On Sun, 11 Aug 2013 20:43:17 +0200
"Tyler Jameson Little" <beatgammit@gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> I really wish this was more popular:
> __________________
> |       |        |
> |   1   |   2    |
> |       |        |
> |       |        |
> |----------------|
> |       |        |
> |   3   |   4    |
> |       |        |
> |       |        |
> ___ page break ___
> |       |        |
> |       |        |
> |   1   |   2    |
> |       |        |
> |----------------|
> |       |        |
> |       |        |
> |   3   |   4    |
> |       |        |
> 
> This allows a multi-column layout with less scrolling.

Yea, that's another thing that would help.

> 
> Why can't we get the same for academic papers? They're even simpler because each section can be forced to be the same size.

I keep getting more and more convinced that it's just comes back down to the usual old problem of glacial bureaucratic-like nature of academia. I truly believe the academic world is beginning to sink under the weight of its own outdated traditions. This is just one symptom of that, just like all the ways the MPAA/RIAA struggled against the societal changes they wanted to pretend weren't really occurring.

On Sunday, 11 August 2013 at 15:42:24 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Sun, 11 Aug 2013 01:22:34 -0700
> Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:
>
>> http://elrond.informatik.tu-freiberg.de/papers/WorldComp2012/PDP3426.pdf
>
> Holy crap those two-column PDFs are hard to read! Why in the world does
> academia keep doing that anyway? (Genuine question, not rhetoric)

It's convenient for embedding figures without using up excessive space or resorting to *shivers* word wrapping.

Even without taking that in to account, I've always had a soft spot for 2 column layout, when done right. Most of the physics papers I read use it and I never have any problems. It's only really bad if they make the columns too narrow compared to the font width and you get too few words per line.

On Sunday, 11 August 2013 at 08:22:35 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> http://elrond.informatik.tu-freiberg.de/papers/WorldComp2012/PDP3426.pdf

Interesting, and certainly D being a wide spectrum language is a reason that many of us investigate it. Julia is aiming at the same space as that mentioned in the paper, so I think that their point that D is the only choice here is not true any more.

No comment on the paper's formatting, which seems to its most salient feature :-)

-- Brian

On 8/11/13 12:00 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Sun, 11 Aug 2013 11:25:02 -0700
> Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote:
>>
>> For a column of text to be readable it should have not much more than
>> 10 words per line. Going beyond that forces eyes to scan too jerkily
>> and causes difficulty in following line breaks. Filling an A4 or
>> letter paper with only one column would force either (a) an unusually
>> large font, (b) very large margins, or (c) too many words per line.
>> Children books choose (a), which is why many do come in that format.
>> LaTeX and Word choose (b) in single-column documents.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> Multicolumn is best for screen reading, too. The only problem is
>> there's no good flowing - the columns should fit the screen. There's
>> work on that, see e.g. http://alistapart.com/article/css3multicolumn.
>>
>
> A. HTML has good flowing, and has had it since freaking v1. No need for
> upcoming CSS tricks: As long as the author doesn't go and do something
> retarded like use a fixed layout or this new "zoom out whenever the
> window shrinks" lunacy, then all any user ever has to do is adjust
> the window to their liking.

Clearly HTML has made good progress toward reaching good formatting, but is not quite there yet.

> If someone expands their browser to be
> two-feet wide and ends up with too much text per line, then really they
> have no one to blame but their own dumbass self.

This is a frequent argument. The issue with it is that often people use tabbed browsing, each tab having a page with its own approach to readability.

> B. There's nothing stopping authors from making their PDFs a
> single-column at whatever line width works well. Like I said,
> personally I've never found 8" line width at a normal font size to be
> even the slightest hint harder than 10 words per line (in fact,
> sometimes I find 10 words per line to be *harder* due to such
> frequent line breaks), *but* if the author wants to do 10 words per
> line in a PDF, there's *nothing* in PDF stopping them from doing that
> without immediately sacrificing those gains, and more, by
> going multi-column.

This started with your refutation of my argument that two columns need less space. One column would fill less of the paper, which was my point. This is, indeed, the motivation of conferences: they want to publish relatively compact proceedings.

There is a lot of research and practice on readability, dating from hundreds of years ago - before the start of typography. In recent years there's been new research motivated by the advent of new media for displaying textual information, some of which supports your view, see e.g. http://goo.gl/qfHcJz. However, most pundits do suggest limiting the width of text lines, see the many results of http://goo.gl/HuPEXV.

