing I want in a document
- digdugdirk 3y ago
  There are some genuine benefits that come along with. I mean, if I could have auto expand inline footnotes/references in a document, I'd be a happy camper.
- esafak 3y ago
  Do you object to the interactive Vega widget? https://nota-lang.org/reference.html#def-section-1.1 https://nota-lang.org/reference.html#def-section-1.1 Reputable scientific journals now post videos online alongside their articles. Interactivity is even better for understanding. But permanence is an issue I suppose.
  - DistractionRect 3y ago
    I'm not saying it's all bad. Digital augmentation can be handy (love the hell out of document search), but honestly their examples aren't compelling. I think accessibility is a major issue, where the text doesn't make as much sense without the interactive bits, and often the text itself isn't substantial enough to be stand alone. But also, it's starting to cross the line between web app and document. I can print out a pdf and I just lose peripheral QoL benefits like document search. However, if I try to print a web app I usually lose a lot of the content/context. Edit: as far as supplemental material goes, I'm all for it. People learn differently, so video, audio, web app, whatever are all great supplemental materials, but a good document should be able to stand by itself.
- anon35 3y ago
  OK but then what is the thing in the middle, between documents and applications? There are fantastic, beautiful interactive experiences (for lack of a better word) that are obviously not documents (they can't be represented on paper, there is code running) but they're not really applications, either (they are fully offline, self-contained, state that's only evident on the page). But they are, universally: dynamic. Examples: - https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ - http://worrydream.com/TenBrighterIdeas/ http://worrydream.com/TenBrighterIdeas/ - even : https://neal.fun/space-elevator/ https://neal.fun/space-elevator/ This is what I think the future of textbooks and presentations should be. But I think part of the problem is that not only do we not have tools geared toward creating them, we don't even have a name for these things. If we say "document", they flunk the pdf test. If we say "web application", they are lumped into the same lumbering category as office docs and enterprise software. Maybe Nota is a step in the right direction. But it'd be an even better step if it didn't call itself "21st century documents", if for no other reason than to defend against the valid criticism you levied against it.
  - DistractionRect 3y ago
    Ha, I was totally thinking about the watch blog too! I think that one is rather a special case. You could print it out with the first still of each bit and probably get out 90% of the content/context, and modify document to print out a few stills from each interactive part and get the same intellectual content. In it's case, the interactivity is superfluous, it's there to spark joy. It's really an example of a document with outstanding figures/visual aid - the interactivity is just a bonus. Similarly, the space elevator could be a picture book/pdf. The interactive bits there also spark joy. The tenbrighterideas page mostly annoyed me. It's just bastardizing structure to be "interactive", which is to say most of the information is hidden away behind a bunch of clicks and it could have been a document, with one page dedicated to each idea.
    - MrJohz 3y ago
      I strongly disagree with the idea that the interactive elements are only there to "spark joy" - in both of the cases you mentioned, the interactive elements are pretty fundamental. Their purpose is to let you get somewhat hands-on with the concepts the text is discussing - to allow you to take apart the watch yourself, at your own pace, and understand what all the pieces are doing. I'm sure you can convey the same information in text format (like you say, you could just print out the page), but these particular sites would be a lot weaker, because part of their explanatory power is the interactivity. The original quote was that dynamism was "the last thing I want in a document", and I think these interactive diagrams and explainers directly show how useful dynamism can be in conveying information. That's not to say that all dynamism is good - I don't usually want you to use Javascript to just load a new page, my browser can do that just fine - but every medium can be abused. That doesn't mean that medium is bad!
- hesk 3y ago
  The example academic paper has puts the definition of variables into a tooltip when you click on them. That's a nice feature for academic papers.
teruakohatu 3y ago
I agree with you. Another document is Word document (or whatever the standard is officially called), which is an editable page by page document. In theory a PDF is a static document that should display the same in any PDF reader.
axlee 3y ago
I don't want dynsmism, I want reprodicity.
kazinator 3y ago
Yeah; I mean do knock down the page breaks, but don't go overboard with the dynamism.
maple3142 3y ago
I think some basic dynamism is still necessary to make reading pdf on small screens comfortable (e.g. mobile). When on mobile, I vastly prefer reading webpages over pdf because most reasonable webpage should be able to fit mobile screen.
- nsagent 3y ago
  Sadly, if you have an iPhone I don't think you can easily read Nota docs currently. The article that introduces Nota [1] has only been tested on Chrome. I tried multiple browsers on iOS to no avail (likely since they all use the same underlying rendering engine). [1] https://willcrichton.net/nota/ https://willcrichton.net/nota/
- jessriedel 3y ago
  All you need is re-flowable text for this, right? That's generally not considered dynamic.
  - Calavar 3y ago
    If you follow the comment trail back up, in the context of this conversation, static means PDF, hard constraints of physical page layouts; dynamic means HTML, digital, no hard layout constraints.
    - jessriedel 3y ago
