On Wednesday 09 March 2011 22:18:53 Nick Sabalausky wrote: > "Jonathan M Davis" <[email protected]> wrote in message > news:[email protected]... > > > On Wednesday 09 March 2011 13:30:27 Nick Sabalausky wrote: > >> 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? > >> This is one example of why I despise Adobe's predominance: PDF is > >> fucking useless for anything but printing, and no one seems to know it. > >> Isn't it about time the ivory tower learned about Mosaic? The web is > >> more than a PDF-distribution tool...Really! It is! Welcome to the > >> mid-90's. Sheesh. > > > > And what format would you _want_ it in? PDF is _way_ better than having a > > file > > for any particular word processor. What else would you pick? HTML? Yuck. > > How > > would _that_ be any better than a PDF? These are _papers_ after all, not > > some > > web article. They're either written up in a word processor or with latex. > > Distributing them as PDFs makes perfect sense. > > They're text. With minor formatting. That alone makes html better. Html is > lousy for a lot of things, but formatted text is the one thing it's always > been perfectly good at. And frankly I think I'd *rather* go with pretty > much any word processing format if the only other option was pdf.
I'm afraid that I don't understand at all. The only time that I would consider html better than a pdf is if the pdf isn't searchable (and most papers _are_ searchable). And I _definitely_ don't like dealing with whatever word processor format someone happens to be using. PDF is nice and universal. I don't have to worry about whether I have the appropriate fonts or if I even have a program which can read their word processor format of choice. I don't really have any gripes with PDF at all. - Jonathan M Davis
