
Ask HN: Why are papers still published as PDFs? - adius
Why don&#x27;t we use some standardized machine readable format? E.g. markdown with frontmatter would seem like a great choice!
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rpietro
Some journals will publish a separate file in XML, specially if they are open
access. As for why PDFs, I think the answers are:

1\. P (portable): you can access it offline, store it locally and annotate
(something that researchers do extensively for key articles) 2\. design:
despite all possibilities with html, including html5, flex, interactive
graphics and apps, pdf still allows you to have a much more granular control
over design, and looks matter 3\. tradition - old habits die hard

Specifically in relation to markdown, although some of its flavors are
semantic, and that it also allows for absolutely awesome things such as R
markdown (Rmd), tagging specific article sections is still complicated and
cumbersome. Including div tags inside markdown has a number of issues. This is
all to say that although there is a lot of people writing articles in Rmd, it
is not an ideal solution.

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GFK_of_xmaspast
Papers are meant to be read by people, not machines.

