HTML Tags For Academic Printing? 338
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?
Re:Have you looked at PrinceXML? (Score:2, Interesting)
I've had great experience with PrinceXML -- same document to generate both interactive web page and printable PDF using CSS3 tailored to the media. If you already know HTML/CSS, extending yourself to CSS3 is a lot easier than learning LaTeX.
Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Interesting)
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
I'm guessing the OP has been inspired by the use of HTML for slide presentations, in the form of S5 [wikipedia.org]. 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.
texexplorer (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:LaTeX (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, .tex files don't render so well if you drop them into web browsers. I mean, which format you choose really should depend on what your needs are. If you want to be able to store a single copy that can be opened in a web browser or an office suite, HTML isn't necessarily a bad choice, but at this point you wont get great layout control. I really think it's reasonable to hope that as new versions of HTML and CSS come out, they should be aiming towards enabling people to have a good "print" media type CSS that gives professional layout results, but we aren't there yet. We aren't even really close.
If you want people who know what they're doing to be making/editing these documents, then LaTex may be a good choice. If you want people to have normal everyday people to be able to open the file in an office suite they're comfortable with, then ODF is worth considering. If you want a widely supported format only for display/printing purposes (no editing) and you want tight layout control, then you won't do better than PDF.
At this point, there is no format that does it all without any downsides. You have to pick the best tool for the job.
Re:LaTeX (Score:3, Interesting)
Why is LaTeX archaic, but HTML not? LaTeX is infinitely more powerful when it comes to layout. Even with CSS, HTML has to be bent over backwards? But it's deeper than that. HTML is about rendering documents on many variant platforms and displays. It's about general text flow, not about pages. I think you could probably do what you wanted with CSS, but it would be horrible to code, and would be utterly screwed up on any screen that didn't match yours in resolution or in ratio. What about people who don't maximize their browsers? I mean, the whole point of HTML is that it can deal with all sorts of browser window sizes. I find CSS that explicitly sets screen real estate to be an incredibly pain in the ass, and essentially breaks the browser. What you're proposing would be even worse.
Screens are not pieces of paper. They are entirely different mediums with entirely different requirements. Maybe if we all had 30" monitors, it would make some sense, but since that's not the trend (quite the opposite, in fact, we're going to smaller and smaller screens on netbooks and smartphones).
HTML has its place, but there are proper typesetting languages out there, designed specifically for what you want. So learn them.
Now, like I said, I think it would be very cool if someone would design a plugin that would allow browsers to render LaTeX files. That would be quite awesome, although I guess the reasonable argument could be made that just simply compiling them as a PDF would accomplish the same thing. But any such plugin would have to pretty much dispense with most of the typesetting markup or again, we'd be breaking the browser.
Re:LaTeX (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
don't forget about groff (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.gnu.org/software/groff/ [gnu.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groff_(software) [wikipedia.org]