You say it as if pdf is somehow better. To begin with it's a proprietary format. If Adobe goes bankrupt or obscure tomorrow, pdf will go out of use as a failed technology.
> it's a proprietary format. If Adobe goes bankrupt or obscure tomorrow, pdf will go out of use as a failed technology. It's an ISO standard with a very large ecosystem outside Adobe. Many users and businesses I know don't use Adobe at all.
They will use it, like COBOL. But are COBOL programs usable on your machine?
I think this is an argument in favor of doing automatic PDF -> HTML conversion for the authors that don't want to touch it, but I don't think it's an argument against letting those who are fine with HTML provide their own.
HTML is not generated from PDF. Both PDF and HTML are generated from LaTeX.
Probably only a small percentage of people are using latex today. I’ve never personally seen it used. Just MS word docs sent to coauthors then to the paper editor.
I learned (the basics of) LaTeX in my last year of middle school, and stuck with it ever since. To be fair, I was into computers since I was a child, played with Rockbox at the age of 10, started to dabble in programming shortly after, so this was a lot less scary than most of the things I was doing already. I took my middle and high school finals (they're kind of like SAT but matter a lot more) by producing LaTeX ou…
Thanks for the suggestions! When you LaTeX your work to turn in, do you work only with the source, or do you have a good way to read the PDF output? I agree the amount of LaTeX needed for calculus is pretty minimal. One of my students was taking chemistry at the same time, which is (I think) much tougher for blind students. But they also had more teaching assistants for the course.
I don't interact with the PDF output myself, but I can compile and email PDFs if I need to send work over to people who do not wish to receive LaTeX themselves, a fact I used throughout most of my high-school education, where LaTeX knowledge was rare. This is why I eschew formatting where possible, I can do enough to make my symbols look right and be understandable to a sighted reader not familiar with LaTeX, but not necessarily to make things extra pretty. Not actually seeing the output makes it a lot more difficult to check your formatting work.
> This makes the PDF format quite inflexible for reading on a computer, with it being impossible to properly zoom or adjust the reading experience. As an academic researcher, generally speaking I also prefer PDF, and the inflexibility and static nature is a feature, not a bug. I appreciate the fact that a paper will appear the same everywhere, that I can refer to "the top of page 7", etc. The exception is if I wanted…
> I appreciate the fact that a paper will appear the same everywhere, that I can refer to "the top of page 7", etc. There are many great solutions to this problem, including ones that don't require Javascript at all. This website ( https://gwern.net/silk-road ) presents a really good example -- every header and sub-header is a clickable anchor. If more granularity is needed, on newer articles most of the paragraphs s…
Also intriguing as a solution, which is potentially much stabler across revisions (page numbers are unstable), is the text-anchor-fragment feature Chrome introduced a while back: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Text_fragments