      I had read all those comments. What I'm saying that is that re-flowable text is just in a very different class than web pages that auto-translate the text, have animations, or run arbitrary code.
      - Calavar 3y ago
        Yes, that's what dynamic means in a frontend dev context. This is a typesetting and document layout context.
        3y ago
queuebert 3y ago
Reminds me of https://lab6.com https://lab6.com
growingkittens 3y ago
PDFs constrain information by limiting the way it can be reproduced digitally. There is no such thing as "just" copy/pasting from a PDF - weird errors abound. The text has to be extensively reformatted or run through special software. A format is needed that encodes information visually and digitally. The digital layer doesn't have to be visible by default, just accessible when needed.
wodenokoto 3y ago
So you want static margins that not even adjust to mobile?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lallysingh 3y ago
Check out the example of the PLDI paper. There are popups for symbols inside large, dense equations. That can really help. I think that there's interesting open space for dynamic documents, but you need some good examples of people using it with taste.
- jacobolus 3y ago
  You mean this one? https://nota-lang.org/examples/infoflow-paper/standalone/ https://nota-lang.org/examples/infoflow-paper/standalone/ One unfortunate problem is that nobody bothered setting the measure for legibility. On my display the text block is far far too wide. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length (while we're talking about typography, the fonts for body copy and code are mismatched in size in a distracting way) As far as formulas/notation is concerned, the notation used in this paper is targeted only at experts in theoretical computer science, approximately the level of advanced grad students or above, who also happen to be pretty familiar with Rust and C++. The gimmicky popups are probably not meaningfully helpful for such an audience, and in my opinion don't really make the notation any more accessible to people without the extremely steep prerequisite expertise (e.g. I don't think this paper is going to be at all accessible to the vast majority of working programmers or computer science undergraduate students). If you really want to make the paper more accessible, it would be better to focus on reducing the reliance on formulas, reducing the amount of jargon involved, and explaining the concepts and techniques using plain English targeted at a broader audience, rather than trying to add extra colors, click targets, or popups. (A research paper may alternately want to just target experts; that can also be fine. Even for experts this paper is pretty dense though.)
  - lallysingh 3y ago
    They were helpful for me, an ex-grad-student who read some type theory years ago. I think anyone breaking into the topic would appreciate that. Requiring authors to publish two versions to make it accessible, when the motivated reader just needs a little comfort, is too high a bar. Let them write densely for their primary audience (and this pass peer review) and still give affordances for everyone else. As for width, font, etc, a stylesheet can fix that. I'm assuming they allow stylesheets to format for each venue appropriately.
eviks 3y ago
If it's not needed, it's not essential
romwell 3y ago
>I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it's not needed is actually a feature, not a bug. Yeah. To author's surprise, Adobe's PDF spec supports JavaScript execution[1]. And interactive 3D graphics [2][3]. Not to mention, audio and video [4]. And "Liquid Mode" for responsive-layout PDF documents [5]. Of course, these "features" were considered bugs by the ISO PDF/A spec (archival, i.e. future-proof), so they were all stripped out [6]. The point being: sometimes a document should be a document. As for science papers: LaTeX is written by humans, for humans. Custom latex commands and packages allow one to write a plaintext document that is as easily read as the paper it generates. Which is great for accessibility, among other things. [1] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/applying-actions-scripts-pdfs.html https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/applying-actions-scrip... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKfyFt3zT5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKfyFt3zT5A [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW5-1LVtd9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW5-1LVtd9U [4] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/rich-media.html https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/rich-media.html [5] https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/hub/what-is-adobe-liquid-mode.html https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/hub/what-is-adobe-liquid-mode.... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A
- fie 3y ago
  The static issue also permeates to webpages and other formats though. Although this is now just yet another competing method for documentation or creation, the restrictions caused by using TeX or LaTeX over more dynamic approaches are not insignificant.
larme 3y ago
> Web pages are undeniably the future of digital documents. It used to be. But not anymore. Web browser + js are too bloat for any serious documentation usage.
SebastianKra 3y ago
It is needed. I hate reading pdfs on my 24" or 32" monitor. I hate reading them on my Phone. The main thing that my father complained about when switching from Blackberry to iPhone, was missing PDF reflow feature. Basically the only screen where I find pdfs comfortable to read, is on the 12.9" iPad, and only if the author has the same font-size preferences as me.
- Shorel 3y ago
  That is the main flaw of the PDF file format. It is by design. If we want documents that work well on all screens, then we use EPUB.
Shorel 3y ago
And I don't agree with you. Every time I can choose between PDF and EPUB, I choose EPUB.
cactusfrog 3y ago
Reading smresearch papers on BART is really annoying right now so I’m a fan of this project.

