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RichardKennaway comments on What Would You Like To Read? A Quick Poll - Less Wrong
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Comments (43)
If it comes to my attention, I really don't care, as long as it's discursive written text, i.e. not audio or slides.
What are people's objections to PDF? For me PDF has two advantages. A PDF can include complex mathematics, which most papers I read do. This is generally done badly or not at all in other media. PDFs are also self-contained: I can download a PDF and have the whole thing, which is not always possible with HTML. A downside is that they don't reflow to accommodate the window size, making them awkward to read on a phone, but most HTML is broken in that way as well (including e.g. LessWrong). I've little experience of other e-book formats.
Mostly moral objections, for me.
Like what? FYI, PDF hasn't been proprietary since 2008, and there are plenty of free/open source implementations of it.
The structure of the specification is gigantic, lengthy, and wrong-headed on many points. It's a file format but it tries to define details of how it should be viewed (!!!). It is bloated and inefficient. It moves things away from becoming efficient data - plain text becomes formatted or even a flat picture of words.
As an illustration of how messed up the spec is, even Adobe Photoshop commonly fails to render PDFs the same way as Adobe Acrobat.
This can be handled with some effort with epub and Mobi. In HTML it requires either reference to generated images or some javascript (or browser specific support).
Oh yes, there are ways of working around the limitation. But they are all just workarounds that create difficulties for either the writer or the reader, e.g. MathML is not practically writable by a human being. MathJax looks like the nearest thing to an actual solution for HTML (even if under the hood it's made of workarounds around workarounds), but I've never encountered a site that uses it other than the MathJax site itself.
Using Pandoc to convert our LaTeX math to MathJax for display sounds like the best option for us. The ability to copy and paste the generated Math could be handy. Most alternatives end up giving you images.
It's worked pretty well for me so far. I don't even need to host MathJax on my site - it's one of the libraries the Google CDN provides for free. (But I don't use much LaTeX more complicated than division, natural logs, etc.)