Am 09.03.2011 22:33, schrieb Nick Sabalausky: > "Nick Sabalausky" <[email protected]> wrote in message > news:[email protected]... >> >> But why is it that academic authors have a chronic inability to release >> any form of text without first cramming it into a goddamn PDF of all >> things? > > It's like how my dad tries to email photos by sticking them into a Word > document first. WTF's the point? >
No it's not. At least PDF is a standard format with free and open viewers on about any platform. And while sticking photos into a Word document is pretty pointless using PDF for papers does make sense. One thing is that papers are usually published in printed form, the PDFs are more or less a by-product of that. Also they're usually written with LaTeX (or something similar) and the obvious (digital) formats to publish stuff written in *TeX are Postscript and PDF - I guess you agree that PDF is preferable, as it can be searched etc ;) You can also export *TeX to HTML, but that'll probably fuck up formatting and formulas. So you'd have to use some LaTeX->HTML converter and clean up stuff afterwards to make sure the formatting is OK, the formulas are like they were intended to be (missing a small detail like a ' or an index or whatever will make a formula unusable) etc.. This may not be a problem for this specific paper (it's only text, sourcecode and some tables I think), but for many other scientific papers it is. That's the reason why they're mostly published as PDFs. Cheers, - Daniel