by jxf 3y ago

DistractionRect 3y ago

> I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it's not needed is actually a feature, not a bug. I couldn't agree more. Dynamism is great for web _apps_, but it's the last thing I want in a document

digdugdirk 3y ago
There are some genuine benefits that come along with. I mean, if I could have auto expand inline footnotes/references in a document, I'd be a happy camper.
esafak 3y ago
Do you object to the interactive Vega widget? https://nota-lang.org/reference.html#def-section-1.1 https://nota-lang.org/reference.html#def-section-1.1 Reputable scientific journals now post videos online alongside their articles. Interactivity is even better for understanding. But permanence is an issue I suppose.
- DistractionRect 3y ago
  I'm not saying it's all bad. Digital augmentation can be handy (love the hell out of document search), but honestly their examples aren't compelling. I think accessibility is a major issue, where the text doesn't make as much sense without the interactive bits, and often the text itself isn't substantial enough to be stand alone. But also, it's starting to cross the line between web app and document. I can print out a pdf and I just lose peripheral QoL benefits like document search. However, if I try to print a web app I usually lose a lot of the content/context. Edit: as far as supplemental material goes, I'm all for it. People learn differently, so video, audio, web app, whatever are all great supplemental materials, but a good document should be able to stand by itself.
anon35 3y ago
OK but then what is the thing in the middle, between documents and applications? There are fantastic, beautiful interactive experiences (for lack of a better word) that are obviously not documents (they can't be represented on paper, there is code running) but they're not really applications, either (they are fully offline, self-contained, state that's only evident on the page). But they are, universally: dynamic. Examples: - https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ - http://worrydream.com/TenBrighterIdeas/ http://worrydream.com/TenBrighterIdeas/ - even : https://neal.fun/space-elevator/ https://neal.fun/space-elevator/ This is what I think the future of textbooks and presentations should be. But I think part of the problem is that not only do we not have tools geared toward creating them, we don't even have a name for these things. If we say "document", they flunk the pdf test. If we say "web application", they are lumped into the same lumbering category as office docs and enterprise software. Maybe Nota is a step in the right direction. But it'd be an even better step if it didn't call itself "21st century documents", if for no other reason than to defend against the valid criticism you levied against it.
- DistractionRect 3y ago
  Ha, I was totally thinking about the watch blog too! I think that one is rather a special case. You could print it out with the first still of each bit and probably get out 90% of the content/context, and modify document to print out a few stills from each interactive part and get the same intellectual content. In it's case, the interactivity is superfluous, it's there to spark joy. It's really an example of a document with outstanding figures/visual aid - the interactivity is just a bonus. Similarly, the space elevator could be a picture book/pdf. The interactive bits there also spark joy. The tenbrighterideas page mostly annoyed me. It's just bastardizing structure to be "interactive", which is to say most of the information is hidden away behind a bunch of clicks and it could have been a document, with one page dedicated to each idea.
  - MrJohz 3y ago
    I strongly disagree with the idea that the interactive elements are only there to "spark joy" - in both of the cases you mentioned, the interactive elements are pretty fundamental. Their purpose is to let you get somewhat hands-on with the concepts the text is discussing - to allow you to take apart the watch yourself, at your own pace, and understand what all the pieces are doing. I'm sure you can convey the same information in text format (like you say, you could just print out the page), but these particular sites would be a lot weaker, because part of their explanatory power is the interactivity. The original quote was that dynamism was "the last thing I want in a document", and I think these interactive diagrams and explainers directly show how useful dynamism can be in conveying information. That's not to say that all dynamism is good - I don't usually want you to use Javascript to just load a new page, my browser can do that just fine - but every medium can be abused. That doesn't mean that medium is bad!
hesk 3y ago
The example academic paper has puts the definition of variables into a tooltip when you click on them. That's a nice feature for academic papers.

