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

"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.


> 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.


> 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.

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.

Phil

Received on Monday, 6 October 2014 15:39:12 UTC