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?

Comments

LaTeX

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be talking about LaTex. It already exists. Don't reinvent it.

Re:LaTeX

[Liquidrage]

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

Re:LaTeX

[The Snowman]

You seem to be talking about LaTex. It already exists. Don't reinvent it.

Another alternative is RTF, which is a sister SGML language of HTML. While it may have drawbacks, it would accomplish most if not all of what is required.

Re:LaTeX

[fermion]

Latex is really the solution. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel. In fact, reinventing the wheel might cause problems when submitting papers. From what I have seen, many academic journals prefer .tex and .eps files. I can't imagine what they would do with HTML.

The nice thing about LaTex is that, like HTML, it is a pure markup language, but it is a markup language that understands typesetting so one tend to get a good page layout no matter what. OTOH, HTML merely identifies blocks of text as various generic types, and really does not have a context for the types. The render engine is free visualize, make a sound, or do whatever it wishes to represent the blocks. CSS is what imposes a consistent visual framework, so what one needs to duplicate LaTex is in fact CSS.

Use LaTex. Except for the often limited fonts, it is vastly superior to an word processor, because a word processor is not the write tool to create real documents. We have know that for many years. That is why people bought pagemaker. And I think the lack of fonts forces people to create compelling content. LaTex is free, there are many good books,and if you do have a hankering to code, you can always play with Tex.

Re:LaTeX

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the font problem is solved by using XeLaTeX (which uses XeTeX).

Full OpenType support. Looks amazing.

Re:LaTeX

[femto]

LyX. I wrote a thesis in it and didn't have to resort to any manual interventions in the generated LaTeX. Couple it with SVG diagrams, generated by inkscape, and you have a seamless authoring system that handles both text and graphics. SVG means there is no messy task of keeping source and postscript output synchronised (just right click a diagram within LyX to edit the SVG source with inkscape). Use gnuplot to generate your (postscript) graphs and you have pretty well a complete authoring system. A few years ago, LyX and inkscape were too immature to use seriously, but they have matured. I recommend the combination.

Re:LaTeX

[Petrushka]

I have a sneaking suspicion that when the OP is saying things like "no CSS" and doesn't mention LaTeX, s/he is actually giving specifications in a very obfuscated way -- specifications that need to be deduced. What I take from the post is that the OP wants

• Portability. Anyone can open an HTML file without having to install new software; the same doesn't go for ODF, LaTeX, or MSWord. I suspect this is the main thing the OP wants. But this shouldn't rule out CSS.
• Everything in one file: I'm guessing this may be why the OP doesn't want CSS. But that's not a good reason to avoid CSS either, since CSS can perfectly easily go in the same file. (I think it does rule out editing the XML in ODF documents, though, since as far as I'm aware they're always a composite of several files.)
• Read/edit in the same document. This could be another reason why the OP doesn't mention LaTeX. LaTeX is perfect for editing, not so great for reading: for that you have PDF. Maybe the OP doesn't want to have two separate files like that.

I'm guessing the OP has been inspired by the use of HTML for slide presentations, in the form of S5. I can see that. But the specifications, if I've deduced them correctly, are not hugely well-thought-out ones. I can kind of see someone not wanting to use LaTeX for the reasons given above, but insisting on no CSS is crazy.

In any case, the OP should certainly give slightly clearer specifications if s/he doesn't want to have people yelling "LaTeX!!!" all day.

Re:LaTeX

[plasticsquirrel]

Use LaTex. Except for the often limited fonts, it is vastly superior to an word processor, because a word processor is not the write tool to create real documents. We have know that for many years. That is why people bought pagemaker. And I think the lack of fonts forces people to create compelling content. LaTex is free, there are many good books,and if you do have a hankering to code, you can always play with Tex.

LaTeX has limited fonts, but if you use XeTeX (which uses LaTeX), you can not only use all the LaTeX stuff, but also any TrueType or OpenType font, and native unicode support as well. This is a godsend for typesetting anything that includes words or characters not in English, or just for people who are picky about typography. My personal favorite font is the open source SIL Gentium family, which is not only much more beautiful and readable than Times, but contains a fuller character set that makes it compatible with many more languages. Once you start writing documents with XeTeX and nicer fonts, you see how lacking word processors are for good typography and well-structured documents, and how self-limiting the concept is.

For newcomers to LaTeX and XeTeX, including packages and specifying options can be a bit time-consuming when you just want to get started with a basic A4-sized document. Here is the basic XeTeX file template I use for simple stuff. I'm picky about margins, line spacing, fonts, etc. so you know that it's a safe place to start out.
-

\documentclass[11pt]{article}

%%
% XeTeX packages
%%
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xunicode}
\usepackage{xltxtra}

%%
% Formatting packages
%%
\usepackage{setspace}
\usepackage[vcentering,dvips]{geometry}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}

\geometry{papersize={8.5in,11in},total={6.5in,8.8in}}

\pdfpagewidth 8.5in
\pdfpageheight 11in

% 10pt font: 1.15
% 11pt font: 1.1
\setstretch{1.1}

\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Gentium Basic}

\begin{document}

Some text...

\end{document}

Re:LaTeX

[moosesocks]

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.

Re:LaTeX

[Nitewing98]

Yes, not using CSS is crazy. Especially since CSS includes the concept of media types. A simple "media='print'" in the CSS spec should hand that.

Re:LaTeX

[rhathar]

Portability:

Name me an OS that doesn't have a PDF or PS reader installed by default.

Windows

Re:LaTeX

[smallfries]

Further to the two AC posts: you are doing something wrong. As an academic I send / receive latex source all the time and expect it to compile and reproduce the same exact same results. How are you abusing TeX to get these kinds of problems?

