[lallysingh]

Check out the example of the PLDI paper. There are popups for symbols inside large, dense equations. That can really help.

I think that there's interesting open space for dynamic documents, but you need some good examples of people using it with taste.

[jacobolus]

You mean this one? https://nota-lang.org/examples/infoflow-paper/standalone/

One unfortunate problem is that nobody bothered setting the measure for legibility. On my display the text block is far far too wide. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length (while we're talking about typography, the fonts for body copy and code are mismatched in size in a distracting way)

As far as formulas/notation is concerned, the notation used in this paper is targeted only at experts in theoretical computer science, approximately the level of advanced grad students or above, who also happen to be pretty familiar with Rust and C++. The gimmicky popups are probably not meaningfully helpful for such an audience, and in my opinion don't really make the notation any more accessible to people without the extremely steep prerequisite expertise (e.g. I don't think this paper is going to be at all accessible to the vast majority of working programmers or computer science undergraduate students).

If you really want to make the paper more accessible, it would be better to focus on reducing the reliance on formulas, reducing the amount of jargon involved, and explaining the concepts and techniques using plain English targeted at a broader audience, rather than trying to add extra colors, click targets, or popups. (A research paper may alternately want to just target experts; that can also be fine. Even for experts this paper is pretty dense though.)

[lallysingh]

They were helpful for me, an ex-grad-student who read some type theory years ago. I think anyone breaking into the topic would appreciate that.

Requiring authors to publish two versions to make it accessible, when the motivated reader just needs a little comfort, is too high a bar. Let them write densely for their primary audience (and this pass peer review) and still give affordances for everyone else.

As for width, font, etc, a stylesheet can fix that. I'm assuming they allow stylesheets to format for each venue appropriately.

[romwell]

>There are popups for symbols inside large, dense equations. That can really help.

That can also really mess with screen readers and other accessibility features.

There's a reason PDF/A spec forbids scripts in any PDF documents that are expected to be available in the future.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A

[lallysingh]

This is a good point. Can a similar markup mechanism help make accessibility easier? Equations are compact to the eye but can be really unpleasant read out loud.