SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
It is the 120th anniversary of the passing of a bill by the House of Congress of Indiana to change the value of pi to 3.2! [Errors in the original are copied here verbatim. -Ed]
Weird as it sounds, in effect the House voted 67-0 on H.B. 246 "Introducing a new mathematical truth" on February 5th, 1897 and referred to the Senate of Indiana.
On February 2, 1897 Representative S. E. Nicholson, of Howard County, chairman of the Committee on Education, reported to the House:
"Your Committee on Education, to which was referred House Bill No. 246, entitled a bill for an act entitled an act introducing a new mathematical truth, has had same under consideration, and begs leave to report the same back to the House with the recommendation that said bill do pass."
The bill was duly passed to the Senate on February 10th and read on the 11th, then referred to the Temperance Committee. On February 12 Senator Harry S. New, of Marion County, Chairman of the Committee on Temperance made the following report to the Senate:
"Your Committee on Temperance, to which was referred House Bill No. 246, introduced by Mr. Record, has had the same under consideration. and begs leave to report the same back to the Senate with the recommendation that said bill do pass."
On the afternoon of February 12 "Senator Bozeman called up House Bill No. 246. The bill was read a second time by title. Senator Hogate moved to amend the bill by striking out the enacting clause. The motion was lost. Senator Hubbell moved to postpone the further consideration of this bill indefinitely. Which motion prevailed."
The bill was never voted on, it was simply postponed following ridicule from the press. "Senator Hubbell characterized the bill as utter folly. The Senate might as well try to legislate water to run up hill as to establish mathematical truth by law. Leading papers all over the country, he said, were ridiculing the Indiana Legislature. It was outrageous that the State of Indiana should pay $250 a day to have time wasted on such frivolous matters."
A very interesting story by Will E. Edington then at DePauw University, published by the Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science. Sorry PDF only.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday February 14 2017, @05:59PM
Yes, I completely agree about the inflexibility of PDFs.
But one major advantage with PDFs with defined layout is that they still give at least some of the "navigational" experience of traditional paper reading, which to me is really useful in finding stuff if I ever need to go back to the article/book/whatever again. Sure, text search helps too, but with a book I can generally remember, "Hey, I saw this passage on a top of a page about 2/3 of the way through next to a table" and flip through and find it almost instantly. Full-text search might also work too, but PDF gives me both options... whereas if I view something in HTML, the layout may be completely different.
And, traditional typography in a "set" form allows various layout choices that make reading pleasant. For example, there are lot of traditional "rules" about line breaking that old-school typographers used to pay attention to, like where to line-break appropriately (and where not to break) around numbers or conjunctions or initials or various things to prevent "parsing errors" when reading. Good copyeditors these days when doing a final print version of something may still pay attention to such things. And those are small things -- layout also can standardize text flow around figures, tables, etc. to ensure a good result. There's a lot more flexibility making various adjustments to leading and other layout tweaks if necessary.
And choosing a font is more than just an aesthetic choice. The characteristics of a font often also determine other layout choices to optimize readability. Sure, you could use other fonts, but in doing so, a good layout designer would probably make a lot of other small adjustments.
gutter width (that's just wasting space - even on tablets - as well as grows\shrinks with even\odd pages just so you won't be able to zoom in and casually flip pages).
PDFs that are optimized for screen use won't have gutters for binding. I completely agree that IF you're going to distribute a PDF for screen use, you should optimize it for screen viewing, not binding.
Then again, nowadays HTMLs also have mandatory fonts and gutters as well as a metric ton of javascript so you're probably screwed either way.
What's your problem with mandatory fonts? Many people care not only about the words of the text, but also its appearance. (If they didn't, MS Word would have no formatting choices at all.)
And what do you mean "gutters" in HTML? Do you just mean "margins"? Margins are important for appearance and readability -- try running text up to the very, very edge of your screen, and you'll see that generally having at least a small area for "contrast" surrounding the text can be helpful. Also, if you're talking about defined text widths, again that's a readability issue. Lots of typography stuff is based on tradition and aesthetic choices, but there have been actual studies showing that if you put too many characters per line, it makes it more difficult for your eyes to find the right line when skipping to the next one (unless you put a huge amount of leading between). That's the reason magazines and newsletters that want to cram in text put it in a multi-column format -- so you can use a smaller font and smaller margins without increasing characters per line to the point that it impacts readability.
So, I completely agree with you that it's sometimes annoying to deal with PDFs. But if I'm reading a long document, I'd actually prefer having to zoom a bit or whatever rather than dealing with all the inefficiencies of text that has no defined layout or design. And yes, you can actually accomplish some of this stuff in HTML too, but most people don't seem to bother and even when they do, there are often very "hack-like" things that end up just looking weird.