- From: Peter F. Patel-Schneider <pfpschneider@gmail.com>
- Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2018 12:16:06 -0800
- To: Ruben Verborgh <Ruben.Verborgh@UGent.be>
- Cc: Axel Polleres <axel@polleres.net>, "Simon.Cox@csiro.au" <Simon.Cox@csiro.au>, Harry Halpin <hhalpin@ibiblio.org>, "info@csarven.ca" <info@csarven.ca>, "semantic-web@w3.org" <semantic-web@w3.org>
On 02/22/2018 03:41 AM, Ruben Verborgh wrote: > >> There are benefits to having a single-file fixed-format >> publication vehicle like PDF that I don't want to give up. > That's an interesting point, and it would be good if we'd all list them, > so we can see what we still need to do with our tooling. > > Mathematical typesetting has come up already > (but still waiting for examples that are hard/impossible now). > > Best, > > Ruben The following is my view of how PDF fits into scholarly publishing. Other researchers may have different views. I'm taking a very broad view of scholarly publishing, ranging from standard journals and series to document repositories. The major attributes of PDF relevant to scholarly publishg are - self-contained documents - a document as a sequence of pages with non-varying line width and page height - non-varying fonts and glyphs, renderable at different resolutions - non-varying embedded graphics, renderable at different resolutions - multiple popular ways to produce conformant documents - multiple popular ways to render at low cost (Yes, some of these are not true of PDF itself, but instead are true of the standard uses of PDF in scholarly publishing.) PDF also has some other features that are often used in scholarly publishing, such as intra-document links and annotations, but I don't view these as important as the above features. Self-contained documents make it much easier to produce, distribute, and conserve a non-varying document, an important aspect of publishing. Paged documents are both a problem and a benefit for scholarly publishing. The need to page documents is problematic, but does ease the display of larger portions of a document on a single imaging device. Fixed line width is currently an advantage for documents with embedded content, particularly large formulae. Fixed fonts and graphic elements retain potentially important distinctions in the document. Multiple popular production toolchains let authors pick and choose, and permit experimentation. Multiple popular low-cost renderers are needed for wide distribution and aid in longevity of the documents. PDF didn't become widely used for publication distribution until after essentially all scholars could easily view PDF documents. peter
Received on Sunday, 25 February 2018 20:16:32 UTC