Saturday 14 April 2012

Why don't publishers make better use of PDFs?



EDIT: Goodreader for ipad does support hyperlinking!

17 comments:

  1. It's not a problem, it's a feature.
    PDF is an offline format for the majority who want to download and print out. If you want live hyperlinks, read online (html format) - cache locally if you'e going to be offline when reading.

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  2. So what is the best way of caching locally? I work with 100s of papers. How should I manage all of those caches locally? How can I search those caches for keywords etc?

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  3. I have been filing PDFs in a Reference file for about a decade. Recently I started using an App on MacBook Air called "Tags", but I have to now go back and tag the PDFs. This app seems very good, you can then go and search the app by Tags.

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    1. Thanks Ryan. I have no problem searching PDFs- that is one of the reasons that I like PDF format. But I'm wondering what @ajcann means... by web cache does he mean something like evernote? That seems a bit clumsy.

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    2. Ah I see. On my Mac, I've been "printing" all the webpages as PDFs for saving. On Safari: Print > PDF (bottom left) > Save as PDF. That might help.

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    3. Hi Ryan- sorry for confusing you! See Alan's comment above. He is suggesting using a web cache as a REPLACEMENT of pdf format. Your solution is the opposite- turning all html to pdf so that it can be annotated. I want to know how Alan manages annotation etc in HTML format. I can understand what you do:)

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  4. Safari or Firefox will save a local copy with all the extras included.

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  5. It's not a feature, it is the author/publisher failing to use the technology. As you show, it is quite possible to have the links in (be they called bookmarks, hyperlinks etc) and for viewers to be able to take you to the relevant point in the document. Personally I would find it much more useful for the references if they had a mouse-over text assigned, preferably facilitating direct download of the document being referred to, but I guess it will be cold in hell long before publishers try to make their outputs actually useful.

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    1. That certainy would be better- it it possible in a PDF? Some journals do it in the html version I'm sure.

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  6. Very nice use of media (screenr)! I don't know if this is still true, but it used to be that hyperlinks in Word documents were lost when converted to PDFs. I wonder if that contributes.

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    1. I don't know. Maybe it will get better some day:)

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  7. Anne Marie,
    There are ways to do the annotation, highlighting etc on tablets. I blogged about a workflow for doing this http://blogedutech.blogspot.com/2012/04/reading-journals-in-era-of-tablets.html

    The one open issue is closing to loop and searching and citing these articles when you need to write one yourself.

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    1. I have no problem doing annotation on tablets. I use Goodreader. Syncs with Dropbox- all is well! And hyperlinks etc do work from it-I made a mistake about tht in screencast but added an edit. I keep all my PDFs in a folder for project I'm working on. Foxit- and I'm guessing Adobe- make it easy to search an entire folder.
      Some use Mendley to make notes from desktop- their iPad app isn't so god- doesn't synch.

      So the loop isn't bad and is certainly better than paper!!!

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    2. Agree, that journals should ideally provide PDFs that maintain the hyperlinks. I have a work around for creating PDFs with hyperlinks if they are provided in the HTML version of the paper.
      Open Adobe Acrobat >> File >> Create PDF >> From Web Page >> enter web page of HTML version of article. The resulting PDF has all the hyperlinks maintained. Older versions of Acrobat might not support this. Also other free PDF creators might support this too. I put this in as an addendum to my post. http://blogedutech.blogspot.com/2012/04/reading-journals-in-era-of-tablets.html

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  8. Well, it's not even a matter of maintaining hyperlinks. The paper I talked about wasn't available in HTML at all... That is unusual in medical journals but not extremely unusual in the social sciences which I'm reading quite a lot as well.

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  9. Interesting discussion. I don't see why they can't have a 'popup' window appearing when you hover or click the reference number. This is available for html e.g. NetBibleTagger or iphone/ipad Bible reader applications although I haven't seen it in PDFs. Presumably for the goodreader hyperlink feature to work the hyperlinks have to be saved in the PDF file by the publisher.

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  10. Thanks for the tip, Neil. I really had a hard life doing the annotations. I searched the web for a solution, but no luck.

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