> Bottom line, obviously multi-column PDF is a bad situation, but we
> already *have* multiple dead-simple solutions even without throwing our
> hands up and saying "Oh, well, there's no good *multi-column* solution
> ATM, so I have no way to make my document readable without waiting for
> a reflowing-PDF or CSS5 or 6 or 7 or whatever."
>
> An obsessive desire for multi-column appears to be getting in the way
> of academic documents that have halfway decent readability. Meanwhile,
> the *rest* of the word just doesn't bother, uses single-column, and
> gets by perfectly fine with entirely readable documents (Well, except
> when they put out webpages with gigantic sizes, grey-on-white text, and
> double-spacing - Now *that* makes things *really* hard to read. Gives
> me a headache every single time - and it's always committed by the
> very people who *think* they're doing it to be more readable. Gack.)

Again, two-column layout is being used as a vehicle for putting a wealth of information in a good quality format that is cheap to print and bind (most conference proceedings are simply printed on letter/A4 paper and bound at the university bindery). The rest of the paper publishing world has different constraints because they print document in much larger numbers, in a specialized typography that use folios divided in different ways, producing smaller, single-column books. It strikes me as ignorant to accuse the academic world of high-brow snobbery because it produces good quality printed content with free software at affordable costs.

> I *really* wish PDF would die. It's great for printed stuff, but
> its mere existence just does far more harm than good. Designers are
> already far too tempted to treat computers like a freaking sheet of
> paper - PDF just clinches it for them.

Clearly PDF and other fixed-format products are targeted at putting ink on paper, and that's going the way of the dinosaur. At the same time, the publishing industry is very much in turmoil for the time being and only future will tell what the right replacement is.


Andrei

On 8/11/13 12:09 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Sun, 11 Aug 2013 20:43:17 +0200
> "Tyler Jameson Little" <beatgammit@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> I really wish this was more popular:
>> __________________
>> |       |        |
>> |   1   |   2    |
>> |       |        |
>> |       |        |
>> |----------------|
>> |       |        |
>> |   3   |   4    |
>> |       |        |
>> |       |        |
>> ___ page break ___
>> |       |        |
>> |       |        |
>> |   1   |   2    |
>> |       |        |
>> |----------------|
>> |       |        |
>> |       |        |
>> |   3   |   4    |
>> |       |        |
>>
>> This allows a multi-column layout with less scrolling.
>
> Yea, that's another thing that would help.

This is still too rigid. I think the right answer is adaptive flowed layout (http://goo.gl/CXylLi - warning it's a PDF :o)), where the system selects a typography-quality layout dynamically depending on the characteristics of the device.

>> Why can't we get the same for academic papers? They're even
>> simpler because each section can be forced to be the same size.
>
> I keep getting more and more convinced that it's just comes back down
> to the usual old problem of glacial bureaucratic-like nature of
> academia. I truly believe the academic world is beginning to sink under
> the weight of its own outdated traditions. This is just one symptom of
> that, just like all the ways the MPAA/RIAA struggled against the
> societal changes they wanted to pretend weren't really occurring.

That's an odd thing to say seeing as a lot of CS academic research is ten years ahead of the industry.


Andrei

On Sunday, 11 August 2013 at 23:37:28 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> That's an odd thing to say seeing as a lot of CS academic research is ten years ahead of the industry.

I would personally venture to say that the publication practises of academia in general and CS in particular have many destructive and damaging aspects, and that industry-academia gap might be narrowed quite a bit if these were addressed.

On 8/11/2013 4:33 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Clearly PDF and other fixed-format products are targeted at putting ink on
> paper, and that's going the way of the dinosaur. At the same time, the
> publishing industry is very much in turmoil for the time being and only future
> will tell what the right replacement is.

Currently ereaders are great for reading novels and such with little typography needs. But they're terrible for textbooks and reference material, mainly because the screen is both low res and is way too small.

It's like programming with an 80*24 display (I can't believe I was able to use them!).

(I was eagerly looking at the Surface tablet when it came out, but what killed it for me was the low res display. I want to read books on a tablet, and a low res display doesn't do that very well.)

I'd like an ereader that has a full 8.5*11 display.

On 8/11/13 4:45 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On Sunday, 11 August 2013 at 23:37:28 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> That's an odd thing to say seeing as a lot of CS academic research is
>> ten years ahead of the industry.
>
> I would personally venture to say that the publication practises of
> academia in general and CS in particular have many destructive and
> damaging aspects, and that industry-academia gap might be narrowed quite
> a bit if these were addressed.

