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Stepping into an area about which I have strong opinions. I appreciate your effort, I just think you're way off base. Physical Review Letters in journal (aka p

Stepping into an area about which I have strong opinions. I appreciate your effort, I just think you're way off base. Physical Review Letters in journal (aka pdf) format are ideal. Nothing is especially stylish, but it's a simple, easy to read format that highlights figures as a way to convey the meaning of the work. I much prefer the PDF to the online version. Some critics of your site (all in the spirit of "I hope you take this as a challenge to do better or maybe just realize there's not a lot wrong in the first place"): -your color contrast hurts my eyes (light grey on blue...) -the graphs are hard to understand (no axis labels on some, no captions to understand what's going on since that's all most people read first anyways, lack of contrast) -typeset equations are ugly (can't beat LaTeX) -drastic font size difference between code and text is jarring -no authors listed so I can instantly disregard your work because I've learned not to trust your methods (I kid, I kid... kindof) -the draggable figures did nothing for me -your column width was too narrow. Aim for 10-14 words per line. -because I have to scroll it's hard to quickly scan it for parts I actually want to read. When you read 10-20 papers a day, this is important. One thing I really like: click the Fig. # and it scrolls to be beside the text. That is a nice feature that online journals can learn from. In short, I think you're trying to solve a non-existent (or at least minimally existent) problem. LaTeX is beautiful, but perhaps you don't appreciate it. Journals in print (except for Science and Nature which blend all their articles together) generally look really nice. The PDF's of individual articles are the thing to read online, and I think your solution is a long way from any sort of reasonable online reading experience.

