this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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Science Memes

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submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 42 points 5 months ago (3 children)

If the paper is worth it and does have an original not OCR-ed text layer, it'd better be exported as any other format. We don't call good things a PDF file, lol. It's clumsy, heavy, have unadjustable font size and useless empty borders, includes various limits and takes on DRM, and it's editing is usually done via paid software. This format shall die off.

The only reason academia needs that is strict references to exact page but it's not that hard to emulate. Upsides to that are overwhelming.

I had my couple of times properly digitalizing PDFs into e-books and text-processing formats, and it's a pain in the ass, but if I know it'd be read by someone but me, I'm okay with putting a bit more effort into it.

[–] petersr 27 points 5 months ago

Well, I guess PDF has one thing going for it (which might not be relevant for scientific papers): The same file will render the same on any platform (assuming the reader implements all the PDF spec to the tee).

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Thanks. I've used simplier tools (besides pirated Acrobat) and wrote some scripts to optimize deDRMing and breaking passwords on them. That one ypu posted looks promising. I'd save it to toy with it in my free time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It's the bees knees. Bonus theme for it: https://draculatheme.com/stirling-pdf

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Wow, this is awesome, thanks!

[–] visc 7 points 5 months ago (2 children)

What format do you suggest?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (4 children)

FB2 is a known format for russian pirates, but it can and should be improved because it sucks ass in many things. FB3 was announced long ago but it hasn't got any traction yet.

EPUB is mor/e popular, so it's probably be the go to format for most books US and EU create, but it isn't much better.

Other than that, even Doc\Docx is better than PDF, but I'd recomend RTF for it has less traces of M$ bullshit, and while it's imperfect format, it's still better.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Whatever the format, let's hope it doesn't end up having the extension .map

(minor attracted persons aka PDF file joke)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Get ready for a sweaty techbro to explain why Least Optimized Lossless Image is the superior format.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Only if you use the Self-Hashing Orthogonal Tracing Algorithm, naturally.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don't like docx because it looks different in libreoffice compared to Windows, also you can run into problems with fonts

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

DOC is a mess in different editions of Word too, especially if you do some complex formatting, but it's the default format for text documents thanks to MS.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Maybe for books. I've seen only pdf and PostScript widely used for papers in academia.

Edit: ok my supervisor liked div but he was the only one I knew with this kind of taste

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Div? Can you unpack your thoughts on that, as I haven't faced it yet?

I only know DJVU or deja vu format that's usually used for raw scans.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Djvu is also for books and similar.

I don't know about div format much, but I remember that mktex was producing it as a side effect

[–] visc 3 points 5 months ago

Docx doc rtf and all those have a different purpose than pdf, word docs don’t even necessarily look the same on two different computers with the same version of word, and rtf doesn’t even attempt any kind of paper description, it’s literally only a rich format for text. None of these are a true “if I give this to someone to print I know what I will get” “portable document format”

I will look at fb*, I had not heard of them. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Most papers are made in TEX or LaTEX. These formats separate display from data in such a way that they can be quickly formatted to a variety of page size, margins, text size, et al with minimal effort. It's basically an open standard typesetting format. You can create and edit TEX in any text editor and run it through a program to prepare it for print or viewing. Nothing else can handle math formulas, tables, charts, etc with the same elegance. If you've ever struggled to write a math paper in Microsoft word, seriously question why your professor hasn't already forced you to learn about LaTEX.