On 10/06/2014 04:15 AM, Phillip Lord wrote:
"Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <[email protected]> writes:
One problem with allowing HTML submission is ensuring that reviewers can
correctly view the submission as the authors intended it to be viewed. How
would you feel if your paper was rejected because one of the reviewers could
not view portions of it? At least with PDF there is a reasonably good chance
that every paper can be correctly viewed by all its reviewers, even if they
have to print it out. I don't think that the same claim can be made for
HTML-based systems.
I don't think this is a valid point. It is certainly possible to write
HTML that will not be look good on every machine, but these days, it is
easier to write HTML that does.
The same is true with PDF. Font problems used to be routine. And, as
other people have said, it's very hard to write a PDF that looks good on
anything other than paper.
My aesthetics are different. I routinely view PDFs on my laptop, and find
that they indeed look great. As I said before, I prefer PDF to HTML for
viewing of just about any technical material on my computers. Yes, on limited
displays two-column PDF may not be viewable at all. Single-column PDF should
look good on displays with resolution of HD or better.
When I view HTML documents, even the ones I have written, I have to do a lot
of adjusting to get something that looks even half-decent on the screen. And
when I print HTML documents, the result is invariably bad, and often very bad.
However, my point was not about looking good. It was about being able to see
the paper in the way that the author intended. My experience is that this is
generally possible with PDF, but generally not possible with HTML. I do write
papers with considerable math in them, so my experience may not be typical,
but whenever I have tried to produce HTML versions of my papers, I have ended
up quite frustrated because even I cannot get them to display the way I want
them to.
It may be that there are now good tools for producing HTML that carries the
intent of the author. htlatex has been mentioned in this thread. A solution
that uses htlatex would have the benefit of building on much of the work that
has been done to make latex a reasonable technology for producing papers. If
someone wants to create the necessary infrastructure to make htlatex work as
well as pdflatex does, then feel free.
Further, why should there be any technical preference for HTML at all? (Yes,
HTML is an open standard and PDF is a closed one, but is there anything else
besides that?) Web conference vitally use the web in their reviewing and
publishing processes. Doesn't that show their allegiance to the web? Would
the use of HTML make a conference more webby?
PDF is, I think, open these days. But, yes, I do think that conferences
should dog food. I mean, what would you think if W3C produced all of
their documents in PDF? Would that make sense?
Actually, I would have been very happy if W3C had produced all its technical
documents in PDF. It would have made my life much easier.
Phil
peter
