For what it's worth I concur with Alan's assessment of the use of .pdf
versus .html files for online journals. Again, to go back to a question we
were looking at earlier this year, it comes down to a question of access.

Adobe Acrobat Reader is not hard to download, but it is slow to download --
about one hour for my two-year old Power MAC with a modem, although much
less on my newer PC on a network connection.  So if a potential reader
doesn't already have it, they will have to be relatively motivated to
download the necessary program in the first place. Even then, as Alan points
out, the pages do take forever to download -- and it's impossible as well to
cut and paste the text content and create a nice, small ".txt" file for
storage on my hard drive, which is easily done with html files.  At least
I've not figured a way to do that with .pdf files!

As Alan also points out it's not hard to use tables to control (within
reasonable expectations) the "look" of an html document, and, after all --
isn't the content the most important thing? I for one don't care what font
(for example) someone uses to print any of my online publications. Just read
them, and if you want to print them all the better! What the layout looks
like at that point is of much less importance, to me anyway.

I do think that sometimes using .pdf is justified. For example, anyone who
tries to get papers from the World Archaeology Congress website also has to
deal with .pdf, but in that case using it was a reasonable choice. The
conference web site person (one, from what I gather!) had a lot of printed
(not electronic) submissions and very little time to get them on the web
site. So scanning and  using .pdf files made more sense. However, in the
case of the JCA they're asking for electronic submissions anyway. I wonder
if all this concern with the "look" of the document is because we're in a
transitional period -- will this change as we all get more used to online
publishing?

cheers,
carol mcdavid

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Carol McDavid
Department of Archaeology
University of Cambridge
[log in to unmask]
http://www.webarchaeology.com

Address in UK:
Clare Hall 
Cambridge CB3 9AL
+44 (0)1223 328832

Address in US:
1406 Sul Ross
Houston, TX 77006
+001 (713) 523-2649


%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%