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thomblake comments on Why Academic Papers Are A Terrible Discussion Forum - Less Wrong
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It's not "nearly as debilitating as a paywall" for most people. And many people prefer pdf to html, including jsteinhardt and myself.
I had my LaTeX team look into what it would cost to generate well-formatted HTML versions of our papers, and it doesn't seem worth it on the present margin. But at a larger funding level it clearly would be.
I find that surprising. Is this based on a study or something?
If I click a link and it leads to a pdf my reaction is usually something like "Ack Abort ABORT!!!" and then I won't download the pdf unless it's something that I really need - the sort of thing I would also likely pay for. Even then I'd in most cases prefer to see it in any other format.
When I click on a PDF link, my web browser opens the PDF in another tab. It's a quick and easy way to view PDFs without downloading them onto my hard drive. If you have an aversion to downloading PDFs but would still like to read them, then you may want to enable that feature in your web browser.
For some reason the PDF reader plug-in in my browser doesn't work as well as my stand-alone PDF reader (though they're both from Adobe), so I still prefer to download them.
Just FYI, when you click a link and view content, that content has been downloaded onto your hard drive, even if you only see it on a browser window..
The browser PDF readers are even worse than standalone Adobe Acrobat (especially in Chrome, which is my primary web browser).
I'd rather just not support the use of such a broken file format.
My opinion is the opposite, to the point I've set Chrome as my default program for PDFs, even those on my local hard drive. IIRC, it's based on the open source Foxit reader.
Chrome's PDF reader is missing a lot of features. Notably, no page numbers / jump to page.
Really? I thought viewing it in my browser is more akin to streaming a video. But I could easily be wrong about that.
Ah, okay. I use Firefox with an Adobe Acrobat plugin. Not familiar at all with Chrome and other PDF readers.
The difference is minor. FWIW, a better analogy might be downloading a video file to your browser's temp directory and then opening it in VLC to watch while it's still downloading.
Gotcha. Thank you for the correction.