RE: Setting the record straight on PLOS

I feel obligated to point out that you are looking at an old article from PLOS. If you look at a recent one you will see an entirely different picture. (Full disclosure: Apex took over the production of PLOS a few months ago.)

You shouldn't see this problem anymore.

All equations are in MathML and also have images to accompany them. Including those converted from LaTex.

All tables are in HTML, though PLOS doesn't currently render the HTML tables online.

The XML generates the PDF, including the equations and tables. The equation and table alternative images are automated derivatives of the PDF layout.

(All this from my colleague Greg Suprock, Apex's Head of Solutions Architecture. Really smart guy. Some of you may know him. Will not stand for crap.)

So please don't judge PLOS by that old example.

--Bill K



-----Original Message-----
From: Robin Berjon [mailto:robin@w3.org] 
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2015 10:19 AM
To: Dave Cramer; Ivan Herman
Cc: Bill Kasdorf; Tzviya Siegman; W3C Digital Publishing IG
Subject: Re: use case: page based scholarly reference?

On 11/06/2015 15:26 , Dave Cramer wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 5:41 AM, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org 
> <mailto:ivan@w3.org>> wrote:
>     P.S. I have to say that PLOS is not a really good example for
>     quality. I was shocked to see that, on [2], all the numbers in the
>     text are… images! It looks horrible in my browser, it is bad in so
>     many ways… Sigh...
>
> Just wow! Here's how they mark up the number "1.8 million":
>
>   <span class="inline-formula"><img
> src="article/asset?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253.e003.PNG"
> class="inline-graphic"></span> million
>
> Human-readable AND accessible. Nice job!*

"Just wow!" was pretty much my reaction too, at least if you filter out the parts that one wouldn't post to a public mailing list.

> Is this an automated MathML to image conversion used inappropriately?

But how would you end up with MathML to markup just the one number in the first place? Broken LaTeX conversion? Note that not *every* number is imaged (but quite a few are).

--
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Thursday, 11 June 2015 19:02:19 UTC