Re: Formats and icing (Was Re: [ESWC 2015] First Call for Paper)

On 2014-10-01 21:05, Luca Matteis wrote:
> Dear Sarven,
>
> This stuff is really cool: http://linked-research.270a.info/
>
> Couple of questions: How did you come up with such a close CSS/HTML
> template as the LCNS latex version? Did you hand code the CSS to make
> it look as close as possible or was it automated by some tool I'm not
> aware of?

As venues always give precise instructions on what template to follow e.g.:

http://static.springer.com/sgw/documents/1121537/application/pdf/SPLNPROC+Author+Instructions_Aug2014.pdf

that's exactly what I did. Read it line by line and wrote the CSS for it.

There is no doubt that the CSS can be better. Different browsers for 
instance have varying CSS3 print support.

If you thought http://linked-research.270a.info/ looked cool, why not 
change the <link href="lncs.css" to "acm.css" from your browser's 
developer tool.

What's demanded by the conferences/publishers is an archaic 
presentation. Fixed page length. Fixed "view". So be it. That is a small 
subset of what we can achieve using the Web stack.

> What you're saying about moving towards RDFa for publishing papers
> should definitely be discussed more, however, CSS/HTML still fails in
> a lot of things that Latex on the other hand excels at. For example
> typography and font kerning/spacing. All that works really well in
> latex/pdf, while in HTML you get different results in different
> browsers. Journals certainly can't expect inconsistencies. I've seen
> templates built in PDF using Latex that you can dream of using
> HTML/CSS. It's just a better set of tools for when it comes to
> publishing *static* documents, because they were built for static
> documents. The Web on the other hand is rarely static. It's an
> interactive playground better suited for a DOM structure such as HTML.

Let me ask you to take a step back for a second. Are you convinced that 
there are far more possibilities with LaTeX/PDF for data representation, 
presentation and interaction than HTML+CSS+JavaScript+RDFa+SVG+MathML.. 
? Do we really need to battle that out? :) Don't worry, I will. As I'll 
demonstrate in my final PhD dissertation ;)

If PDF was so good at static documents, we'd have the Web of PDFs 
instead of Web of HTMLs. I disagree that the Web is rarely static.

As far as the print precision goes, I agree, CSS3 and browser support 
for printing has a lot of work to do. But, what level of precision is 
the SW/LD conferences are worried about providing to publishers? I 
recall that Springer for instance asks for only the PDF. What that 
practically means it that, one can go from LaTeX, HTML+CSS, or dare I 
say, JPEG to PDF. There is no precision police for rendering. Most 
people and organizations have printers that have 300-600 DPI support.

> Isn't there just a standard way to add RDF markup to a PDF file?

Maybe. But, that's totally backwards, IMO.

-Sarven