Le 05/06/2014 09:33, Ralf Hemmecke a écrit :
And rigor, I suppose? pdf format is not frozen, pdf viewers are not
bug-free. Remember an RMLL conference in Metz where the pdf file of a
colleague didn't display some text of the file. dvi format is very
simple and frozen, dvi viewers exist and can be supposed bug-free for
these reason. Same old recurrent debate of "new" vs "old",
You misunderstood my question about dvipdfm.

I don't like .dvi and .pdf. These are binary formats. Source counts.
Ah, I see, OK. In theory, in a world with perfect humans, I would completely agree with you. But in practice, in a world with imperfect humans, source is often insufficient: I could cite many tex sources of colleagues that did not compile because they used files that were not available anymore; I have seen also style files, one particular version of it broke representation of mathematical formulas. In these cases, dvi saves from starting from zero. So, I would say the couple source and dvi are indispensable in an imperfect world. Creating output versions in pdf, html, epub etc. is of course a plus, and one of these (and no dvi) may be quite sufficient for a thriller author because an error can be corrected automatically by the brain of the reader. But for mathematics and works that need rigor and for which the brain cannot automatically correct errors : I think the best is still to have source and dvi (and pdf as a plus, but not as a replacement). This is, by the way, the approach also used for ArXiV (if it didn't change recently).

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