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?
LaTeX (Score:5, Informative)
Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
*sigh* it's a slow news day
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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.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately any program able to handle everyone's different styles for document printing is probably going to be too specialized for everyone to have. LaTeX shows that print layouts are a difficult problem. Even on webpages (screen display), to get reall
Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Informative)
Further to the two AC posts: you are doing something wrong. As an academic I send / receive latex source all the time and expect it to compile and reproduce the same exact same results. How are you abusing TeX to get these kinds of problems?
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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...
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Re:LaTeX (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, not using CSS is crazy. Especially since CSS includes the concept of media types. A simple "media='print'" in the CSS spec should hand that.
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Re:LaTeX (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Please also remember that the "compiled" output of latex is dvi, not ps or pdf.
Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
Portability:
Name me an OS that doesn't have a PDF or PS reader installed by default.
Windows
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Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Informative)
Another alternative is RTF, which is a sister SGML language of HTML. While it may have drawbacks, it would accomplish most if not all of what is required.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In hindsight there was probably a better way...but I was young, and string manipulation is easy.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Exactly. Until I can use a server scripting language to open a (binary) PDF template and do string find-replace, and not break the document, I'll stick with the ASCII-based RTF format.
There are a lot of people who seem to be screaming "LaTex" as the solution to this non-problem. This is specifically what the PDF format was created for: to create a portable document that renders and prints the same anywhere. HTML is a fluid layout to fit various resolutions, PDF is guaranteed to print the same on any mach
Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Informative)
The nice thing about LaTex is that, like HTML, it is a pure markup language, but it is a markup language that understands typesetting so one tend to get a good page layout no matter what. OTOH, HTML merely identifies blocks of text as various generic types, and really does not have a context for the types. The render engine is free visualize, make a sound, or do whatever it wishes to represent the blocks. CSS is what imposes a consistent visual framework, so what one needs to duplicate LaTex is in fact CSS.
Use LaTex. Except for the often limited fonts, it is vastly superior to an word processor, because a word processor is not the write tool to create real documents. We have know that for many years. That is why people bought pagemaker. And I think the lack of fonts forces people to create compelling content. LaTex is free, there are many good books,and if you do have a hankering to code, you can always play with Tex.
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Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the font problem is solved by using XeLaTeX (which uses XeTeX [wikipedia.org]).
Full OpenType support. Looks amazing.
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Re:LaTeX (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
LaTex is a solution for certain (usually niche) purposes, but has its drawbacks, like everything else. The problem is that we are a dealing with an online world, where things are published in several different formats, online and offline. LaTex doesn't translate easily or cleanly into HTML, or vice-versa. And good luck getting people outside of math and science academia to use LaTex.
This is a real problem, and shouldn't simply be brushed aside with "use this" comments. There currently is no workable format,
Re: (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 do
Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Informative)
Use LaTex. Except for the often limited fonts, it is vastly superior to an word processor, because a word processor is not the write tool to create real documents. We have know that for many years. That is why people bought pagemaker. And I think the lack of fonts forces people to create compelling content. LaTex is free, there are many good books,and if you do have a hankering to code, you can always play with Tex.
LaTeX has limited fonts, but if you use XeTeX [wikipedia.org] (which uses LaTeX), you can not only use all the LaTeX stuff, but also any TrueType or OpenType font, and native unicode support as well. This is a godsend for typesetting anything that includes words or characters not in English, or just for people who are picky about typography. My personal favorite font is the open source SIL Gentium [sil.org] family, which is not only much more beautiful and readable than Times, but contains a fuller character set that makes it compatible with many more languages. Once you start writing documents with XeTeX and nicer fonts, you see how lacking word processors are for good typography and well-structured documents, and how self-limiting the concept is.
For newcomers to LaTeX and XeTeX, including packages and specifying options can be a bit time-consuming when you just want to get started with a basic A4-sized document. Here is the basic XeTeX file template I use for simple stuff. I'm picky about margins, line spacing, fonts, etc. so you know that it's a safe place to start out.
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\documentclass[11pt]{article}
%%
% XeTeX packages
%%
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xunicode}
\usepackage{xltxtra}
%%
% Formatting packages
%%
\usepackage{setspace}
\usepackage[vcentering,dvips]{geometry}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\geometry{papersize={8.5in,11in},total={6.5in,8.8in}}
\pdfpagewidth 8.5in
\pdfpageheight 11in
% 10pt font: 1.15
% 11pt font: 1.1
\setstretch{1.1}
\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Gentium Basic}
\begin{document}
Some text...
\end{document}
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Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Insightful)
Although I agree with you in that LaTeX is widely used in the scientific community, and unambiguously offers the best typesetting facilities you'll find outside of a publishing house, is it still appropriate today?
The internet as we know it was created at CERN to facilitate the sharing of scientific information. Why are we still publishing in a format designed to be presented on dead trees?