egocodedinsol 13y ago
Having been offered a part-time job to typeset LaTeX, I do really like it :) I used MathJax, which was the best math typesetting I could find for the web. Without disrespecting your criticisms at all, is there any sort of dynamism which would make you want to read something other than the pdf?
ssivark 13y ago
As a grad student who reads lots of papers (with a typical length of 30+ pages), I too have a strong opinion on this. I think PDFs do not serve the needs of the day and such efforts are a step in the right direction. PDFs okay if you plan to print out the papers to read and are just about bearable if you read the papers on a large monitor. They are quite unfriendly for tablets or smaller laptops -- starting with the multiple vertical columns, which are taller than the screen height. The font size is dictated by the aim of reducing printing costs rather than reading convenience. Just for starters, a "responsive" reader with the ability to resize fonts would make a big difference. Notes/references which appear on the side (rather than the bottom of the page) or links to interactive data (which scientists will have to figure out a good way of using) would drastically improve the reading experience and the efficacy of this mode of scholarly communication.
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- banachtarski 13y ago
  You mention printing. This is the singular reason why I prefer pdfs myself. PDFs are viewable in the browser and resizeable. They are operating system agnostic. Most importantly, they preserve the formatting that the original author intended. This is not to say it can't be all done natively in a browser, with resizing based on screen or print resolution. Just that most paper authors will not be savvy enough to do it right. It's enough for them to learn LaTeX properly (the only option for typesetting equations) and I doubt tooling for doing what you suggest will come any time soon.
  - ssivark 13y ago
    > PDFs are viewable in the browser and resizeable. They are operating system agnostic. Most importantly, they preserve the formatting that the original author intended. So are most webpages. > Just that most paper authors will not be savvy enough to do it right. [...] I believe this can be done gracefully in a manner where the authors just supply a source file and the software chain will generate the requisite output formats (much like pdflatex or Pandoc do the job today). Scientists should NOT have to muck around with HTML/CSS/JS/etc else the solution would be DOA.
    - banachtarski 13y ago
      > So are most webpages View hacker news on multiple browsers and operating systems. It won't look the same. My gmail looks different too. Fonts are different which means the numbers of words per line are different. > I believe this can be done gracefully in a manner where the authors just supply a source file and the software chain will generate the requisite output formats (much like pdflatex or Pandoc do the job today). Scientists should NOT have to muck around with HTML/CSS/JS/etc else the solution would be DOA. Agreed but this is much much easier said than done.
dfc 13y ago
If anyone is left wanting for an example of the pdfs from The Physical Review Letters. This is my best attempt at providing an example: http://prl.aps.org/pdf/PRL/v111/i1/e012001 http://prl.aps.org/pdf/PRL/v111/i1/e012001 or http://prl.aps.org/pdf/PRL/v105/i25/e252302 http://prl.aps.org/pdf/PRL/v105/i25/e252302
lobster_johnson 13y ago
One of the downsides to the formats (including PDF) currently used in academia is that their layout and typography is fixed by the author, and optimized for printing. You can't reflow the text for the screen unless you have the original source document. For example, most papers use multiple columns. This optimizes for readability when printed in A4/Letter, but on a computer screen it's much harder to scan and read pages this way, compared to a strictly linear layout -- especially when the text is interspersed with graphs and tables. Another example: Paragraphs are usually signaled with a line break and an indent. Papers seldom use any spacing between paragraphs. I think indented paragraphs work well for fiction, less so for academic texts. The papers mentioned in this thread by dfc are good examples of those two problems.
- lrem 13y ago
  Well, have you tried, or you just assume that you can't reflow the text? ;) I read well enough academic papers on a Nexus 7 and I assure you it's not much more annoying than reading them in print. Search and zoom in for those [scale=0.2] figures come in handy too.
conradev 13y ago
Your criticisms are of the submission's design, not the idea. I don't think that this submission fully emphasizes the advantages of a dynamic, interactive document as a medium for conveying ideas. I think this does it much, much better: http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3099595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3099595 see also: Khan Academy
Osmium 13y ago
Also as someone who has strong opinions, I concur that PDFs are great, especially for archiving purposes. As a distillation of important information, I think they're ideal. That said I think we need something else in addition to PDFs, rather than to replace them. Dynamic graphs, for example, and the ability to export raw data. In my field, rotatable/zoomable 3D views for molecules and crystals and the like would be great, as well as being able to measure bond lengths and angles. This would be infinitely superior to a static 2D projection. But these should all be in addition to: I still want a PDF I can take with me and read offline if necessary.
- jimhefferon 13y ago
  > rotatable/zoomable 3D views for molecules and crystals and the like would be great Adobe Reader does this (?and maybe Evince). http://help.adobe.com/en_US/reader/using/WSebddb957d123ebb0134f518b129c9c79890-7ffb.html http://help.adobe.com/en_US/reader/using/WSebddb957d123ebb01...
  - Osmium 13y ago
    There are two problems with this: 1) There's not good broad support for 3D views in PDFs; I imagine it won't work on most things other than Adobe Reader. What does it fallback on if it doesn't work? etc. And in any case, it's a corruption of what the PDF document format was "meant" to be, which is a document format guaranteed to display the same on all devices. 2) The 3D data isn't useful. It's raw information, rather than the metadata. If I'm looking at a 3D view of a crystal, I may want to export it to manipulate the structure myself or use it in my own simulations, so I want to know what atoms are there and information about boundary conditions, symmetry and the like. I specifically don't want a list of vertices and edges that, say, make up the individual spheres that represent the atoms.
jimhefferon 13y ago
Not to pile on but .. .. and some lines were far too tight and some were far too loose, at least in my browser. I am 54 and I can't see some things that I expect a 24 year old can see, and I depend on interword space to be there.
studentrob 13y ago
I doubt anyone will move away from LaTeX, though I also like the one-click alignment of figure and text. If LaTeX were to add a way to associate figures with text, then someone could write a converter from LaTeX to HTML to implement this idea.

egocodedinsol 13y ago

Having been offered a part-time job to typeset LaTeX, I do really like it :) I used MathJax, which was the best math typesetting I could find for the web. Without disrespecting your criticisms at all, is there any sort of dynamism which would make you want to read something other than the pdf?

ssivark 13y ago

As a grad student who reads lots of papers (with a typical length of 30+ pages), I too have a strong opinion on this. I think PDFs do not serve the needs of the day and such efforts are a step in the right direction. PDFs okay if you plan to print out the papers to read and are just about bearable if you read the papers on a large monitor. They are quite unfriendly for tablets or smaller laptops -- starting with the multiple vertical columns, which are taller than the screen height. The font size is dictated by the aim of reducing printing costs rather than reading convenience. Just for starters, a "responsive" reader with the ability to resize fonts would make a big difference. Notes/references which appear on the side (rather than the bottom of the page) or links to interactive data (which scientists will have to figure out a good way of using) would drastically improve the reading experience and the efficacy of this mode of scholarly communication.

