Comments on: Trip report: visit to Microsoft

By: Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - PDFs « petermr’s blog

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:33:52 +0000

[...] PDF, the point of why PDF is to data what a hamburger is to a cow, in reply to a blog by Peter SF, Scholarly HTML.This lead to a discussion on FriendFeed. A couple of misconceptions:FF: “But how are we going [...]

By: Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - The ICE-man: Scholary HTML not PDF « petermr’s blog

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:14:49 +0000

[...] ICE-man: Scholary HTML not PDF I’m picking up on Peter Sefton’s monster post and one of his phrases suddenly hit me: academia is one of the few places where PDF is considered [...]

By: robert forkel

robert forkel — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:02:09 +0000

@jodi yes, i was thinking abput ereaders after posting my comment. but judging from my own practice, i also have some hope for a new generation of researchers. i still take notes on paper sometimes – but i always feel a little stupid, when i type those notes into a computer lateron.

By: Jodi Schneider

Jodi Schneider — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:01:13 +0000

@robert The future of ereaders is looking up: it’s useful for novels (at least) today. Better annotation and page comparison tools could make ereaders a mainstream tool for scholars.

Scholars also need better tools for archiving HTML. PDF is still used as a takeaway copy. My sense is that PDF vs. HTML use depends on the discipline and the use-cases. For data-driven science, PDFs are not enough–downloadable data is needed.

By: robert forkel

robert forkel — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 07:36:39 +0000

I think “academia is one of the few places where PDF is considered
acceptable” because that’s how the stuff is still used: print it out
to read; so saying PDF is an impediment to usability is only half
true, unfortunately.

With our online-only journals at http://www.livingreviews.org we’re trying
hard to make the HTML version attractive and actually consider it the
authoritative version. but that’s still a hard sell. having to create
PDF of good quality for print is also one the factors that keeps LaTeX
in business, i think, which for us is both, boon and burden.

So what I’d consider prerequisite for scholarly HTML (or HTML in
academia in general) to succeed, is the departure from real
paper. Without the requirement for high print quality on real paper,
I’d hope that also publishers would focus more on what they can do
with/on the web – things like the Article 2.0 contest.
So maybe fighting the climate change will bring about scholarly HTML