Like it or not, a properly-formatted print article looks horrible on a screen. An article formatted for printing on A4 or Letter-sized paper will use the whole width of the page, be set in 10-point type, and use columns. Unfortunately, modern computer screens don't have nearly enough resolution to display the full width of the page alongside much else. Obviously, PDF files also don't have the ability to flow to fit the width of the screen.
LaTeX also doesn't give you the benefit of hypertext. Yes, there are various hacks you can use to add anchors and links to PDFs, although these are mere hacks on top of a broken format. Things such as high-resolution figures and hyperlinked references would be particularly beneficial for academic uses. It'd also be great to be able to see all articles linking back to what you happen to be reading. (This brings up all sorts of questions about the very nature of scientific publishing, although this is another debate entirely)
Wikipedia (more specifically, MediaWiki) actually offers a promising solution to these (and the original poster's) requirements. It provides a convenient and simplistic markup for multi-sectioned articles, flows to fit the width of the page, and also provides LaTeX's fantastic mathematical typesetting facilities. Hyperlinking to other parts of the Wiki (and to external sites) is excessively easy. I'm sure the DOI [doi.org] system could be integrated to allow linking back to other articles within the constraints of the existing academic publishing regime.
Google could very easily provide the "glue" to hold such a system together, although it would ultimately be better to put a public, non-profit entity in charge. It's absurd and hypocritical that so much of academic research (particularly the publishing part of it) is profit-driven.
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Re:LaTeX (Score:4, Insightful)
LaTeX describes the document, just like HTML describes it, but with more structure about it. What you see in a web browser is not HTML, it is a *rendering* of HTML. Different browsers render the same HTML differently, for example a mobile browser will skip stuff and reformat other stuff. In the same way there are different LaTeX renderers - some output PDF, some output HTML, some output ODF. It would be much easier to use LaTeX for the source document and then compile a pretty HTML file and a PDF file from it than to craft it in HTML or some other XML variant directly. You can have links in LaTeX that render as normal links in the HTML output. Why stress?
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Re: (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
Re:LaTeX (Score:5, Informative)
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Congratulations! (Score:5, Insightful)
Congratulations, you're the 5,134,978th person to suggest a change to HTML which will prevent it from being reflowable!
Please step up to the spiked door in front of the acid pit to claim your prize.
Re:Congratulations! (Score:5, Funny)
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PDF? (Score:5, Informative)
CSS3 is the solution (Score:5, Informative)
ODF (Score:3, Insightful)
LaTeX already got mentioned, and probably makes more sense.
If you really want an unreadable super-general XML-based format, use ODF.
Have you looked at PrinceXML? (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong, in many ways (Score:5, Insightful)
What you want (being able to define pages) is wrong in many many ways.
You should, as an authoring tool, never define a page, or its dimensions, especially academic works, which will be printed in different formats, on different paper (A4/Letter/Tradeback/etc/etc)
At most, whatever markup you have, many define things like page breaks, but even then, they are more a typesetting issue.
What you want is either LaTeX or DocBook.
Re:Wrong, in many ways (Score:5, Funny)
You should, as an authoring tool, never...
Who're you callin' a tool?
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Static Page Feeds are available (Score:5, Informative)
Static configurations are available already, not the intelligent ones being requested. Has sufficed for what I needed:
To have print page break add: <p style="page-break-before: always">
Also, to hide odd font and underline for links:
<STYLE TYPE="text/css" MEDIA=print> <!-- A { text-decoration: none; color: black } --> </STYLE>
Yes, they have to be massaged a little.
what do you want to do? (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to save the source form or markup, use a language designed for it: LaTeX. LaTeX lets you represent all the things you would want to represent in an academic paper, it's fairly readable, very widespread, and has tons of tools. And LaTeX converts to both HTML and PDF.
If you want to display on the web, use HTML. It's meant for the web. It's not a good representation for paged media. If you must represent paged media, you need to use CSS or XSL, but you probably don't want to.
If you want archival quality paged representations, PDF is the only game in town really. HTML with CSS doesn't come close. But it doesn't make sense to save your own papers only in PDF because PDF is not really editable and doesn't have the semantic information.
Don't use HTML (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Don't use HTML (Score:4, Insightful)
HTML was never supposed to do those things in the first place. The tags you are referring were hacks invented because CSS did not exist yet.
Unfortunately there is a whole generation of "web developers" who don't understand the concepts of semantic markup and output device-independent layouts.
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In my day (Score:3, Insightful)
I used netscape communicator to write all my papers for uni, mainly because it was available under windows and unix (IRIX in our case) and could be read by anyone on any platform.
It was a reasonably easy to use editor, without all the useless crap most others have.
A few lecturers were quite impressed with the idea, the portability and cost were big factors.