Could be improved, sure. Destructive and damaging - I'd be curious for some substantiation.

Andrei

On Sun, 11 Aug 2013 20:01:27 -0700
"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh@quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
> 
> I personally prefer single-column with no more than about 40 ems in width or thereabouts. Anything more than that, and it becomes uncomfortable to read.
> 

For me, it's closer to 80. With 40 the line breaks are too frequent for my eyes. And it just "feels" cramped.


> 
> - No full justification by default. Existing justification schemes could be improved (most implementations suffer from rivers of whitespace in a justified paragraph -- they could learn from LaTeX here). Needs native hyphenation support (using JS to patch up this flaw is a failure IMO).
> 

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of justified text. Obviously I can live with it, but even without the occasional "rivers of whitespace" issue, I find the lack of jagged edges gives my eyes too few reference points, so I end up losing my place more easily. The value of justified text's smooth edges, to me, seems somewhat "Adrian Monk" (wikipedia, if you don't know).


> 
> - Pixel sizes should be banned, as well as hard-coded font sizes. These tie you to assumptions about specific user screen dimensions, which are almost always wrong. In this day and age, the only real solution is a fully dynamically adaptive layout. Everything else is just a relic from paper layouts, and is a dead-end.

Yea. Admittedly, I do occasionally use pixels for a little bit of spacing here and there (never for more than 8px), but I can happily give them up - especially with so much now using those ultra-high pixel density screens. Pixels just don't make much sense now unless you're already dealing on a raster level anyway, like a photo or something.


> Things like
> aligning images should be based on treating image size as an actual
> quantity you can compute sizes on; any hard-coded image sizes is
> bound to cause problems when the image is modified.
> 
> - Unable to express simple computations on sizes, requiring
>   circumlocutions that make the CSS hard to read and maintain.

Yes! That's one of my big issues with CSS, the inability to do anything computationally. And yea, dealing with images tends to make that become more of an issue.

Ultimately, the root problem here regarding the lack of computability, is that HTML/CSS is not, and never has been, a UI layout format (No matter how much people insist on treating it as such...*cough*mozilla*cough*.) It's a *document* format. Always has been. Everything else is a kludge, and is doomed to be so from the start.


> 
> > >If someone expands their browser to be two-feet wide and ends up with too much text per line, then really they have no one to blame but their own dumbass self.
> > 
> > This is a frequent argument. The issue with it is that often people use tabbed browsing, each tab having a page with its own approach to readability.
> 
> The *real* problem is that webpage layout is still very much confined by outdated paper layout concepts. The browser should be able to automatically columnize text to fit the screen. Maybe with horizontal scrolling instead of vertical scrolling. Layouts should be flexible enough that the browser can resize the fonts to keep the text readable. Seriously, this isn't 1970. There's no reason why we should still be fiddling with this stuff manually. Layouts should be automatic, not hardcoded or at the whims of designers fixated on paper layout concepts.
> 

Exactly. In fact, we *already* had all this. It was called HTML 1. But then some jackass designers  came in from the print world and demanded webpages match their photoshop mockups to the pixel, thus HTML mutated into the world's worst UI layout system. (Of course I skipped a few steps there, but you get the picture.)

If we weren't trying to force app UIs and manual page layouts into web pages, we could have *already* had nice document layout systems tailored to the individual user (with tabbed browsing *not* being an obstacle to basic window resizing, and with multiple device form factors *never* being an issue for any content creator), instead of this current endless circle where W3C occasionally hands out some new half-baked CSS gimmick that a few of the more overzealous designers can optionally employ in order to force a one-size-fits-all approach to "readability" onto everyone who visits that one particular site, thus leading to inevitable problems and ultimately the W3C's next round of half-baked hacks to the CSS spec.


> 
> [...]
> > >I *really* wish PDF would die. It's great for printed stuff, but its mere existence just does far more harm than good. Designers are already far too tempted to treat computers like a freaking sheet of paper - PDF just clinches it for them.
> > 
> > Clearly PDF and other fixed-format products are targeted at putting ink on paper, and that's going the way of the dinosaur. At the same time, the publishing industry is very much in turmoil for the time being and only future will tell what the right replacement is.
> [...]
> 
> The right replacement is to have dynamic page layout that doesn't depend on CSS hacks or other arbitrary decisions by the publisher like number of columns, etc.. This isn't the age of paper anymore; layout should be done automatically by the end-user's browser, not by content producers, who should be worrying about the content, not the layout.
> 

Exactly. In other words, the right solution is more or less equivalent to HTML 1 or 2.

