Formats for On-line Papers

The following formats are used.

Postscript

This is ok for a document that is to be printed rather than read on-line. Postscript viewers are optimized for proofreading documents that are to be printed. Here are some of postscript's disadvantages.

• Reading at 72 dots per inch a document intended to be printed at 600 dots per inch is unpleasant. It is possible to compile the document into a form suitable for on-line reading. It is a lot of work, and suitable style files are not readily available.
• The document cannot have links out of it.
• The user cannot put a link to a specific point in the document in other documents. See the later discussion of "unco-operative links."
• The document cannot be searched for specific phrases.
• Excerpts cannot be copied.

dvi

The disadvantages are the same as postscript, except that the viewers are better, and magnification is possible in the viewer.

html

It is legible on-line and has links. It allows pictures and diagrams, and the advertising applications are driving improvements in that respect. Its disadvantages are

• The available forms of html and the viewers do not support mathematical formulas. Making formulas available seems to be an extremely low priority for Netscape, et. al., who correctly see that there is no way the scientific market will contribute much to the billions of dollars their stockholders expect them to make. See latex2html.
• There are no uncooperative links, i.e. a reader cannot ask his reader to give him a link to a specific place in a Netscape document so that he can return to it or refer to it in another document. The only links into a document have to be provided by the creator of the document putting in anchors. Uncooperative links can be based on counts or searches.

latex2html

This elegant system converts a Latex document to a number of files with an internal linkage structure based on the latex labels. It is a trifle complicated to use. See the LaTeX2HTML Tranlator manual.

Adobe Acrobat

The original form did not allow arbitrary links out, but the new version apparently does. It is proprietary, so the features are limited to what Adobe chooses to provide. It can handle mathematical formulas. No uncooperative links. It allows searching and excerpting. It isn't available on all machines, especially not all Unix machines. See Adobe Acrobat.