Re: [Axiom-developer] Axiom, Ubuntu and texlive

[Michel Lavaud]

Le 05/06/2014 09:33, Ralf Hemmecke a écrit :
> > And rigor, I suppose? pdf format is not frozen, pdf viewers are not
> > bug-free. Remember an RMLL conference in Metz where the pdf file of a
> > colleague didn't display some text of the file. dvi format is very
> > simple and frozen, dvi viewers exist and can be supposed bug-free for
> > these reason. Same old recurrent debate of "new" vs "old",
> You misunderstood my question about dvipdfm.
>
> I don't like .dvi and .pdf. These are binary formats. Source counts.
Ah, I see, OK. In theory, in a world with perfect humans, I would 
completely agree with you. But in practice, in a world with imperfect 
humans, source is often insufficient: I could cite many tex sources of 
colleagues that did not compile because they used files that were not 
available anymore; I have seen also style files, one particular version 
of it broke representation of mathematical formulas. In these cases, dvi 
saves from starting from zero. So, I would say the couple source and dvi 
are indispensable in an imperfect world. Creating output versions in 
pdf, html, epub etc. is of course a plus, and one of these (and no dvi) 
may be quite sufficient for a thriller author because an error can be 
corrected automatically by the brain of the reader. But for mathematics 
and works that need rigor and for which the brain cannot automatically 
correct errors : I think the best is still to have source and dvi (and 
pdf as a plus, but not as a replacement). This is, by the way, the 
approach also used for ArXiV (if it didn't change recently).