Re: scientific publishing process (was Re: Cost and access)

On 10/06/2014 08:38 AM, Phillip Lord wrote:
> "Peter F. Patel-Schneider" <pfpschneider@gmail.com> writes:
>> I would be totally astonished if using htlatex as the main way to produce
>> conference papers were as simple as this.
>>
>> I just tried htlatex on my ISWC paper, and the result was, to put it mildly,
>> horrible.  (One of my AAAI papers was about the same, the other one caused an
>> undefined control sequence and only produced one page of output.)   Several
>> parts of the paper were rendered in fixed-width fonts.  There was no attempt
>> to limit line length.  Footnotes were in separate files.
>
>
> The footnote thing is pretty strange, I have to agree. Although
> "footnotes" are a fairly alien concept wrt to the web. Probably hover
> overs would be a reasonable presentation for this.
>
>
>> Many non-scalable images were included, even for simple math.
>
> It does MathML I think, which is then rendered client side. Or you could
> drop math-mode straight through and render client side with mathjax.

Well, somehow png files are being produced for some math, which is a failure. 
  I don't know what the way to do this right would be, I just know that the 
version of htlatex for Fedora 20 fails to reasonably handle the math in this 
paper.

>> My carefully designed layout for examples was modified in ways that
>> made the examples harder to understand.
>
> Perhaps this is a key difference between us. I don't care about the
> layout, and want someone to do it for me; it's one of the reasons I use
> latex as well.

There are many cases where line breaks and indentation are important for 
understanding.  Getting this sort of presentation right in latex is a pain for 
starters, but when it has been done, having the htlatex toolchain mess it up 
is a failure.

>> That said, the result was better than I expected.  If someone upgrades htlatex
>> to work well I'm quite willing to use it, but I expect that a lot of work is
>> going to be needed.
>
> Which gets us back to the chicken and egg situation. I would probably do
> this; but, at the moment, ESWC and ISWC won't let me submit it. So, I'll
> end up with the PDF output anyway.

Well, I'm with ESWC and ISWC here.  The review process should be designed to 
make reviewing easy for reviewers.  Until viewing HTML output is as 
trouble-free as viewing PDF output, then PDF should be the required format.

> This is why it is important that web conferences allow HTML, which is
> where the argument started. If you want something that prints just
> right, PDF is the thing for you. If you you want to read your papers in
> the bath, likewise, PDF is the thing for you. And that's fine by me (so
> long as you don't mind me reading your papers in the bath!). But it
> needs to not be the only option.

Why?  What are the benefits of HTML reviewing, right now?  What are the 
benefits of HTML publishing, right now?  If there were HTML-based tools that 
worked well for preparing, reviewing, and reading scientific papers, then 
maybe conferences would use them.  However, conference organizers and 
reviewers have limited time, and are thus going for the simplest solution that 
works well.

If some group thinks that a good HTML-based solution is possible, then let 
them produce this solution.  If the group can get pre-approval of some 
conference, then more power to them.  However, I'm not going to vote for any 
pre-approval of some future solution when the current situation is satisficing.

> Phil

peter

Received on Monday, 6 October 2014 16:09:29 UTC