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Comment by ethin | Hacker News Reader

I love typst. It's about time we have an authoring system like it that also let's you publish HTML versions of things you write with it instead of just PDFs. Papers in Academia for the longest time have been PDFs, which screen readers are terrible with, mainly because the PDF format is an abomination, and makes accessibility (let alone interoperability) unnecessarily painful.

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PDF serves an important purpose; it’s not an abomination. It conveys exactly what the author or publisher intended. HTML can not do this. It can serve as a reliable archive and be made (imperfectly) accessible, as described in the article. Of course all this comes with significant tradeoffs, including reduced interoperability, as you say. But there are good reasons for academic publishing, especially in math, CS, and physics (but also in some areas of the humanities) to prefer PDFs—it’s not just obstinacy.

I mean, I know why the format is used and what it does. That doesn't make any less of an abomination. Parsing it is an absolute clusterfuck, and accessibility for it is horrifically bad even in Acrobat. By contrast, something like HTML is far better, even if it doesn't necessarily display the document exactly the same way all the time on all devices.

> It conveys exactly what the author or publisher intended.

How many authors intended to break copy and paste of their data?

I don’t have the data to answer your question. But I’d like to point out that it has little to do with my assertions. Note in particular the word “conveys”.

The word doesn't help without specifying the set of intents you meant.

But in general that would also be a mistaken post-hoc rationalization of the state of an ecosystem.

The "author's intent" could just be "I just want to fit the requirement". And the publisher's intent could just be "I don't want to change". None of which is about the deficiency of alternative formats re. "conveying [supposedly design] intent"

And PDF is an abomination because of the awful way it implements the "intent preservation"

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