• andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      FB2 is a known format for russian pirates, but it can and should be improved because it sucks ass in many things. FB3 was announced long ago but it hasn’t got any traction yet.

      EPUB is mor/e popular, so it’s probably be the go to format for most books US and EU create, but it isn’t much better.

      Other than that, even Doc\Docx is better than PDF, but I’d recomend RTF for it has less traces of M$ bullshit, and while it’s imperfect format, it’s still better.

      • humbletightband@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 months ago

        Maybe for books. I’ve seen only pdf and PostScript widely used for papers in academia.

        Edit: ok my supervisor liked div but he was the only one I knew with this kind of taste

        • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          Div? Can you unpack your thoughts on that, as I haven’t faced it yet?

          I only know DJVU or deja vu format that’s usually used for raw scans.

          • humbletightband@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            6 months ago

            Djvu is also for books and similar.

            I don’t know about div format much, but I remember that mktex was producing it as a side effect

      • visc@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Docx doc rtf and all those have a different purpose than pdf, word docs don’t even necessarily look the same on two different computers with the same version of word, and rtf doesn’t even attempt any kind of paper description, it’s literally only a rich format for text. None of these are a true “if I give this to someone to print I know what I will get” “portable document format”

        I will look at fb*, I had not heard of them. Thanks!

    • ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      Most papers are made in TEX or LaTEX. These formats separate display from data in such a way that they can be quickly formatted to a variety of page size, margins, text size, et al with minimal effort. It’s basically an open standard typesetting format. You can create and edit TEX in any text editor and run it through a program to prepare it for print or viewing. Nothing else can handle math formulas, tables, charts, etc with the same elegance. If you’ve ever struggled to write a math paper in Microsoft word, seriously question why your professor hasn’t already forced you to learn about LaTEX.