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Comment by dealpete | Hacker News Reader

> My only complaint is that I don't particularly like PDF and wish there was an HTML-zip format that could be sent around and the browser did all the rendering work, while the udnerlying data tables are stored in well-defined formats so they can be programatically extracted.

Back when I was doing Math research it was common to submit LateX files to ArXiv. A quick look at some of the Physics papers, though, suggests it may not the case for other fields.

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It depends. arXiv won't normally accept a LaTeX-generated PDF, but it will accept a PDF written in Word.

Particle physicists, cosmologists and astrophysicists almost exclusively use LaTeX (anybody using Word would get laughed at). In other fields of physics, Word is more common and also not everyone submits everything to the arXiv. It's an interesting cultural divide...

I wrote my thesis in latex and convert to html in 1995. It’s still online, 27 years later, and totally readable! Only a few external image links are broken.

I don’t particularly like latex though.

> It depends. arXiv won't normally accept a LaTeX-generated PDF, but it will accept a PDF written in Word.

What do you mean? I predict the majority of PDFs on arxiv are generated from latex just based on the fields who mainly use it. In fact many papers contain the tex source files.

What I mean is, if you try to upload the PDF from LaTeX, it will complain and tell you to upload the sources (which it then compiles to a PDF).

MHTML is not going anywhere, but presumably you could do a single HTML file with all media as embedded data URIs?

I'm in CS research, I submit all my papers as latex sources. Submitting pdfs that were obviously created in latex is supposedly against the rules.

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