[oandrei]

The main problem with LaTeX is that it does not have a good hyperlink mechanism. So, I am thinking about how to switch from LaTeX to HTML. I have a markup system based on Racket:

http://andreimikhailov.com/slides/bystroTeX/slides-manual/in...

The main application was supposed to be slides, to replace the Beamer. But I think it is good for generic math-oriented web publishing. It does not work on Windows, though. Comments/suggestions/testing are welcome!

[claudius]

Is there anything specifically wrong with the hyperref package? It seems to work rather decently for me.

[oandrei]

I want to put a hyperlink to Eq. (4.4) of http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9907164 What is the right format? How can it even in principle work? If I click on the link:

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9907164/Eq_4_4

what is supposed to happen?

[claudius]

To me, that looks more like a limitation in PDF rather than the tool that is used to create the PDF – that is, hyperref allows you to create arbitrary links to be handled by your system, but the problem is that PDF does not work all that well when you want to reference a link within a given PDF.

If there was a reliable way to advise a PDF reader to ‘open document X and jump to reference Y’ and to specify both X and Y, then I am sure you would have no problem using hyperref to create a link to X#Y.

[dubya]

Is http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/9907164v2.pdf#page=30 a reasonable approximation? It works in Chrome and should work with the Adobe plugin, but doesn't work in Safari. I don't know if PDF has finer scale references than page.

[oandrei]

I dont know what is Adobe plugin. I will investigate. However, just based on its name, I would probably recommend removing it. The combination of these two words, ``Adobe'' and ``plugin'', makes me feeling uneasy :) Which brings us to the second point: there is no good open-source PDF viewer. If you care about using open source, then go HTML.

[dubya]

Yeah, I don't have the Adobe PDF plugin either. But Firefox and Chrome use PDF.js which is open source AFAIK, and works with page references.

[oandrei]

Also, if they submit a revised version, it will be a different page. Anyway, I don't think we will ever get a good PDF reader, because there is no demand. People read HTML.

[dubya]

After a little more digging, I've found that pdf files can have named destinations, like eqrefs, so you don't have to use page numbers as references. See http://www.tug.org/pipermail/pdftex/2007-October/007383.html for how to make them in LaTeX.

This does require whoever generates the pdf to include the labels, but then so does html. It shouldn't be too hard to generate a reference to any named equation in a file.

What exactly is your problem with current PDF readers? PDF.js is pretty nice for browsers, Preview.app is standard on OS X, Linux has several that were fine and I know that Windows has many that are considered good alternatives to Acrobat Reader. Even phones and tablets do a good job, though e-readers do not.

[oandrei]

You are right, and thank you for the link. Actually, let me use this to advertise my own fork of PdfViewer:

https://github.com/amkhlv/pdfviewer

I started that fork because I could not find a viewer which would keep vertical position, and jump back after following an internal link, and have bookmarks with charhints.

There is a conceptual problem, however: as I said, I feel that PDF is getting deprecated because of insufficient demand. If this is true, then it does not make much sense to invest effort into TeX + PDF. Maybe I am wrong. Sometimes I think that I am simply allergic to TeX :)

[apepe]

In academia though, most scholars tend to stick to PDF for reading papers, see e.g. http://www.quora.com/Why-do-scientists-tend-to-prefer-PDF-do...

[leephillips]

"I have a markup system based on Racket"

Interesting. I just discovered the excellent online book "Practical Typography"[0], which the author prepared using a system he created that he calls "Pollen," and which he wrote in Racket.

[0]http://practicaltypography.com/

[oandrei]

Thanks for the link, I will have a look! Although, in terms of typography you cannot beat LaTeX. That's what LaTeX is good at. But the thing is, I don't care so much about the typographic quality. All I need is a quick way of inserting and hyperlinking math formulas in HTML pages.