Comment by zzless | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zzless | Hacker News Reader

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To make some counterpoints:

- On any device as long as it runs a browser

- You can write TeX documents as a single file with ease

- Phones are not designed for reading, so dynamic layout or not, it will still be inferior to finely typeset document

- With care so can be TeX; carelessly written HTML docs will be just as bad as anything else

- CSS is a pretty poor layout tool; typographically speaking, CSS is very subpar to TeX's capabilities, using JS... well how much better is it than just using macros in TeX/LaTeX?

- markdown is fine for simple stuff but for highly complicated documents involving lots of generated tables, lists, and mathematics it is almost like having no tool at all;

- but many people DO like printed documents (I rarely can stand reading anything but basic technical stuff on screen, say language reference is fine but anything that requires thinking, has to be printed);

TeX is not locked to pdf in any way (it is not even it's native format). HTML's support for formulas is primitive (the only decent tools available are ... based on TeX). Academic world is not entirely uniform either but while I do think LaTeX is not ideal (TeX is though), I simply shudder when I think about Word or any MS or Adobe products.

> Phones are not designed for reading, so dynamic layout or not, it will still be inferior to finely typeset document

Personally, I find my phone to be my favorite medium to read prose on, not inferior to anything – including printed paper, which I never use if I can help it. It works for books and most webpages, but PDFs are a disaster.

My second preference is my laptop. Its screen is big enough to make reading PDFs an acceptable experience, but not a great one. When viewing at an optimal zoom level for me, there's almost enough vertical space to fit an entire normally-sized page… but not quite. Which means I have to scroll. In the common case that the paper has two columns, I have to scroll down to read the bottom left of the page, then back up to read the top right, then back down to read the bottom right.

Oh, and it's always great hunting for the figures in a paper, because of course they have to be nicely lined up in a corner of a page, even if that leaves them far from the text that references them. It's a compromise that makes total sense in print, but feels silly on a screen.

So TeX's output is good in print but awkward on a screen. (It may not be limited to PDF, but I'm pretty sure all its output formats assume a fixed page size.) Meanwhile, HTML is good on a screen, but I agree that it's awkward in print.

What we need is a format that's good at both, and that doesn't currently exist.

Try reading pdf's using Tofu.app. Lexcyle's Stanza had the same functionality, but Amazon killed it. I don't know if there are any Unix or Windows programs with the same functionality.

If you are creating pdf's, you are not limited to portrait/a4/letter, you can specify landscape/size of your laptop screen and use newspaper columns.

Counter counter point: I pretty regularly read pdf docs on my phone, and it’s a horrible experience.

I went so far as to write a script that downloads the Tex source of a paper from arxiv, changes up the paper size to match my phone screen, and recompiles the paper. It’s ok for text-heavy documents, but doesn’t work well for most figures. And most of my field does not post preprints (or use LaTeX at all).

For me the ideal solution would be something like org mode -> html output. I think the main gap that isn’t really addressed by any tool I’ve seen is reference management

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