XSL:FO (Score:5, Informative)
There's a little-used standard that came out of the W3C along with XSLTs called XSL:FO. You write your document in XSL:FO markup, and then one of any number of processors like XEP [renderx.com] to convert it into PDF or what have you.
http://www.w3schools.com/xslfo/default.asp [w3schools.com]
One of the original purposes of it was so that you could use XSLTs to transform the same XML data into both XHTML or XSL:FO for publishing. The standard never took off though. XSL:FO just doesn't have enough options to be typographically interesting, compared to SVG.
Of course, the right answer is LaTeX, but you might want to give XSL:FO a try for familiarity's sake.
Use DITA (Score:4, Informative)
Someone mentioned XML/XSL/FO. Don't try to write your content in XSL-FO. You'll hate every minute of it.
I'd look in to using DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). It's a set of canned XML structures, plus a specification for how to process and customize those structures. It includes tags for stuff like footnotes...I bet it covers a lot of your use cases. There are some good intros to how these XML structures work here: http://dita.xml.org/book/dita-wiki-knowledgebase [xml.org]
As DITA is XML, you can convert it to HTML and whatever else you feel like, pretty easily. There's an open-source implementation of the DITA spec called the DITA Open Toolkit (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dita-ot/). The DITA Open Toolkit includes stylesheets/scripts to publish HTML and PDF, among other things. PDFs are published via XSL-FO. Just like HTML needs a web browser to render something useful, XSL-FO requires a FO processor to create a PDF. So, in the end you write DITA, XSLT and other scripts transform that DITA to XSL-FO, the a FO processor consumes the XSL-FO and spits out a PDF. The DITA Open Toolkit comes with an open-source FO processor (Apache FOP). FOP doesn't fulfill everyone's needs, but it might work very well for you.
Unfortunately, working with the Open Toolkit and customizing its output can be a bit unwieldy. http://groups.yahoo.com/search?query=dita+users [yahoo.com] is a pretty good place to look for help.
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: (Score:3, Informative)
That example sounds like it could be well rendered using MathML... http://www.w3.org/Math/ [w3.org]
Learn the tools first, then worry about changing (Score:3, Informative)
See, as someone has already pointed out, there's at least one such tool that's in wide use already: TeX and LaTeX. If you don't like that one, it turns out that HTML, with CSS and a little bit of Javascript, is perfectly capable of doing all the things you want, too. You just have to learn how. Have a look at Lie's Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web [amazon.com] (written and typeset in HTML/CSS) and at Prince XML [princexml.com] for detailed examples.
You're on the right track, for the wrong reason. (Score:3, Informative)
The ability to cite an HTML document is something that would indeed be useful. The ability to hard code page numbers into an HTML document isn't. The reason why academia and the press have been so resistant to HTML, historically, is that you don't get any control over page layout. Which means that you can't refer to things by page number.
The solution isn't to fix HTML so that you can number pages. It is to fix the bibliographic references to not use page numbers. Generally speaking, it's not hard to number documents by section, and you can make the numbering fine-grained enough for bibliographic references. Then refer to the chapter and section, rather than the page number in your bibliography, and you're done. No need to "fix" HTML.
It might make sense to ID paragraphs in HTML, so that you could simply refer to the paragraph ID in your bibliography. If this were simply document metadata, and didn't have anything to do with layout, it would work pretty well. As a bonus, you wouldn't need to renumber, because the ID would just be an arbitrary cookie, and wouldn't need to make sense to a human.
Of course, with hypertext, there's really no need for a bibliography anyway. Just link to the text you're referencing... But I realize that that's impractical in academia at the moment. I'm just saying...
Let CSS work for you! (Score:3, Insightful)
<head>
<title>Abstract of a usable design</title>
<style type="text/css">
@media print {
body { margin: 2.5cm; }
}
@media screen {
body { margin: 50px; width: 50%; }
}
body { font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>It's so crazy it just might work</h2>
<h2>and other html inspired musings</h2>
<p>Why not just use css?</p>
<p>Also, don't worry about page numbering. that's the browser's job.</p>
</body>
</html>
I am curious to know... (Score:3, Insightful)
CSS has a method of creating pages, for printing and more. It's no more difficult to learn than HTML is. You could use XML, create all the custom tags you want, and use XSL (oh look stylesheets again) to style the XML however you want.
HTML5 is coming out in the near or distant future, if you have suggestions for tags and functions, you might want to try to get involved with the W3.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Informative)
I should have been more clear: HTML describes the *structure* of a document, of which pages are not a part.
As many have said above, you could use CSS if you really wanted to, since page specifications are presentational aspects of the document. Or, you could use LaTeX, which is designed for this kind of use.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:wondering if we should let go of standard tags (Score:4, Insightful)
There's no complexity problem that cannot be solved by adding a layer of abstraction, nor performance problem that cannot be solved by removing a layer of abstraction.
Though I must note that you can already define your own tags in HTML+CSS and, while the W3 validator will (rightfully) complain loudly about them, most browsers deal with them just fine.
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