https://sites.google.com/site/beyondthepdf/home/program-draft

I wonder what Adobe thinks of this conference.





JasonE

JasonE wrote:

https://sites.google.com/site/beyondthepdf/home/program-draft

This is interesting stuff, with lots of implications for outliner software, especially the ones that want to target scientists and academics. These efforts to overcome the PDF format could change fundamentally how science journal papers (and possibly e-books) are written and consumed. Thanks for posting it.

Adobe is probably having a good laugh ...

"The NGP format is designed to retain traditional elements ... bla bla. The reader may also customize their reading experience by selecting alternative text and background color themes."

Are they real scientists? Changing background color themes? This is supposed to be a sample paper in a new format:
http://zfishbook.org/NGP/journalcontent/FunctionalEvalPaper/NGP2.html

jokers

JasonE wrote:

https://sites.google.com/site/beyondthepdf/home/program-draft

I wonder
what Adobe thinks of this conference.





JasonE

Well the article graphic is not as bad as PowerPoint which I liken to the illuminated manuscripts of the middle ages when noblemen would pay scribes to make the manuscripts pretty so they could show them off, even though they could not read. Today PowerPoint presentations (and perhaps this new "medium"?) is designed to please management which hasn't a clue about the content.

Cassius wrote:

Well the article graphic is not as bad as PowerPoint which I liken to the illuminated...

not so sure, they managed to use 3 types of fonts on the initial image, how much more ugly can it be?
http://zfishbook.org/NGP/journalcontent/FunctionalEvalPaper/images/title_image.jpg

and the fish picture in the middle ... I thought it was supposed to be a scientific article not an infant picture book

It looks like the preparation for a 1st April joke...

I think the effort to free scientific work from the constraints imposed upon it by the PDF format is commendable and is an entirely valid reason for a workshop. The PDF is perhaps suitable for business and legal purposes but very poor for consuming scientific information. I support the efforts to make these publications granular, so that one could perhaps do a search by just comparing the methodological sections of thousands of journal articles, without having to download them all and leaf through all the PDFs. Also, annotating, highlighting and then dealing with the annotations is not that easy with PDFs. At the moment one needs a whole range of devices and software to do this, involving several steps.

Ideally I'd like to read my papers on a tablet computer, add notes and highlight while reading them, and capture quotations and citations that could be added automatically to an outlining software. At the moment this is a convoluted process and unsatisfactory, not to mention that there is no way to aggregate scientific papers on the basis of their specific parts, at least not in my field (the social sciences). If all of the above could be done in just a single online platform that would hugely simplify and enhance scientific work.

At the moment I use Whizfolders "watch clipboard" function to capture passages from PDFs, which is OK, but I feel reluctant to buy a Windows-based tablet PC just for that. GoodReader looks nice on the iPad for PDF reading and annotation, but then there is still that business of synchronising the files with the desktop and then it can't capture passages from PDFs as Whizfolders can. So a post-PDF, web-based environment would be ideal...

Dr Andus wrote:

I think the effort to free scientific work from the constraints imposed upon it by the
PDF format is commendable and is an entirely valid reason for a workshop. The PDF is
perhaps suitable for business and legal purposes but very poor for consuming
scientific information.

Dr Anders:
Thanks for taking this topic seriously. As a researchers, PDFs have been the bane of my life, and I've spent hour after fruitless hour over the past 10 years or so battling with the problem of getting information out of them efficiently. Admittedly things are a little easier now; but anything that offers to provide a more useful alternative should be commended not ridiculed.

DBC

In this age of wikinomics the PDF seems like steam powered technology at best. However, I assume that it has flourished largely due to its convenience for intellectual rights management. That is probably the reason that major academic publishing houses support it, so that one can find most papers in PDF format in the first place.

When I first entered the university more than twenty years ago, I would have been eternally grateful for access to journals in PDF form. More recently, during my MBA experience, I wasn't so impressed; I suppose that I expect much more nowadays, simply because I know that much more is possible.

I can think of at least one historical effort to provide a structured document format, facilitating knowledge organisation and retrieval, namely Doug Engelbart's Hyperscope http://hyperscope.org/ see also http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/hyperscope.html I'm sure there have been others.

@ Dr. Andus and Derek Cornish,

Has either of you tried working with pdfs within Citavi, which is newly available in English. It doesn't solve every problem of working with pdfs, but it addresses quite a few: reference management, annotation of pdfs within the program, and the ability to organize and outline with your annotations (with the citations following the annotations and quotations on their travels). Worth a look, if you haven't looked already. I've only just started using it myself, so I'd certainly be interested in chatting with others here who might be interested in Citavi.

Cheers,
David

@Dr Andus

Yes, it's time to take the topic serious because it's a nightmare...

What about using the Normfall Manager for pdf management?
http://www.normfall.de/products-en/normfall-manager/overview.html

Or maybe UltraRecall?
http://www.kinook.com/UltraRecall/

Zotero is an option, too:
http://www.zotero.org/

Last but not least: Mendeley
http://www.mendeley.com/


Dominik

critStock wrote:

Has either of you tried working with pdfs within
Citavi, which is newly available in English.

Thank you David, I had a look at Citavi yesterday and it is truly very impressive. I use EndNote X4 at the moment but I have never been happy with it (too feature-poor and too expensive), especially after I had to buy a brand new licence when I upgraded to Windows 7. I've looked at Zotero and Mendeley in the past, and while they're fine, there weren't sufficiently compelling reasons to switch. However, if it is not too painful to switch from EndNote, I will seriously consider Citavi because as you say they managed to integrate some tasks that otherwise would require 3 or 4 different software (such as a browser, PDF viewer and note-taking and coding software). Now if there was an iPad or Android version of it, that would be the ultimate...

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

In this age of wikinomics the PDF seems like steam powered technology at best.
However, I assume that it has flourished largely due to its convenience for
intellectual rights management. That is probably the reason that major academic
publishing houses support it, so that one can find most papers in PDF format in the
first place.

Exactly! And there is a certain irony in its lack of convenience for academics, who are, after all, the ones who produce the intellectual property.

Derek

@critStock,

Thanks for the reminder about this software. I'll take a closer look when I've finished my current project. Anything that renders a basically unfriendly format more usable is welcome. Currently I use Zoot (v5, not v6) for handling pdfs.

Derek

You might take a look also at Qiqqa, which is a reference manager built around PDFs. It offers full-text search and text export, using a built-in OCR if necessary.

Jerome

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

I can think of at least
one historical effort to provide a structured document format, facilitating
knowledge organisation and retrieval, namely Doug Engelbart's Hyperscope
http://hyperscope.org/ see also
http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/hyperscope.html I'm sure there have been
others.

Answering to myself, there is of course RDF http://www.w3.org/RDF/ the Resource Description Framework to support the semantic web.

In short, whether as PDFs or web pages, our information is stored in ways that our tools cannot comprehend, only reproduce. The semantic web's ambition is to change this.

In other respects, all tools mentioned for handling PDFs are useful, but they don't free their user from the intellectual investment to make sense out of them.