teruakohatu 3y ago

I agree with you. Another document is Word document (or whatever the standard is officially called), which is an editable page by page document. In theory a PDF is a static document that should display the same in any PDF reader.

axlee 3y ago

I don't want dynsmism, I want reprodicity.

kazinator 3y ago

Yeah; I mean do knock down the page breaks, but don't go overboard with the dynamism.

maple3142 3y ago

I think some basic dynamism is still necessary to make reading pdf on small screens comfortable (e.g. mobile). When on mobile, I vastly prefer reading webpages over pdf because most reasonable webpage should be able to fit mobile screen.

nsagent 3y ago
Sadly, if you have an iPhone I don't think you can easily read Nota docs currently. The article that introduces Nota [1] has only been tested on Chrome. I tried multiple browsers on iOS to no avail (likely since they all use the same underlying rendering engine). [1] https://willcrichton.net/nota/ https://willcrichton.net/nota/
jessriedel 3y ago
All you need is re-flowable text for this, right? That's generally not considered dynamic.
- Calavar 3y ago
  If you follow the comment trail back up, in the context of this conversation, static means PDF, hard constraints of physical page layouts; dynamic means HTML, digital, no hard layout constraints.
  - jessriedel 3y ago
    I had read all those comments. What I'm saying that is that re-flowable text is just in a very different class than web pages that auto-translate the text, have animations, or run arbitrary code.
    - Calavar 3y ago
      Yes, that's what dynamic means in a frontend dev context. This is a typesetting and document layout context.
      - 3y ago

queuebert 3y ago

Reminds me of https://lab6.com https://lab6.com

growingkittens 3y ago

PDFs constrain information by limiting the way it can be reproduced digitally. There is no such thing as "just" copy/pasting from a PDF - weird errors abound. The text has to be extensively reformatted or run through special software. A format is needed that encodes information visually and digitally. The digital layer doesn't have to be visible by default, just accessible when needed.

wodenokoto 3y ago

So you want static margins that not even adjust to mobile?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

lallysingh 3y ago

Check out the example of the PLDI paper. There are popups for symbols inside large, dense equations. That can really help. I think that there's interesting open space for dynamic documents, but you need some good examples of people using it with taste.

