Am 09.03.2011 22:49, schrieb Daniel Gibson: > 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
One more thing: Published papers will probably be cited by other papers or theses. With PDF this is easier, you can write "XYZ, page 42, l 13" - with HTML pages it's not that easy, you could maybe write "in chapter 3 somewhere in the 5th paragraph" or something like that, but that sucks. Or worse "on the fourth page in the third paragraph" and once a new CMS is used that splits pages differently that is completely meaningless..
