Literature imaging

• on this page: Motivation, Response
• see also: devnotes : : PDF imaging

Motivation

• Reading the scientific literature is a beautiful experience
  • ...for Mac users
• Linux PDF readers are rubbish¹, and reading PDFs on mobile is a pain in the neck²

  • ¹ comparatively... obviously I'm hugely grateful to the developers who produce and improve such vital tools

    • corollary: pity Adobe choose to make a political point by keeping their applications on the platform feeling a good 5-10 years out of date, where they support us at all...

  • ... They never go full screen properly,
    else they don't zoom nicely,
    else they crash etc etc

  • ² mainly a problem of network latency, but associated to that is publishers' total indifference to researchers' use of mobile phones

    • ...or perhaps this is solved with paid services at some point for some elite class of researchers who rarely find themselves far from a high quality connection.
    • with an essentially state of the art smartphone [albeit Android] and 4G connection this is still a problem, I'm sick of waiting for load screens, not to mention filling my phone up
      • and no, the cloud is not the solution to filling one's phone memory
      • ...not least for the £ demand it assumes of students et al. to participate in literature consumption, i.e. one more informal differentiator between students based on their financial means rather than ability

Response

• Rendering PDF to image is easy
• Creating images of PDFs you own (nothing more than looking at them, as you'd do with paper) will be healthy for researchers
  • once it's an image, the value of text becomes clearer

    • e.g. through non-standard text that can't be accessed through features like Google On Tap, equation annotation, etc.

      NB PDFs themselves are poor housing for this information too, images only clarify the issue of access to the textual data we think we obtain when we "download a paper", and over which [by many academic accounts] publishers seize onto more tightly than they really ought be entitled to