How do you guys read your papers? Until now I've been using

>>>/sci/

>>8222414
a guy bought an ipad and amidtted that it is shit

I tried ereader and it is shit
nothing beats printing on laser
and nothing beats printing on laser a paper whereon you tweak the margins and font.

>>8222414
Usually read them online and take notes in a notebook.
I use to print and annotate, but its been a while since I've needed to read that in depth.

>>8222429
I have to go through a lot of papers, all relevant, and wanted to expedite the process somewhat.

>>8222422
I have a kindle, but zooming in and out on multi-columned articles, and segmented figures, it's not worth it. Printing is good insofar as you don't have too many and can categorize them properly.

I'd really like something that's protable (laptop has no battery).

>>8222414
If I'm skimming, I'll use the web browser.

If I'm reading, I gotta print it.

I'd love for something like sony's DPTS1 Digital Paper System. Though, for that price, I'd rather just buy a printer and a lifetime's supply of ink and paper made from endangered trees

>>8222592
this

More and more I feel like unless it's printed, this pdf format isn't the best way to transmit this sort of information.

Way back in the day, when html and the idea of webpages was first being designed, the idea was actually geared around scientific research papers (the original developers didn't expect it to be used for normal consumer/entertainment type stuff). In the first web browser, Mosaic (note: it was designed by said group of people), the text and images were to be rendered separately (instead of inline images). Clicking on an image link would open up a new window for it where you could view the diagram at a higher resolution (it also allowed you to continue reading the text with the image onscreen, useful for research papers where diagrams appear on different pages from their related text). There were several other features designed around this idea. Unfortunately Mosaic wasn't free and then when a free browser came out sometime later they adapted a design model more similar to modern browsers and webpages. Needless to say the free browsers ate up all the market share and Mosaic died a quiet death.

I don't think Mosaic was the solution we're looking for but it may have been on the right track. Perhaps when reading research on a digital medium we should use a better format of presentation.

I understand that we currently write papers using LaTeX while paying great attention to all sorts of typesetting details and that it wouldn't be feasible to convert LaTeX or PDF to some other format nor would it be practical to expect researchers to write up multiple versions of their research. However, that doesn't mean that a better solution doesn't exist.

I'm interested in hearing what ideas other users may have.

(cont.)

>>8223448
(cont.)

My idea is to design a language that compiles down to LaTeX (with a set of LaTeX/TeX libraries) as well as HTML (with any necessary CSS and Javascript) and perhaps other formats as well. Such a language would have limitations on it (it wouldn't be capable of doing everything you can do in LaTeX nor everything you can do in HTML) but would that really be a problem?

>>8222414
Print them and read the hard copy.

>>8223449
There are javascript libraries which you can use in html to generate equations using latex commands. Mathjax I use quite a bit. It can render to svg to get nice scalable equations.

>>8223729
You're right, those do exist, but they only handle math mode LaTeX. By itself it's not quite enough for handling documents as a whole. That said it could definitely be useful.

>>8223448
I find HTML documents frequently better, for online reading at least. Printing is .pdf's strong suit. But again there the problem of having lots of papers that you want to search through on the fly. I assume html over latex for data volume, but not all articles have html, so i dunno

>>8224019
>But again there the problem of having lots of papers that you want to search through on the fly.
There are many benefits to paper as well that you don't currently have with digital media. For instance, if you have to refer to a definition/diagram/theorem/whatever on an entirely different page from the one you're reading then you can easily do this with paper (even if it's bound together you can user your fingers to mark the pages and flip back and forth seamlessly). In html documents you would have to scroll back and forth or open the same page in different tabs each time you need to do this. In PDF documents you would have to create bookmarks for trivial things or struggle to scroll back and forth. Just think of any book that has tables and diagrams on inside of the front/back covers and in the appendix. With a real book those are actually practical decisions, but with digital media they aren't really or at least not as much (i.e. we can probably do better).

If you need to look at several books or documents at the same time then your only real limit is the size of your table whereas in digital media things can get tricky (though linux's virtual desktops really help).

There are many other benefits to paper (that don't currently have a digital equivalent) that I can't remember off the top of my head.

>>8224195
In html /pdf you can make the references to equations hyperlinks. In html Im sure you could just make something that when you mouseover an equation it displays..

>>8222414
I go to the University on Fridays and sneak into the printing room. Nobody has caught me yet.

>>8224501
Yeah I printed 50 books this way, after I discovered libgen. the best part is that I have not read one of these books and years later, I have put 4000 pages of paper to the bin.

>>8224501
you sneaky devil.
Sadly, my uni has these cards which you load with money if you want to print from uni printers. At 5cents/page it's not worth it for anything big.

>>8223448

elife lens offers an html view of papers with, IMHO, sensible separation of text and figures.

Utopia Documents is a desktop PDF reader intended to help bioscientists.

Lots of other experiments in article presentation.

re: other language

You can do this with markdown + pandoc tolerably well. or reST if you need more control.

Some researchers I am acquainted with have built a tool that can read PDFs and reasonably accurately produce a semantic representation more like HTML. When that or something similar is open sourced I could see mobile apps especially accepting PDFs and then converting them internally for a much different presentation.