Order matters in academia whether the authors want it to or not. Other academics will look at the order of the authors and make judgements based on that, so you'd have to specify something like "authors listed alphabetically".
At text: People may complain about readability, but even with jpeg compression, extracting the data points is usually computationally feasible if there aren't too many of them.
Maybe for the way in which they are layering them, but I'm pretty sure the reasoning behind it is inspired by content that has been made into comics for quite some time, for example
I thought I was hot shit with a low-priority B name, but the Adams in my collaboration showed me just how truly mid I am. If he wasn't on my dissertation committee... and also a cool dude... and a good scientist..., I would have some choice words for him!
Get rid of that guy! And you don't have to do it alone. B names of the university, unite! You have nothing to lose but your second place and all the first places to gain
I'll make him rue the day he was born. I will make the kerning on the copy of my dissertation I send him just slightly weird so that it gives him uncanny discomfort while reading it. Any plots I cite from his work will be slightly lower resolution. He won't know what hit him.
They talk about alphabetical order in the introduction, you can see a bit of it in the screenshot. It feels just slightly unfair because you'll always get Adams et al. and never Zimmer et al.
My idea: have it so every time the document is opened the names are randomly scrambled. I don't think this would work with PDF or on paper but it's a fun idea
Edit: While it wouldn't work decently on paper, this would work with E-Ink display, and instead have it change every few seconds while the paper is being read.
We have implemented two ways to reveal the
actual names present in an overlapping stack, when viewing a PDF
file on a computer.
First, hovering over the stacked names should pop up a tooltip
with the authors listed in their original order, as shown in Figure 1.
This feature works on many desktop PDF viewers (e.g., Acrobat,
Evince, Firefox, VSCode), but notably not Chrome, Edge, Safari,
or MacOS Preview. It also does not work on mobile devices we
tested (probably because they lack a natural notion of “hovering”).
All it’s done is force you to read a tooltip. Which is an awful idea. The tooltips still create a first-author situation, so now your forced to screw around with a tooltip for…. Nothing.
I think the point is to recognise a paper by its author blob so you don't end up needing the tooltip that much (they talk about it in the paper)
I'm not really convinced that it's worth it, but they did think it through.
