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I'm sure that many of you already had to write a scientific of technical paper, filled with equations and special symbols.
If it happened to you, you know this is not as trivial as writing a letter. You need to learn specific skills, like a publishing language.
Here is what Jeffrey Selingo has to say about this.
It's one of the most frustrating problems encountered when passing documents back and forth electronically: the little square boxes that mean a font someone else used to create the file cannot be rendered on your computer. While Portable Document Format, or PDF, files, which essentially are copies of printed pages, have helped mitigate the problem for most computer users, that solution has not satisfied scientists and mathematicians, whose formulas and equations contain many symbols.
Using those symbols on the Web has been particularly inconvenient. Most publishers use the symbol-friendly PDF format, but then researchers cannot easily embed links to other files or background information within those documents as they can with HTML files. But HTML documents have their own drawbacks. For instance, they often display equations as separate graphic images that cannot be resized or searched and greatly increase the size of the file.
Let's look at the following example: a formula for pi, discovered in 1996, by David H. Bailey (Chief Technologist, NERSC), Peter Borwein and Simon Plouffe (at Simon Fraser University in Canada).
As you can see, this is a GIF image, not-easily editable.
So, some publishers decided to tackle the problem.
Now a new set of fonts being developed by six publishers of scientific, technical and medical journals promises to contain every character -- more than 7,000 in all -- that might be needed in a technical article published in any scientific discipline. When complete, sometime next fall, the fonts will be shared freely with publishers, software manufacturers and scholars, under the condition that they not be altered.
"This work is a breakthrough for publishers and scientists," said Tim Ingoldsby, director of business development at the American Institute of Physics, one of the publishers working on the project, called the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange, or STIX. "The display of math symbols in publishing has always been difficult, but those problems have only become worse with the Web."
There are additional benefits with this approach. For instance, you can search for words, expressions or images on the web. But what about a symbol or a set of symbols currently buried within a GIF image or a PDF document? You're out of luck.
When the STIX project is completed next year, both publishing and searching on the Web will be easier.
Source: Jeffrey Selingo, The New York Times, November 7, 2002
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