By Chemistry Blog » Blog Archive » ACS PUBS Redesign Brings Chaos To the RSS Masses on November 20, 2008 at 9:08 pm

[...] Edit 4: Rachel has an update: About Those Feeds [...]

By zts on November 25, 2008 at 9:50 am

A picture is worth a thousand words. If I can’t see the graphical abstract, I won’t read the article.

The same goes for the HTML versions of the papers. The images are so small that it is impossible to scan the articles, and very difficult to read them. The images are the most meaningful content for most papers, and I don’t want to go through and expand them all myself. The new pdf cover page hypes the HTML version, but the HTML version is useless, so I will still use the pdf, but now I have to go through an extra step of deleting the cover page before I save or print. Really, do they have anyone test their new features before they roll them out?

By mitch on November 25, 2008 at 11:33 am

Sam has a work around for those that can’t wait:
http://blog.everydayscientist.com/?p=1210

By mitch on November 26, 2008 at 12:37 am

Klug: Then how would you know it was a hyperlink? :p

By zts on November 26, 2008 at 8:34 am

From Jonathan Morgan: “please click on the abstract graphic within this full text HTML article. This will bring up our new “Figure Browser” feature…lets you scroll through all of the figures and schemes in the paper (instead of clicking on figures one-by-one).”

This feature seems to be OK, but I still want the graphics in the HTML document to appear at a readable size. I constantly refer back and forth between the text and the figures when I’m reading. To have to be reading, go click on the picture, look at it, then click back, is too much trouble. If the figure browser were fixed on a portion of the screen, so it could always be open and viewable while you scrolled through the text, that would fix the problem.

Playing around with the figure browser, it seems a little buggy. The paper Jonathan linked to displays the figure captions properly, but in this paper: 10.1021/jo8016814, the captions are nowhere to be found, as far as I can tell, anywhere in the HTML version of the paper. The captions are essential to understanding the figure, because they they contain all the details about reagents. Without them this version of the paper is unreadable. In the paper Jonathan linked to I tried exporting some of the figures to powerpoint, and the images were deformed in the process (all scrunched up horizontally). Overall, looks like a step in the right direction, but still buggy.

By zts on November 26, 2008 at 12:50 pm

Mitch, I guess I probably knew your comment was a joke, but it still provided a good opportunity to launch into a rant.