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

Dear Peter,

please show me how to query PDFs with SPARQL. Then I'll believe there
are no benefits of XHTML+RDFa over PDF.

Addressing the issue from the reviewer perspective only is too narrow,
don't you think?


Martynas

On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 6:08 PM, Peter F. Patel-Schneider
<pfpschneider@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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 16:20:09 UTC