Most papers are made in TEX or LaTEX. These formats separate display from data in such a way that they can be quickly formatted to a variety of page size, margins, text size, et al with minimal effort. It’s basically an open standard typesetting format. You can create and edit TEX in any text editor and run it through a program to prepare it for print or viewing. Nothing else can handle math formulas, tables, charts, etc with the same elegance. If you’ve ever struggled to write a math paper in Microsoft word, seriously question why your professor hasn’t already forced you to learn about LaTEX.
Comment on Elsevier
visc@lemmy.world 5 months agoWhat format do you suggest?
ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
FB2 is a known format for russian pirates, but it can and should be improved because it sucks ass in many things. FB3 was announced long ago but it hasn’t got any traction yet.
EPUB is mor/e popular, so it’s probably be the go to format for most books US and EU create, but it isn’t much better.
Other than that, even Doc\Docx is better than PDF, but I’d recomend RTF for it has less traces of M$ bullshit, and while it’s imperfect format, it’s still better.
Syn_Attck@lemmy.today 5 months ago
Whatever the format, let’s hope it doesn’t end up having the extension .map
(minor attracted persons aka PDF file joke)
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Get ready for a sweaty techbro to explain why Least Optimized Lossless Image is the superior format.
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Only if you use the Self-Hashing Orthogonal Tracing Algorithm, naturally.
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 months ago
I don’t like docx because it looks different in libreoffice compared to Windows, also you can run into problems with fonts
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
DOC is a mess in different editions of Word too, especially if you do some complex formatting, but it’s the default format for text documents thanks to MS.
humbletightband@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Maybe for books. I’ve seen only pdf and PostScript widely used for papers in academia
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Div? Can you unpack your thoughts on that, as I haven’t faced it yet?
I only know DJVU or deja vu format that’s usually used for raw scans.
humbletightband@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Djvu is also for books and similar.
I don’t know about div format much, but I remember that mktex was producing it as a side effect
visc@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Docx doc rtf and all those have a different purpose than pdf, word docs don’t even necessarily look the same on two different computers with the same version of word, and rtf doesn’t even attempt any kind of paper description, it’s literally only a rich format for text. None of these are a true “if I give this to someone to print I know what I will get” “portable document format”
I will look at fb*, I had not heard of them. Thanks!