> >I would therefore advocate making this option as easy as possible to use >within Jmol. In my view, interactive 3D pdf figures should really be the rule >rather than the exception in scientific publishing, and Jmol could lead the >way.
Publishers are likely to love interactive PDF, since it is easy to archive. However, I find one serious issue; such objects are <<data impoverished>>. Whereas with Jmol, one is obliged to provide semantically accurate data (for example CML or equivalent), the PDF object is simply a (pre)rendering of that data. Thus reconstituting a useful molecule from Jmol is trivial (and that reconstitution can then be used for many other purposes), reconstituting a molecule from a 3D PDF is likely to be non trivial, and will almost certainly suffer information loss compared to the original data. By all means, provide BOTH, but I strongly urge that a 3D PDF should NOT be the ONLY object provided. Apart from all these considerations, I can just imagine how publishers would treat the copyright aspects. For example, a publisher CANNOT claim copyright for a Jmol model, since it is basically data, which cannot be copyrighted. But just as they do with 2D images, I should imagine publishers will be falling over themselves to claim copyright for a 3D PDF, since it is intrinsically not data, but in effect <<art>> (and this can be copyrighted). So please, whilst 3D PDF may well have its uses (in 1994 for example, I was a strong advocate of VRML), let us not loose sight of the more fundamental object, which is the data model. -- +44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); FOAF: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/rzepa.xrdf Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK. (Voracious anti-spam filter in operation for received email. If expected reply not received, please phone/fax). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Verizon Developer Community Take advantage of Verizon's best-in-class app development support A streamlined, 14 day to market process makes app distribution fast and easy Join now and get one step closer to millions of Verizon customers http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Jmol-users mailing list Jmol-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jmol-users