Re:LaTeX

[TerranFury]

But... not everything about the PDF is specified by the LaTeX source -- and the toolchain matters. For instance, a document prepared for pdflatex with pdf figures and another prepared for the latex-->dvips-->ps2pdf route (which is often necessary as a number of journal styles use some pstricks) will in general not work with the opposite toolchain. Another example is paper size; certain of these tools output either letter or A4 by default, and must be instructed on the command line (or, really, in your build scripts) when you want the other (I know you can specify paper sizes in the source, but this is lost somewhere in the toolchain).

Download ubuntu on one computer. Use apt to install kile and all its dependecies. Compile a paper written with the IEEE conference style. Now install Windows on another computer. Install MiKTeX on it and do the same. You will get similar output, but it will by no means be identical. The most noticeable thing is that margins are different.

Oh, and so far I've ignored in this discussion that different styles will use different methods for including, say, theorems. It is a pipe dream to simply change the style of a document and expect decent results. Chances are the damn thing won't even compile -- and if it does, all your beautiful theorems will look like crap because the other style expected some different markup for them.

I don't rule out that I'm doing something wrong, and if I am, I could stand to use some enlightenment. But I know that I don't use LaTeX significantly differently from anyone else I know...

Congratulations!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Congratulations!

[Memroid]

Speaking of HTML/CSS... can I be the first person to suggest that we rename "Anonymous Cowardon" back to "Anonymous Coward"?

PDF?

[sys.stdout.write]

As much as I hate Adobe, there's a reason why PDF files dominate acadamia..

CSS3 is the solution

[Tiles]

This is exactly what CSS is designed for, presentation. The CSS3 Paged Media module already defines a number of the properties and settings you're going for. It even includes positions such as @bottom-center to allow you to position footnotes and references. The only thing missing is a way to mark this up in HTML, which could easily be done with anchors and the longdesc attribute, coupled with the CSS content: property. What you're looking for is a CSS3 enabled browser, not a new specification.

Wrong, in many ways

[Zaffle]

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.

Re:Wrong, in many ways

[Ambiguous Coward]

You should, as an authoring tool, never...

Who're you callin' a tool?

Static Page Feeds are available

[caffiend666]

Static configurations are available already, not the intelligent ones being requested. Has sufficed for what I needed:

To have print page break add: <p style="page-break-before: always">

Also, to hide odd font and underline for links:

<STYLE TYPE="text/css" MEDIA=print> <!-- A { text-decoration: none; color: black } --> </STYLE>

Yes, they have to be massaged a little.

what do you want to do?

[jipn4]

If you want to save the source form or markup, use a language designed for it: LaTeX. LaTeX lets you represent all the things you would want to represent in an academic paper, it's fairly readable, very widespread, and has tons of tools. And LaTeX converts to both HTML and PDF.

If you want to display on the web, use HTML. It's meant for the web. It's not a good representation for paged media. If you must represent paged media, you need to use CSS or XSL, but you probably don't want to.

If you want archival quality paged representations, PDF is the only game in town really. HTML with CSS doesn't come close. But it doesn't make sense to save your own papers only in PDF because PDF is not really editable and doesn't have the semantic information.

XSL:FO

[Roxton]

There's a little-used standard that came out of the W3C along with XSLTs called XSL:FO. You write your document in XSL:FO markup, and then one of any number of processors like XEP to convert it into PDF or what have you.

http://www.w3schools.com/xslfo/default.asp

One of the original purposes of it was so that you could use XSLTs to transform the same XML data into both XHTML or XSL:FO for publishing. The standard never took off though. XSL:FO just doesn't have enough options to be typographically interesting, compared to SVG.

Of course, the right answer is LaTeX, but you might want to give XSL:FO a try for familiarity's sake.

Use DITA

[wooden pickle]

Someone mentioned XML/XSL/FO. Don't try to write your content in XSL-FO. You'll hate every minute of it.

I'd look in to using DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). It's a set of canned XML structures, plus a specification for how to process and customize those structures. It includes tags for stuff like footnotes...I bet it covers a lot of your use cases. There are some good intros to how these XML structures work here: http://dita.xml.org/book/dita-wiki-knowledgebase

As DITA is XML, you can convert it to HTML and whatever else you feel like, pretty easily. There's an open-source implementation of the DITA spec called the DITA Open Toolkit (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot/). The DITA Open Toolkit includes stylesheets/scripts to publish HTML and PDF, among other things. PDFs are published via XSL-FO. Just like HTML needs a web browser to render something useful, XSL-FO requires a FO processor to create a PDF. So, in the end you write DITA, XSLT and other scripts transform that DITA to XSL-FO, the a FO processor consumes the XSL-FO and spits out a PDF. The DITA Open Toolkit comes with an open-source FO processor (Apache FOP). FOP doesn't fulfill everyone's needs, but it might work very well for you.

Unfortunately, working with the Open Toolkit and customizing its output can be a bit unwieldy. http://groups.yahoo.com/search?query=dita+users is a pretty good place to look for help.

texexplorer

[e**(i pi)-1]

yes, latex is nice, but it would be even better, if basic TeX would
be understood by browsers.  About 10 years ago, IBM had a cool plugin called texexplorer.
The plugin would compile latex on the fly. No need to publish a PDF. It worked
pretty well for basic documents which would not rely on macros.

Still, to address the question of the submitter, it would be nice to have something like

<latex>
$\int_0^1  \frac{\sqrt{\sin(x)}}{1+x^2} \; dx$.
</latex>

It would not have to be the full latex stack but the ability to place mini latex pages into
HTML documents. Its a pity techexplorer technology seems have disappeared. If IBM would
opensource it, it could become an add-on for firefox.