They already had it pretty much right back in the 90's. But then people wanted their "dancing pigs" so to speak, and we ended up with this unholy mutant we have know: HTML 5. World's worst UI format, and no longer a good document format either.

...And yet 9 times out of 10 it *still* ends up far more readable on-screen than an 8.5" x 11" two-column PDF. Go figure.


> 
> On Sun, Aug 11, 2013 at 04:47:09PM -0700, Walter Bright wrote:
> > On 8/11/2013 4:33 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> [...]
> > Currently ereaders are great for reading novels and such with little typography needs. But they're terrible for textbooks and reference material, mainly because the screen is both low res and is way too small.
> > 
> > It's like programming with an 80*24 display (I can't believe I was
> > able to use them!).
> [...]
> 
> I still program with 80*24 displays. Well, more like 80*40, but I find that it's actually far more readable than the common obsession with squint-inducing microscopic fonts trying to cram as much on the screen as possible. Having too many characters per line quickly gets very hard to read.
> 

Heck, I started out on the 40-character-width AppleSoft BASIC. Although I'm sure other people can best me on that (altair, punch cards, etc).

On Sun, 11 Aug 2013 16:33:26 -0700
Andrei Alexandrescu <SeeWebsiteForEmail@erdani.org> wrote:

> On 8/11/13 12:00 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> 
> > B. There's nothing stopping authors from making their PDFs a single-column at whatever line width works well. Like I said, personally I've never found 8" line width at a normal font size to be even the slightest hint harder than 10 words per line (in fact, sometimes I find 10 words per line to be *harder* due to such frequent line breaks), *but* if the author wants to do 10 words per line in a PDF, there's *nothing* in PDF stopping them from doing that without immediately sacrificing those gains, and more, by going multi-column.
> 
> This started with your refutation of my argument that two columns need less space. One column would fill less of the paper, which was my point. This is, indeed, the motivation of conferences: they want to publish relatively compact proceedings.
> 
> There is a lot of research and practice on readability, dating from hundreds of years ago - before the start of typography. In recent years there's been new research motivated by the advent of new media for displaying textual information, some of which supports your view, see e.g. http://goo.gl/qfHcJz. However, most pundits do suggest limiting the width of text lines, see the many results of http://goo.gl/HuPEXV.
> 

FWIW, I should clarify that I'm not necessarily advocating a complete and total lack of "max-width".


> > Bottom line, obviously multi-column PDF is a bad situation, but we already *have* multiple dead-simple solutions even without throwing our hands up and saying "Oh, well, there's no good *multi-column* solution ATM, so I have no way to make my document readable without waiting for a reflowing-PDF or CSS5 or 6 or 7 or whatever."
> >
> > An obsessive desire for multi-column appears to be getting in the way of academic documents that have halfway decent readability. Meanwhile, the *rest* of the word just doesn't bother, uses single-column, and gets by perfectly fine with entirely readable documents (Well, except when they put out webpages with gigantic sizes, grey-on-white text, and double-spacing - Now *that* makes things *really* hard to read. Gives me a headache every single time - and it's always committed by the very people who *think* they're doing it to be more readable. Gack.)
> 
> Again, two-column layout is being used as a vehicle for putting a wealth of information in a good quality format that is cheap to print and bind (most conference proceedings are simply printed on letter/A4 paper and bound at the university bindery). The rest of the paper publishing world has different constraints because they print document in much larger numbers, in a specialized typography that use folios divided in different ways, producing smaller, single-column books. It strikes me as ignorant to accuse the academic world of high-brow snobbery because it produces good quality printed content with free software at affordable costs.
> 
> > I *really* wish PDF would die. It's great for printed stuff, but its mere existence just does far more harm than good. Designers are already far too tempted to treat computers like a freaking sheet of paper - PDF just clinches it for them.
> 
> Clearly PDF and other fixed-format products are targeted at putting ink on paper, and that's going the way of the dinosaur. At the same time, the publishing industry is very much in turmoil for the time being and only future will tell what the right replacement is.
> 

I'm seeing a lot of focus here on the printed page. People can do whatever the heck they want when they go print handouts and such. But that doesn't mean they have to, or should, shoehorn their electronic publications into a form that's poorly suited for electronic use.

Didn't someone here say not too long ago that most of those
publications are just written in latex anyway? If that's the case, then
I really don't see any issue with having separate formats for print
handouts vs electronic distribution (But then I'm not versed in latex, so maybe I'm missing something).