Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents

This is great, but when is academia, business and government going to finally get off PDF as a typical standard? It's awful, not adaptive for mobile, and a pain in the ass to work with for any kind of development.

Re: Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents

#5

Post by vosper » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:03 PM UTC

gremlinunderway wrote: post #4

This is great, but when is academia, business and government going to finally get off PDF as a typical standard? It's awful, not adaptive for mobile, and a pain in the ass to work with for any kind of development.

What's a good alternative, for users and developers?

I don't have any love for PDF, but I'm actually not sure what's more cross-platform. Any browser will render PDF, so everyone already has a viewer on their computer. A browser will also print any document to PDF, and many other editors can export to PDF (though perhaps not import for editing)

It can't be replaced by an Office format, like docx, because even today apps like Pages can't render MS Office docs correctly half the time.

Doesn't seem like HTML would fly, either, given all the kinds of things that get embedded into PDF.

Re: Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents

#6

Post by froh » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:19 PM UTC

gremlinunderway wrote: post #4

This is great, but when is academia, business and government going to finally get off PDF as a typical standard? It's awful, not adaptive for mobile, and a pain in the ass to work with for any kind of development.

pdf looks the same everywhere and is self-contained. an "immutable" document which looks the same for everyone if it hashes to the same sha... key. which has a value on it's own.

Re: Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents

#7

Post by harshreality » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:38 PM UTC

froh wrote: post #6

gremlinunderway wrote: post #4

This is great, but when is academia, business and government going to finally get off PDF as a typical standard? It's awful, not adaptive for mobile, and a pain in the ass to work with for any kind of development.

pdf looks the same everywhere and is self-contained. an "immutable" document which looks the same for everyone if it hashes to the same sha... key. which has a value on it's own.

There's nothing immutable about pdfs. If you have an "original" document, it'll always hash to whatever it hashes to. I fail to see the point. You can cite md5 hashes on LG the same whether they're pdfs or epubs or, heaven forbid, azw3 (amazon's proprietary epub-like format).

What's the obsession with "looking the same everywhere"?

Page references: this shouldn't be a thing. Academia has already solved this problem for notable texts. Rather than nearly uncountable numbers of paragraphs that all run together, paragraphs or short sections or lines are numbered. See any good edition of Plato or Aristotle, or just about any notable play or longer poem ever translated. Relying on a single published layout of a work to reference is dumb.

Citing exact line numbers isn't even necessary for native-language works. When they're digital, search works. It works even better in flowed-format texts than it does in pdfs, which sometimes, depending on how the pdf was constructed, won't match text properly across newlines.

Visual quality: As long as images—data, charts, graphs, photographs—are not degraded beyond usefulness, the actual text, and its display, is up to the reader application. Everyone uses the web complete with mathjax, and those doesn't have Knuth-approved formatting in every respect. But they're good enough, and they work everywhere on every device without squinting or pinch to zoom. There are some people who insist on putting pre-rendered images of math in html, and they always look worse, because they don't match the text without a lot of work to have extra high-res images that are auto-scaled according to viewport and surrounding font size—work that I bet not many people have ever done in the history of html publishing.

Re: Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents

#8

Post by etrautmann » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:46 PM UTC

harshreality wrote: post #7

froh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pdf looks the same everywhere and is self-contained. an "immutable" document which looks the same for everyone if it hashes to the same sha... key. which has a value on it's own.

There's nothing immutable about pdfs. If you have an "original" document, it'll always hash to whatever it hashes to. I fail to see the point. You can cite md5 hashes on LG the same whether they're pdfs or epubs or, heaven forbid, azw3 (amazon's proprietary epub-like format). What's the obsession with "looking the same everywhere"? Page references: this shouldn't be a thing. Academia has already solved this problem f…

how does line number citation work for responsive text?

Re: Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents

#9

Post by harshreality » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:47 PM UTC

vosper wrote: post #5

gremlinunderway wrote: post #4

This is great, but when is academia, business and government going to finally get off PDF as a typical standard? It's awful, not adaptive for mobile, and a pain in the ass to work with for any kind of development.

What's a good alternative, for users and developers? I don't have any love for PDF, but I'm actually not sure what's more cross-platform. Any browser will render PDF, so everyone already has a viewer on their computer. A browser will also print any document to PDF, and many other editors can export to PDF (though perhaps not import for editing) It can't be replaced by an Office format, like docx, because even today a…

HTML and various javascript libraries like mathjax or other libraries for charts and graphs.

> Doesn't seem like HTML would fly, either, given all the kinds of things that get embedded into PDF.

That's ironic. Browser PDF readers, at least open source ones, render PDFs as HTML using javascript. At least I'm sure about FF because I just checked that text from a native-digital pdf showed up in the DOM in developer tools.

Re: Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents

#10

Post by harshreality » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 9:50 PM UTC

etrautmann wrote: post #8

harshreality wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing immutable about pdfs. If you have an "original" document, it'll always hash to whatever it hashes to. I fail to see the point. You can cite md5 hashes on LG the same whether they're pdfs or epubs or, heaven forbid, azw3 (amazon's proprietary epub-like format). What's the obsession with "looking the same everywhere"? Page references: this shouldn't be a thing. Academia has already solved this problem f…

how does line number citation work for responsive text?

You put line numbers in the margin (with css styling), or I've also seen it as [#] inline in the text, possibly styled differently to make it more intuitive that it's not part of the source text.

For the vast majority of works that are untranslated, that isn't necessary, because, as mentioned, search works fine, and it's faster, too. For translated works, the concept of one published source of truth for page numbers is already broken, so you need some alternative to page numbers anyway.