[texhax] Parchment layout

[James Quirk]

Phil,

On Wed, 22 Jun 2011, Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd) wrote:

> 
> 
> James Quirk wrote:
> 
> > The problem, however, is that Adobe have end-of-lined
> > /RichMedia annotations for Linux/AR and so the approach is sadly no
> > longer portable.
> 
> Do you think that tells us something about Adobe's views
> on RichMedia, or about their views on Linux, or both ?
Adobe have also recently end-of-lined the Linux version of Adobe Air and 
so it's all a question of revenue. Linux/AR doesn't bring in any and 
Linux/AIR revenue is small, and so Adobe's business decision is that it's 
not worth their effort to keep the Linux/AR/Air synched with their 
Windows and OSX counterparts.


> 
> > And with the like's of Elsevier pushing rich-featured
> > journal articles, see http://www.articleofthefuture.com/, it is
> > not clear how much longer PDF will remain the de facto standard
> > for archiving science papers.
> 
> Yes, someone else drew my attention to "Article of the future"
> very recently, but it has major accessibility problems at the
> moment which a blind friend is currently drawing to the
> attention of Elsevier.
Recall I brought this up in the submission I prepared for
Elsevier's executable-paper grand challenge. The difficulty
is that rich-featured articles do not in general have a fixed
reading order. This also presents problems for the able bodied
reader in trying to digest what an author has prepared.
One solution to explore is the concept of document pilots
that "fly" the reader through the material pointing out the
details a reader might otherwise miss. But this increases
the authoring burden to the point where few people will bother. 
So I'm not really sure how things will shape up in the years to come.

> 
> Your latter point is also of interest, because I am about
> to have a visitor who is very keen to release individual
> chapters of a heavyweight textbook in one or more e-formats,
> and he too is unconvinced that PDF will necessarily be one
> of those.
My reservations are not with PDF as a document format,
they lie with Adobe embracing the mobile market to the
detriment of their more traditional products.

James