> There are couple of problems with HTML--first, no HTML viewer support
> vector graphics (such as EPS) as far as I know, and generally bitmaps
> are just awful. My eyes start to ache if I try to read some HTML
> document where math is in ugly bitmaps (althought I think that
> some versions of latex2html can generate antialiased bitmaps which
> is much better but still awful).
You have a few examples of math formulas in fifth to seventh figures at:
http://www.univ-orleans.fr/EXT/ASTEX/astex/doc/fr/nouv30a/html/nouv30a.htm
which are quite readable I think ? In my implementation of TeX4ht ( software by
E. Gurari to transform Plain TeX or LaTeX2.09/2e to html) I use dvidot (by E.
Mattes) to generate automatically formulas as bitmaps, and it is even better
(although I have not put any example on the web).
The criterion "beautiful / not awful" is maybe important for artwork, but for
mathematics, in my opinion, the criterion for displaying math on the web ought to
be "exact". Formulas available as bitmaps cannot be modified and will always be
displayed correctly as created originally by the author by any browser, provided
only it is able to display correctly bitmaps.
Formulas available as parts of pdf files, with symbols taken from vector fonts
are displayed certainly more beautifully, but they can be displayed incorrectly
on the user's machine even if it has been displayed correctly on the machine of
the author, for a multitude of reasons. With pdf for example, a paper of mine was
printed correctly with Acrobat Reader 3, but with AR 4 some letters were not
printed. Or a character can be substituted to another one, for example A can be
displayed instead of greek alpha, il the font used on the user's machine is
bugged or ill-installed.
This might not be too dramatic for pure text, and for not too important text
(say, personal letters, internal notes in a Univ dept etc.), as the mind can
correct errors in general (as one can understand mistyped words from the
context). But in maths, it would be catastrophic if a formula written (a+b)^2 by
the author and displayed as such on his machine, is displayed (a+b) on the
machine of user X, and (alpha+b)^2 on machine of user Y, because there is no way
for the mind to correct a formula, except by refinding it, which may be very
long.
In short : with pdf and vector fonts, there is no way to guarantee that a
formula, displayed correctly for somebody, will be displayed correctly for
somebody else at some other time. Especially for Acrobat Reader, it is not free
software and there is no way for the scientific community to control its quality.
The past experience seems to show that each version brings its own set of bugs,
in an unpredicatble way and with no guarantee that they will be corrected.
If one wants to stick with pdf files, it seems to me that the only reasonable way
to have mathematics articles that can be read safely in the long term (for
articles posted in public archives such at arxiv.org), is using bitmap fonts, as
generated by Dvips+Ghostscript. Acrobat Reader is very poor at displaying such
fonts, display is ugly, and one has to use Ghoscript to display these pdf files
in a readable way.
> Secondly, HTML tends to be
> (althought it isn't necessary) splitted in hundreds of small files,
> from which some thing is extremely hard to find.
Well, html does not tend to anything, it is the authors that do tend to splitting
documents in hundreds of small files, to allow fast loading and browsing. But as
you say, there is no necessity : you can generate from a single LaTeX or texinfo
file both types: large number of small files, adapted to fast load and browsing,
and one unique huge file adapted to text search. In the GNU project, both types
are available, for (almost?) all docs, so you have the choice. With PDF, usually
you have only the opportunity to load a big file. So I would say html is more
versatile.
> Not to mention
> the fact that very rare browsers support antialiased text while
> almost all PDF readers do.
The necessity for antialiasing with pdf files comes from its limitation: you
cannot increase the size of characters displayed, because the width of text is
fixed, and to read a line with big characters, you have to zoom and then use
scrollbar to read each line, if the line is not entirely displayed on your screen
- whic is very uncomfortable.
There is no necessity with html, as lines are wrapped automatically in the
window. html is issued from sgml, so you ought not to have the size of a font
embedded in a html file : if some text is displayed in an illegible manner on
your machine, the html solution is to display it with a larger font, adapted to
the size of your screen and the state of your eyes. There is no need of
antialiasing, whose aim is to improve display of text at a given size.
Michel.Lavaud@univ-orleans.fr
http://www.univ-orleans.fr/EXT/ASTEXftp://ftp.univ-orleans.fr/pub/tex/PC/AsTeX
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