Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by maple3142 974 days ago
I think some basic dynamism is still necessary to make reading pdf on small screens comfortable (e.g. mobile). When on mobile, I vastly prefer reading webpages over pdf because most reasonable webpage should be able to fit mobile screen.
2 comments

Sadly, if you have an iPhone I don't think you can easily read Nota docs currently. The article that introduces Nota [1] has only been tested on Chrome. I tried multiple browsers on iOS to no avail (likely since they all use the same underlying rendering engine).

[1] https://willcrichton.net/nota/

All you need is re-flowable text for this, right? That's generally not considered dynamic.
If you follow the comment trail back up, in the context of this conversation, static means PDF, hard constraints of physical page layouts; dynamic means HTML, digital, no hard layout constraints.
I had read all those comments. What I'm saying that is that re-flowable text is just in a very different class than web pages that auto-translate the text, have animations, or run arbitrary code.
Yes, that's what dynamic means in a frontend dev context. This is a typesetting and document layout context.
No, Nota is not just typesetting and document layout. Things like dynamical code examples, auto-translation, advanced tool-tips, and reader-customizable notation are intended to set it apart from predecessors. In other words, it is different precisely because it does things that would be considered dynamic to a front-end dev.