What I want
- Papers are presented in a flexible-display format. PDFs have the goal of preserving the original appearance of a document.
- I want something like a dead-simple web page that lets text flow to fit the page.
- No weird double-column nonsense, where I have to remember to jump back and forth between columns. (I actually missed an important column in a paper the other day by forgetting to shift back. That was useful for when they were physically distributed on paper, not any more. I need something that makes any paper readable on my phone or computer without having to scroll horizontally.
- I want figures and tables to be able to take the space they need, and not be reduced so they can fit inside a small column.
- Explicit data structure.
- I want the platform to understand that these are sections. Let me collapse ones I'm not focussing on. Show me a navigable outline.
- Structure the metadata. Know what the abstract is, what the title is, the author, the year, etc. Have metadata like that appear at the top in structured places, so going through a dozen papers, it is dead predictable where that information will be.
- Have the information be displayed consistently.
- Perhaps let me select my preference for how dates and author names will be displayed, and have that consistently.
- Hyperlink references to other documents.
- I want citations to be clickable links. They might take me to a bibliographic entry, or take me directly to that paper (perhaps let me hover to see what the paper is (abstract, title, author, year)).
- I want the bibliography to definitely be clickable. I don't want to have to search for the title in Google Scholar. It's 2012 already, we have had the Internet and electronic documents for a while. Academics is supposed to be progressive. Especially computer science when it comes to technology.
- Unique identifiers for each document, like Library of Congress numbers. When I write my own papers, I don't want to have to type up bibliographic information in my paper, I don't want to copy and paste bibtex text from Google. I want to drag a URI in and have it instantly resolve to the paper I meant to reference.
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