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Unfortunately this (good) product will take at least a generation to make it to the academic world. I put my thesis together in HTML using Pandoc, customized t

Unfortunately this (good) product will take at least a generation to make it to the academic world. I put my thesis together in HTML using Pandoc, customized to look a bit like a Tufte publication with margin notes. It had animations, anchor links when cross-referencing paragraphs, and in my eyes, made sense for a document like a thesis. My committee members, on the other hand, were in consensus that a thesis should be a PDF with page numbers, not some multimedia document with hyperlinks. When I made a PDF[0] and submitted it to the university, someone even checked it to make sure the page numbering switched from Roman to Arabic at the correct point as stipulated by the submission guidelines (it didn't, hence my knowledge of their thoroughness). Considering that universities today often don't even want a hard copy of a thesis, this is a world that is tied very strongly to the paper paradigm. [0] Fortunately Pandoc did this quite nicely, though I did have to make a few changes to deal with citations. Incidentally, there is no good, cross-platform way to put an animation in a PDF.

jterrace 14y ago
Yeah, my university formatting requirements are crazy also. This allowed me to have one source that outputs (nicely) to a bunch of different formats, including the university PDF requirement.
andreasvc 14y ago
There's a good reason to require proper page numbers: citations. In general you can't refer to a particular passage in a huge HTML document. Anchor links are a technical solution, but that's not how normal citations work. I think that more generally when a document becomes sufficiently complex it is better to use a page-oriented, typesetting approach. You'll want to fiddle with where certain page breaks and figures end up, and if you do that you might as well stick with one canonical format. You can view it as the paper paradigm. Alternatively, you can also see it as sticking to a uniform, canonical format. Getting fluid layouts right is a very difficult problem, and manually getting the layout right for a fixed format is simply a much better solution for this purpose.
- jterrace 14y ago
  The HTML format does generate multiple pages for different sections and chapters, completely configurable. The format above is the singlehtml format where everything is on one page. I'd much rather have a link to a specific anchor tag on a page that goes directly to where I want than a citation to a page number on a 200 page document.
  - abbot2 14y ago
    "As show on pages 105-107" looks much better than "As shown in sections 4.5.4, 5.1 and 5.1.2". Really. You don't have the first option with HTML and/or sphinx. Oh, and can I have some bold italic text please?
    - jterrace 14y ago
      You can link to a section with a URL. No "section xyz" or "page n" needed.
      - abbot2 14y ago
        Yes, you can place a link. But the link, unlike the page range, points only to the place, not to the scope.
        irollboozers 14y ago
        Why can't you link to divs on a page? When I'm given a page range, I don't typically first go to some arbitrary page in the middle of a range.
      - andreasvc 14y ago
        But the rules of citation prescribe that you give a section or page number. Giving a URL is a neat technical solution, but it's not a proper citation.
        14y ago

jterrace 14y ago

Yeah, my university formatting requirements are crazy also. This allowed me to have one source that outputs (nicely) to a bunch of different formats, including the university PDF requirement.

andreasvc 14y ago

There's a good reason to require proper page numbers: citations. In general you can't refer to a particular passage in a huge HTML document. Anchor links are a technical solution, but that's not how normal citations work. I think that more generally when a document becomes sufficiently complex it is better to use a page-oriented, typesetting approach. You'll want to fiddle with where certain page breaks and figures end up, and if you do that you might as well stick with one canonical format. You can view it as the paper paradigm. Alternatively, you can also see it as sticking to a uniform, canonical format. Getting fluid layouts right is a very difficult problem, and manually getting the layout right for a fixed format is simply a much better solution for this purpose.

jterrace 14y ago
The HTML format does generate multiple pages for different sections and chapters, completely configurable. The format above is the singlehtml format where everything is on one page. I'd much rather have a link to a specific anchor tag on a page that goes directly to where I want than a citation to a page number on a 200 page document.
- abbot2 14y ago
  "As show on pages 105-107" looks much better than "As shown in sections 4.5.4, 5.1 and 5.1.2". Really. You don't have the first option with HTML and/or sphinx. Oh, and can I have some bold italic text please?
  - jterrace 14y ago
    You can link to a section with a URL. No "section xyz" or "page n" needed.
    - abbot2 14y ago
      Yes, you can place a link. But the link, unlike the page range, points only to the place, not to the scope.
      - irollboozers 14y ago
        Why can't you link to divs on a page? When I'm given a page range, I don't typically first go to some arbitrary page in the middle of a range.
    - andreasvc 14y ago
      But the rules of citation prescribe that you give a section or page number. Giving a URL is a neat technical solution, but it's not a proper citation.
      - 14y ago