Re:The future of education is plain text
by canes123456 on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @12:13PM
(#14545879)
A PDF without text still kind of works. It not accessible which is a big problem. However, this happens when there is a mistake somewhere in the chain. This is all too common, but what is the correct way to handle tables, diagrams, formulas, images, graphs, links in plain text. There is no right way to do these things in plain text. You will eventually need html or pdf for education.
Also: PDFs have pages and thus page numbers, which are an important tool. When working with long texts you need reference points to share your state.
Re:The future of education is plain text
by JetSpiegel on Tuesday June 13, 2017 @07:57PM
(#14549719)
That's what hyperlinks are. They even have the better property that they don't break if you change the font size for the whole text.
They don't mean much in a classroom of say 30 or 40. A lecturer will have n people with n texts and will have to synchronise them. In a typical lesson you jump to different pages also non-sequentially. The best option is a PDF etc. that you can optionally print. Anything else is a recipe for chaos, especially if you're not in a CS classroom.
They are OK in theory, for the reasons you state.
The problem is the gratuitous use of PDF which we have all experienced - here's a common (pathological) example:
Document author starts with plain text - no special formatting or fonts, no images, etc. Somehow their toolchain converts that into a PDF file that contains No text, but rather an image of text.
The result is a big, bloated, unnecessary use of PDF that cannot even be parsed or used with anything but a graphical PDF viewer since the text is now gone - there is nothing but a picture. Of text.