PDFs are the preferred communication style for papers. HTML documents are the preferred communication style for most other public facing documents.[1]
PDFs are inferior to HTML in many ways: HTML can adapt to fit the viewport and fontsize requested by the user, while PDFs are basically fancy images in this regard. This makes PDFs basically useless on mobile, and generally terrible for casual browsing.
However HTML is not as good for deep study. You can’t annotate it easily, and it’s harder to bookmark your place on a webpage.
I’d really like to see something that allows you to combine the permanence and mark-ability of PDFs with the flexibility of HTML. I’m not sure how good the profit opportunity is, but boy does it seems great. And not that technically difficult to make the product.
[1] Google docs, slack posts, and a long tail of web-based tools are used internally to organizations.
PDFs are the preferred communication style for papers. HTML documents are the preferred communication style for most other public facing documents.[1]
PDFs are inferior to HTML in many ways: HTML can adapt to fit the viewport and fontsize requested by the user, while PDFs are basically fancy images in this regard. This makes PDFs basically useless on mobile, and generally terrible for casual browsing.
However HTML is not as good for deep study. You can’t annotate it easily, and it’s harder to bookmark your place on a webpage.
I’d really like to see something that allows you to combine the permanence and mark-ability of PDFs with the flexibility of HTML. I’m not sure how good the profit opportunity is, but boy does it seems great. And not that technically difficult to make the product.
[1] Google docs, slack posts, and a long tail of web-based tools are used internally to organizations.
I use org-mode and export the same information in both HTML and PDF. If you’re looking for a way to annotate the web take a look at hypothes.is!
I wish more scientific authors exported their latex to html alongside their pdfs.
As it happens I was trying hypothes.is for the first time when I procrastinated by writing this.