Ask HN: Is it time for scientific community to move on from LaTeX/PDF? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it time for scientific community to move on from LaTeX/PDF?

6 pointskartoshechka6 comments

Arxiv encourages users to submit papers either in PDF or .tex source files, while other formats, such as HTML, being optional. Naturally each paper seen by myself, is .tex or PDF. I've done intermediate thesis in Latex and now I'm stuck with it again for no good reason but, from my point of view, "historical". Not even considering HTML/CSS as the best format possible, I couldn't convince myself in prevalent necessity of PDF/Tex.

1. Latex is better at rendering math? MathJax enables users to render actual Latex code on HTML pages, and I wouldn't say Math StackExchange threads are unreadable.

2. PDFs are more convenient? They look good on paper, and they're optimized for better looking. The formatting and document structure are pretty much irrecoverable from PDF, making data wrangling on PDF redundantly complex.

3. Latex is better suited for typesetting scientific text? It's possible to get the Latex looks on HTML text, though, with potentially higher effort, but this may be eliminated by standard styles that arxiv imposes on Tex/PDF.

4. Tex/PDF were developed to be rendered identically for decades, therefore are better for archiving? For timeless texts I can't think of situation where author is pressured to include all of the plotting library binaries, and most likely this issue may be resolved by well-estabilished, legacy-first set of tools, while maintaining existing paper structure (intro-related work...)

5. Does future hold paper-printed journals? For some physical books are more comfortable to read, though quite a few of them are murdered by either author's unwillingness to pay or publisher's unwillingness to spend. In a context of scientific research, the static nature of PDF (and paper) is limiting and I enjoy more animated, dynamic articles. Trade-off for mentally more challenging varying structures of HTML pages is deeper comprehension, and I doubt this is worthless for a scientist.

I've been using Latex since the 1980s. My .tex files still render with the same output.

However, my HTML pages from earlier in this decade mis-render on certain browsers. Images overlay text, External links die. Internal links die because I forgot to check all of them. The move to https means that "modern browsers" force the user to explicitly type 'http://...'.

Specifically

(1) Latex really is better at rendering math, especially when I need to create special character combinations

(2) PDFs are "irrecoverable" (my site also publishes the latex and you can run detex to strip the latex

(3) HTML "texts" require me to keep my browser open, which is challenging considering MS reboots my machine once a week and Firefox simply stops working after a week

(4) I need the referenced papers to "render identically", especially when the are several decades old

(5) You can do animation in Latex. As for "deeper comprehension", most of the papers I read are barely at the edge of my understanding (which I why I'm reading them). I print them out to do hand markup. Did you ever try to print an HTML page?

While I agree with most of what you stated but imo, LaTeX helps with pretty much everything the community needs. Hell, it even has a Reference Management Software going for it to manage citations easily.

It's really easy to convert to other formats ( even HTML ) so it's not like you're missing anything. And most of all, the files are structured.

Now, I get it that everyone is entitled to their own opinion but the kind of support and features LaTeX already has, I don't see why anyone would want to move on in the first place. The alternative offers slightly less and at no "significant" advantage. So what I think is, the community would prefer LaTeX in the foreseeable future.

I get the feeling that most simply don't care about status quo, but they have been in this "industry" for quite some time, aren't flaws of PDF transparent? While I don't mind Latex, I would argue HTML is better suited for automated processing, whatever purpose it meant for

> aren't flaws of PDF transparent?

Ummmmm... no. Not really.

> better suited for automated processing

I write my papers for other humans. I'm dimly aware that there are a variety of "analytics" companies that are trying to elbow their way into academia. For example there is this company

https://academicanalytics.com/

of which my university is unfortunately a customer. They have some dashboard or something which purports to show my grandbosses how productive I am. I do not wish them well, and I am certainly not going to alter my workflow to accommodate them.

I'm a research mathematician, and I use LaTeX/PDF for everything I write. I'm happy with it, and so is virtually everyone I know.

The only complaint I've heard, which strikes me as serious, is that PDF documents pose accessibility concerns for blind people. I imagine that this could be fixed, though, if effort were invested -- perhaps by compiling LaTeX into something else; it doesn't seem like an intrinsic limitation of LaTeX.

The static nature of PDF is a feature, not a bug. Research papers, once completed, don't change. (And researchers don't do "maintenance".) This assures that you can cite Lemma 6.23 of So-and-So's paper, and twenty years from now the reference will make sense. The purpose of papers isn't to be enjoyed or to teach, but rather to serve as the scientific record.

It strikes me that, in the software industry, one has to invest huge amounts of effort into ensuring that your software remains compatible with other software which is changing. Not something I'm eager to emulate.

I think you kind of answer your own question here, Latex/PDF handles all of the things you mentioned with relative ease, with the only drawback being that PDF's can be hard to parse automaticly. However that point seems moot as well since it's fairly easy to share datasets and actual results separately.

Inventing new systems to replace latex/pdf and ftp (for sharing datasets) would introduce significant overhead without providing any tangible benefits.

So the big question in my mind is why should you move away from latex/pdf?

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