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Comment by ashleyn | Hacker News Reader

I think I see where you're coming from here. When I see something typeset with Latex/in the Computer Modern font...the quick assumption I make is that I'm not going to understand a single word of it.

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That is my default assumption too, that I will not get what they are saying.

OT: This paper is produced using a wordprocessor; my PDF reader says it is produced by OpenOffice.org 2.4. The word spacing and justification of paragraphs makes me think that this is not LaTeX, nevertheless it looks professional. Tex experts have also come to this conclusion [1]. But is it the original PDF or someone's version/copy of it?

[1] : https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/306754/was-anything-...

It's the original. Satoshi used Computer Modern for the headers, which is kind of strange. I guess they wanted to give it the TeX vibe, but didn't want to use LaTeX for some reason.

If anyone wants to collaborate on a TeX version, let me know!

There are two sides to that issue. On the one hand, the point of publishing research is to make knowledge available to humanity, so if you are having trouble understanding even the basic premise of a research paper (what problem it is addressing, etc.) then the authors are failing to achieve that goal. On the other hand, if every published paper was written to be accessible for non-experts in the field, papers would become longer and longer over time as lines of research progressed.

Unfortunately there is no reward for researchers taking the time to write tutorial and survey papers that give more readable explanations of particular lines of work.

Should there be? Seems pointless to target every paper for entry level understanding, paper length would grow exponentially and it would quickly become unreadable.

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