deleted 13y ago
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- deleted 13y ago
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banachtarski 13y ago
You mention printing. This is the singular reason why I prefer pdfs myself. PDFs are viewable in the browser and resizeable. They are operating system agnostic. Most importantly, they preserve the formatting that the original author intended. This is not to say it can't be all done natively in a browser, with resizing based on screen or print resolution. Just that most paper authors will not be savvy enough to do it right. It's enough for them to learn LaTeX properly (the only option for typesetting equations) and I doubt tooling for doing what you suggest will come any time soon.
- ssivark 13y ago
  > PDFs are viewable in the browser and resizeable. They are operating system agnostic. Most importantly, they preserve the formatting that the original author intended. So are most webpages. > Just that most paper authors will not be savvy enough to do it right. [...] I believe this can be done gracefully in a manner where the authors just supply a source file and the software chain will generate the requisite output formats (much like pdflatex or Pandoc do the job today). Scientists should NOT have to muck around with HTML/CSS/JS/etc else the solution would be DOA.
  - banachtarski 13y ago
    > So are most webpages View hacker news on multiple browsers and operating systems. It won't look the same. My gmail looks different too. Fonts are different which means the numbers of words per line are different. > I believe this can be done gracefully in a manner where the authors just supply a source file and the software chain will generate the requisite output formats (much like pdflatex or Pandoc do the job today). Scientists should NOT have to muck around with HTML/CSS/JS/etc else the solution would be DOA. Agreed but this is much much easier said than done.

dfc 13y ago

If anyone is left wanting for an example of the pdfs from The Physical Review Letters. This is my best attempt at providing an example: http://prl.aps.org/pdf/PRL/v111/i1/e012001 http://prl.aps.org/pdf/PRL/v111/i1/e012001 or http://prl.aps.org/pdf/PRL/v105/i25/e252302 http://prl.aps.org/pdf/PRL/v105/i25/e252302

lobster_johnson 13y ago

One of the downsides to the formats (including PDF) currently used in academia is that their layout and typography is fixed by the author, and optimized for printing. You can't reflow the text for the screen unless you have the original source document. For example, most papers use multiple columns. This optimizes for readability when printed in A4/Letter, but on a computer screen it's much harder to scan and read pages this way, compared to a strictly linear layout -- especially when the text is interspersed with graphs and tables. Another example: Paragraphs are usually signaled with a line break and an indent. Papers seldom use any spacing between paragraphs. I think indented paragraphs work well for fiction, less so for academic texts. The papers mentioned in this thread by dfc are good examples of those two problems.

lrem 13y ago
Well, have you tried, or you just assume that you can't reflow the text? ;) I read well enough academic papers on a Nexus 7 and I assure you it's not much more annoying than reading them in print. Search and zoom in for those [scale=0.2] figures come in handy too.

conradev 13y ago

Your criticisms are of the submission's design, not the idea. I don't think that this submission fully emphasizes the advantages of a dynamic, interactive document as a medium for conveying ideas. I think this does it much, much better: http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3099595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3099595 see also: Khan Academy

Osmium 13y ago

Also as someone who has strong opinions, I concur that PDFs are great, especially for archiving purposes. As a distillation of important information, I think they're ideal. That said I think we need something else in addition to PDFs, rather than to replace them. Dynamic graphs, for example, and the ability to export raw data. In my field, rotatable/zoomable 3D views for molecules and crystals and the like would be great, as well as being able to measure bond lengths and angles. This would be infinitely superior to a static 2D projection. But these should all be in addition to: I still want a PDF I can take with me and read offline if necessary.

jimhefferon 13y ago
> rotatable/zoomable 3D views for molecules and crystals and the like would be great Adobe Reader does this (?and maybe Evince). http://help.adobe.com/en_US/reader/using/WSebddb957d123ebb0134f518b129c9c79890-7ffb.html http://help.adobe.com/en_US/reader/using/WSebddb957d123ebb01...
- Osmium 13y ago
  There are two problems with this: 1) There's not good broad support for 3D views in PDFs; I imagine it won't work on most things other than Adobe Reader. What does it fallback on if it doesn't work? etc. And in any case, it's a corruption of what the PDF document format was "meant" to be, which is a document format guaranteed to display the same on all devices. 2) The 3D data isn't useful. It's raw information, rather than the metadata. If I'm looking at a 3D view of a crystal, I may want to export it to manipulate the structure myself or use it in my own simulations, so I want to know what atoms are there and information about boundary conditions, symmetry and the like. I specifically don't want a list of vertices and edges that, say, make up the individual spheres that represent the atoms.

jimhefferon 13y ago

Not to pile on but .. .. and some lines were far too tight and some were far too loose, at least in my browser. I am 54 and I can't see some things that I expect a 24 year old can see, and I depend on interword space to be there.

studentrob 13y ago

I doubt anyone will move away from LaTeX, though I also like the one-click alignment of figure and text. If LaTeX were to add a way to associate figures with text, then someone could write a converter from LaTeX to HTML to implement this idea.