• andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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    6 months ago

    If the paper is worth it and does have an original not OCR-ed text layer, it’d better be exported as any other format. We don’t call good things a PDF file, lol. It’s clumsy, heavy, have unadjustable font size and useless empty borders, includes various limits and takes on DRM, and it’s editing is usually done via paid software. This format shall die off.

    The only reason academia needs that is strict references to exact page but it’s not that hard to emulate. Upsides to that are overwhelming.

    I had my couple of times properly digitalizing PDFs into e-books and text-processing formats, and it’s a pain in the ass, but if I know it’d be read by someone but me, I’m okay with putting a bit more effort into it.

    • petersr@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Well, I guess PDF has one thing going for it (which might not be relevant for scientific papers): The same file will render the same on any platform (assuming the reader implements all the PDF spec to the tee).

      • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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        6 months ago

        FB2 is a known format for russian pirates, but it can and should be improved because it sucks ass in many things. FB3 was announced long ago but it hasn’t got any traction yet.

        EPUB is mor/e popular, so it’s probably be the go to format for most books US and EU create, but it isn’t much better.

        Other than that, even Doc\Docx is better than PDF, but I’d recomend RTF for it has less traces of M$ bullshit, and while it’s imperfect format, it’s still better.

        • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          6 months ago

          I don’t like docx because it looks different in libreoffice compared to Windows, also you can run into problems with fonts

        • visc@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          Docx doc rtf and all those have a different purpose than pdf, word docs don’t even necessarily look the same on two different computers with the same version of word, and rtf doesn’t even attempt any kind of paper description, it’s literally only a rich format for text. None of these are a true “if I give this to someone to print I know what I will get” “portable document format”

          I will look at fb*, I had not heard of them. Thanks!