jacobolus 3y ago
You mean this one? https://nota-lang.org/examples/infoflow-paper/standalone/ https://nota-lang.org/examples/infoflow-paper/standalone/ One unfortunate problem is that nobody bothered setting the measure for legibility. On my display the text block is far far too wide. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length (while we're talking about typography, the fonts for body copy and code are mismatched in size in a distracting way) As far as formulas/notation is concerned, the notation used in this paper is targeted only at experts in theoretical computer science, approximately the level of advanced grad students or above, who also happen to be pretty familiar with Rust and C++. The gimmicky popups are probably not meaningfully helpful for such an audience, and in my opinion don't really make the notation any more accessible to people without the extremely steep prerequisite expertise (e.g. I don't think this paper is going to be at all accessible to the vast majority of working programmers or computer science undergraduate students). If you really want to make the paper more accessible, it would be better to focus on reducing the reliance on formulas, reducing the amount of jargon involved, and explaining the concepts and techniques using plain English targeted at a broader audience, rather than trying to add extra colors, click targets, or popups. (A research paper may alternately want to just target experts; that can also be fine. Even for experts this paper is pretty dense though.)
- lallysingh 3y ago
  They were helpful for me, an ex-grad-student who read some type theory years ago. I think anyone breaking into the topic would appreciate that. Requiring authors to publish two versions to make it accessible, when the motivated reader just needs a little comfort, is too high a bar. Let them write densely for their primary audience (and this pass peer review) and still give affordances for everyone else. As for width, font, etc, a stylesheet can fix that. I'm assuming they allow stylesheets to format for each venue appropriately.

eviks 3y ago

If it's not needed, it's not essential

romwell 3y ago

>I actually don't agree with this. I think _not_ having "essential dynamism" where it's not needed is actually a feature, not a bug. Yeah. To author's surprise, Adobe's PDF spec supports JavaScript execution[1]. And interactive 3D graphics [2][3]. Not to mention, audio and video [4]. And "Liquid Mode" for responsive-layout PDF documents [5]. Of course, these "features" were considered bugs by the ISO PDF/A spec (archival, i.e. future-proof), so they were all stripped out [6]. The point being: sometimes a document should be a document. As for science papers: LaTeX is written by humans, for humans. Custom latex commands and packages allow one to write a plaintext document that is as easily read as the paper it generates. Which is great for accessibility, among other things. [1] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/applying-actions-scripts-pdfs.html https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/applying-actions-scrip... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKfyFt3zT5A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKfyFt3zT5A [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW5-1LVtd9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW5-1LVtd9U [4] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/rich-media.html https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/rich-media.html [5] https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/hub/what-is-adobe-liquid-mode.html https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/hub/what-is-adobe-liquid-mode.... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A

fie 3y ago
The static issue also permeates to webpages and other formats though. Although this is now just yet another competing method for documentation or creation, the restrictions caused by using TeX or LaTeX over more dynamic approaches are not insignificant.

larme 3y ago

> Web pages are undeniably the future of digital documents. It used to be. But not anymore. Web browser + js are too bloat for any serious documentation usage.

SebastianKra 3y ago

It is needed. I hate reading pdfs on my 24" or 32" monitor. I hate reading them on my Phone. The main thing that my father complained about when switching from Blackberry to iPhone, was missing PDF reflow feature. Basically the only screen where I find pdfs comfortable to read, is on the 12.9" iPad, and only if the author has the same font-size preferences as me.

Shorel 3y ago
That is the main flaw of the PDF file format. It is by design. If we want documents that work well on all screens, then we use EPUB.

Shorel 3y ago

And I don't agree with you. Every time I can choose between PDF and EPUB, I choose EPUB.

cactusfrog 3y ago

Reading smresearch papers on BART is really annoying right now so I’m a fan of this project.