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

I'm always at a bit of a loss when I read this sort of thing. Kerning,
seriously? We can't share scientific content in HTML because of kerning?

In practice, web browsers do a perfectly reasonable job of text layout,
in real time, and do it in a way that allows easy reflowing. The 
thing about Sarven's LNCS style sheets, for instance, is that I like the
most is that I can turn them off; I don't like the LNCS format.

Having said all of that, 5 minutes of googling suggests that, kerning
support is in Canditate Recommendation form from W3C, and at least three
different JS libraries that support it.

Phil

Luca Matteis <lmatteis@gmail.com> writes:
> 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
>>
>>
>
>
>

-- 
Phillip Lord,                           Phone: +44 (0) 191 222 7827
Lecturer in Bioinformatics,             Email: phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk
School of Computing Science,            http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/phillip.lord
Room 914 Claremont Tower,               skype: russet_apples
Newcastle University,                   twitter: phillord
NE1 7RU

Received on Wednesday, 8 October 2014 13:56:15 UTC