Slashdot Mirror
HTML Tags For Academic Printing?
meketrefi writes "It's been quite a while since I got interested in the idea of using html (instead of .doc. or .odf) as a standard for saving documents — including the more official ones like academic papers. The problem is using HTML to create pages with a stable size that would deal with bibliographical references, page breaks, different printers, etc. Does anyone think it is possible to develop a decent tag like 'div,' but called 'page,' specially for this? Something that would make no use of CSS? Maybe something with attributes as follows: {page size="A4" borders="2.5cm,2.5cm,2cm,2cm" page_numbering="bottomleft,startfrom0"} — You get the idea... { /page} I guess you would not be able to tell when the page would be full, so the browser would have to be in charge of breaking the content into multiple pages when needed. Bibliographical references would probably need a special tag as well, positioned inside the tag ..." Is this such a crazy idea? What would you advise?
Good answer. Now all we need is for someone to mod your post up to +5 and then lock the thread.
*sigh* it's a slow news day
Congratulations, you're the 5,134,978th person to suggest a change to HTML which will prevent it from being reflowable!
Please step up to the spiked door in front of the acid pit to claim your prize.
What you want (being able to define pages) is wrong in many many ways.
You should, as an authoring tool, never define a page, or its dimensions, especially academic works, which will be printed in different formats, on different paper (A4/Letter/Tradeback/etc/etc)
At most, whatever markup you have, many define things like page breaks, but even then, they are more a typesetting issue.
What you want is either LaTeX or DocBook.
I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.
Although I agree with you in that LaTeX is widely used in the scientific community, and unambiguously offers the best typesetting facilities you'll find outside of a publishing house, is it still appropriate today?
The internet as we know it was created at CERN to facilitate the sharing of scientific information. Why are we still publishing in a format designed to be presented on dead trees?
Like it or not, a properly-formatted print article looks horrible on a screen. An article formatted for printing on A4 or Letter-sized paper will use the whole width of the page, be set in 10-point type, and use columns. Unfortunately, modern computer screens don't have nearly enough resolution to display the full width of the page alongside much else. Obviously, PDF files also don't have the ability to flow to fit the width of the screen.
LaTeX also doesn't give you the benefit of hypertext. Yes, there are various hacks you can use to add anchors and links to PDFs, although these are mere hacks on top of a broken format. Things such as high-resolution figures and hyperlinked references would be particularly beneficial for academic uses. It'd also be great to be able to see all articles linking back to what you happen to be reading. (This brings up all sorts of questions about the very nature of scientific publishing, although this is another debate entirely)
Wikipedia (more specifically, MediaWiki) actually offers a promising solution to these (and the original poster's) requirements. It provides a convenient and simplistic markup for multi-sectioned articles, flows to fit the width of the page, and also provides LaTeX's fantastic mathematical typesetting facilities. Hyperlinking to other parts of the Wiki (and to external sites) is excessively easy. I'm sure the DOI system could be integrated to allow linking back to other articles within the constraints of the existing academic publishing regime.
Google could very easily provide the "glue" to hold such a system together, although it would ultimately be better to put a public, non-profit entity in charge. It's absurd and hypocritical that so much of academic research (particularly the publishing part of it) is profit-driven.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Portability:
Name me an OS that doesn't have a PDF or PS reader installed by default.
Windows
http://www.chaotickingdoms.com