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

Dear Sarven,

I really appreciate the work that you're doing with trying to style an
HTML page to look similar to the Latex templates. But there's so many
typesetting details that are not available in browsers, which means
you're going to do a lot of DOM hacking to be able to produce the same
quality typography that Latex is capable of. Latex will justify text,
automatically hyphenate, provide proper spacing, and other typesetting
features. Not to mention kerning. Kerning is a *huge* thing in
typography and with HTML you're stuck with creating a DOM element for
every single letter - yup you heard me right.

I think it would be super cool to create some sort of JavaScript
framework that would enable the same level of typography that Latex is
capable of, but you'll eventually hit some hard limitations and you'll
probably be stuck drawing on a canvas.

What are your ideas regarding these problems?

On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 2:26 PM, Sarven Capadisli <info@csarven.ca> wrote:
> On 2014-10-08 14:10, Peter F. Patel-Schneider wrote:
>>
>> Done.
>>
>> The goal of a new paper-preparation and display system should, however,
>> be to be better than what is currently available.  Most HTML-based
>> solutions do not exploit the benefits of HTML, strangely enough.
>>
>> Consider, for example, citation links.  They generally jump you to the
>> references section.  They should instead pop up the reference, as is
>> done in Wikipedia.
>>
>> Similarly for links to figures.  Instead of blindly jumping to the
>> figure, they should do something better, perhaps popping up the figure
>> or, if the figure is already visible, just highlighting it.
>>
>> I have put in both of these as issues.
>
>
> Thanks a lot for the issues! Really great to have this feedback.
>
> I have resolved and commented on some of those already, and will look at the
> rest very shortly.
>
> I am all for improving the interaction as well. I'd like to state again that
> the development was so far focused on adhering to the LNCS/ACM guidelines,
> and improving the final PDF/print product. That is to get on reasonable
> grounds with the "state of the art".
>
> Moving on: I plan to bring in the interaction and framework to easily
> semantically enrich the document as well as the overall UX. I have some
> preliminary code in my dev branch, and will bring it forward, and would like
> feedback as well.
>
> Thanks again and please continue to bring forward any issues or feature
> requests. Contributors are most welcome!
>
> -Sarven
> http://csarven.ca/#i
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 8 October 2014 13:14:47 UTC