Re: RTF for emacs

[Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se>]

Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com> writes:

> Expressive, yes, but that should be fixed by
> developing and standardizing XML schemas for
> everything that is not well expressible in
> HTML/MathML/SVG.

HTML and the Internet is one chaotic hack. LaTeX is a
virtually bug-free, domain-specific programming
language to produce documents.

But it is not even HTML vs. LaTeX (or web vs. PDFs) as
those serve two totally different purposes. (Or should,
at least.)

> Looks the same, yes, and that’s a bad thing. The
> shape of content should adapt to the reader [both
> human who does the reading, and device which is
> used], not the other way round. On paper, I am ok
> with 10pt Times and can handle two columns on an A4
> page or two A5 pages side-by-side. On a desktop
> screen [at least until 4K displays become widely
> available and reasonably priced], I want a highly
> legible 12pt sans-serif, hinted for subpixel
> rendering, in a single column of adjustable width,
> and no subdivision into fixed-size pages. And don’t
> even start with me about tablets and
> smartphones. (And no, it’s not reasonable to expect
> that readers be able or willing to re-render your
> LaTeX article for their device capabilities and
> personal preferences.)

Yes, this is what I'm saying all along! I don't think
you should read PDFs on the monitor/projector, and
certainly not on "smart"phones - grep the web, you
should get web pages (in HTML), print the 600-page
manual or Ph.D. thesis with techno-science notation -
LaTeX and PDFs.

What you can do with HTML cannot at all compare to what
you can do with LaTeX, and if you could (which you
can't) it would be extremely uncertain if it would work
for half browsers - and some people actually need all
that stuff. (And I don't even like browsers, anyway.)

But I'm the first to say PDFs are used too much and for
information that do not benefit from it at all, and
then it is much better with ASCII or HTML.

-- 
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