"Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisp...@gmx.com> wrote in message news:mailman.2409.1299728378.4748.digitalmar...@puremagic.com... > 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. Of course, show me a pdf viewer that's actually worth a damn for viewing documents on a PC instead of just printing, and maybe I could be persuaded to not mind so much. So far I've used (as far as I can think of, I know there's been others), Acrobat Reader (which I don't even allow on my computer anymore), the one built into OSX, and FoxIt. > > And yes, most of these papers are published in print format as their main > form > of release. You're usually lucky to be able to get a PDF format instead of > having to have bought the appropriate magazine or book of papers from a > particular conference. > I'm all too well aware how much academics considers us unwashed masses lucky to ever be granted the privilege to so much as glance upon any of their pristine excellence.