Slashdot Mirror

Why do technically-knowledgeable give their work self-defeating names?

Rust: Happens with iron as iron becomes useless red dust.

Gimp: (1) a derogatory term for someone that is disabled or has a medical problem that results in physical impairment.

LaTeX: Use two different alphabets to write a name! Inspired by the Greek word ÏÎÏ. Sorry, Slashdot can't display those characters.

But it is a good metaphor. If I spend time arranging the content in a book now, avoiding apple's software, I can send it to any publisher. Apple's software removes that ability, Apple's PR team makes it feel natural, and Apple's diehard fans defend it. How about instead of Photoshop I compared it it to something like using http://www.smashwords.com/ or http://www.latex-project.org/intro.html?

Subject of several theses:

http://www.tug.org/docs/liang/

http://www.pragma-ade.com/pdftex/thesis.pdf

https://www.tug.org/docs/plass/plass-thesis.pdf

(John Hobby's on METAPOST http://ect.bell-labs.com/who/hobby/thesis.pdf )

Probably others. More information at

http://www.tug.org/

and

http://www.latex-project.org/

and

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page

William

The GIMP is a bit dodgy, yes; OpenOffice looks terrible, but DON'T use Word. (La)TeX is unbelievably better, and if you want a GUI, LyX is great. These are programs that are used professionally, and are orders of magnitude better than the ugly junk that is Microsoft Word. http://www.latex-project.org/ http://www.lyx.org/

``Also, nice typography.''

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, that's what you get when you use LaTeX. You focus on the content, and LaTeX takes care of the typesetting, incorporating years (perhaps hundreds of them) of research on how to make text aesthetically pleasing, easy to read, and suitable for binding, so that you don't have to do that research yourself. Plus, LaTeX is the format that many journals prefer submissions to be in.

At least it's still in progress and not forsaken...

All 27 users of TeX will be quite excited about this.

Ah yes, the reliable old joke: all X people who care will be happy, where X is a humorously small number. Classic!

But kidding aside, TeX is in heavy use. Most TeX users use LaTeX or even LyX to wrap TeX and make it easier, but TeX is in there doing the work.

My understanding is that TeX is standard in the academic world, because it can correctly typeset serious math equations. Also, Wikipedia uses TeX to process all <math> tags (see here for details).

I have many times read discussion boards where people said something like "I started writing my thesis in Microsoft Word using its equation editor. After my fourth bout of heavy drinking and depression, my friend showed me LaTeX, and I was able to finish my thesis with just a few wine coolers and hardly any Prozac."

steveha

I can understand that copy editing is a lot of work, and GOOD copy editing is somewhat expensive. But "preparation costs?" Complete horseshit. Typesetting is essentially free unless you need to make physical copies, and it's a job that should be done by the copy editor, not a separate engraver. This isn't the 20th century anymore.

(Of course that particular free typesetter only creates a PDF or Postscript file. I'm sure the excessive DRM schemes and platform-specific obfuscation cost several million dollars to create and apply.)

Promotion is a burden that's essentially already borne by Amazon et al. I can't remember the last time I saw an ad for a book anywhere. Where the hell does that advertising budget go? My guess is the publishers are mainly competing with each other for "prime estate" on the front page, but many people-- specifically college students-- are more interested in finding a specific book than whatever is being promoted most heavily. Even private purchasers are loath to pay $5 for a book they may not enjoy at all; most purchases are via word of mouth or because the reader enjoyed reading previous works by that author. The search infrastructure allowing specific purchases is already there, if immature. A Pandora-style associative advertising system probably isn't far off. I don't see where the publishers fit into either of these cases.

So remind me again where the money is going, aside from lobbying against copyright reform?

Looks like LaTeX with a CHI template. But maybe that was what you were getting at? Pretty it is.

one more very successful non-gcc project.

[quote]Explore the fearsome depths of the labyrinthine cursed dungeon /etc in an attempt to find the ancient lost artifact, A Fucking Working Configuration![/quote]

If you want something that genuinely deserves having the Indiana Jones music on in the background, check out the website for Latex. ;)

If you want something for making analogies with the Necronomicon, we also must mention X. Perverted? Check. Blasphemous? Check. Likely to send you howling, barking, raving insane if you delve too deeply into its' unholy innards? Check.

I think it's great that this is happening and look forward to the adoption of open textbooks.

However, I looked at the PDFs that they post on their website, and they look awful. The formulas and plots were hard to read and pixelated. They should have used LaTeX for their typesetting and formulas and maybe sage or matplotlib to make the graphs.

BJ

Is it possible to weed out the redundant or useless features in OOo and make it sleek and quick?

Yes. It's called LaTeX.

It sounds like you want LaTeX. It has a built in reference, chapter, figure/table referencing and an ToC system. It is great for equations and a whole host of other things. It does have a learning curve, but it works great. The one problem with it is that it does not have a spell checker. So what you do is type in Word and then copy/paste it into LaTeX for the formating and everything else.

Mathematica 7 has launched, as noted in Stephen Wolfram's blog post. Among the new features are huge equation typesetting, transcendental roots, and discrete calculus. Looking back at the version 6 discussion, it's perhaps inevitable that comparisons will be made to CAR, CGsuite, GAP, Geogebra, Geometer's Sketchpad, Geometry Expressions, Geonext, LaTeX, Magma, Maple, Matlab, nauty, noneuclid, Pari, Sage, or SeifertView. In other news, the Wolfram Demonstrations project now has over 4000 interactive math demos.

Personally I'm a big fan of JabRef which uses the BibTeX package in LaTeX.

There is a way to get JabRef working with Word 2003 but I've never tried it, I mostly stick to LaTeX.

JabRef is a nice little Java app, nice easy to use interface, smart search functions, runs happily under my xp and *nix accounts, and is open source.

Happy Days

This (2MB PDF) is how I learnt, but it was only a 90min guide back then. It tells you everything you need to know and gives examples of code and the formatted output, so making your first document is straight forward and the examples in there have been sufficient for everything I have ever needed to produce.

More documentation here if you need.

"This reaffirms the integrity of our oral history," Chief Strand said. "Our oral history needs to have a place in your scientific world."

What?! Most other "oral histories" have been written down by now. Hey, you! Chief Strand! Get yourself a laptop and start write! If you also install LaTeX you won't have to worry about not being scientific, as "LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents." as read on http://www.latex-project.org/.

Connexions from Rice University allows authors to write interconnected modules that do not necessarily follow a linear path. A student can read the material online or create a PDF. One of its main drawbacks from an author's standpoint, that input from LaTeX was not accepted, seems to be on the way to being solved. Still, it is clear that from looking at some of the better modules there that at least in the sciences and engineering, a significant amount of time and expense in writing a good textbook go into making quality illustrations, figures, and for online textbooks, animations or videos.

If the CLI were the superior interface, we'd be doing desktop publishing with it.


I do. It's vastly superior to any WYSIAYG (What you see is all you get) word processor.

You do have a point that random access selection of files based on visual inspection of their contents is better done in a GUI though. Until someone writes image-grep that is.

http://www.tug.org/

Use a front end of choice if you want. E.G.:-

http://www.latex-project.org/
http://www.lyx.org/
http://kile.sourceforge.net/
http://www.gnu.org/software/auctex

A Google search on "tex frontend" will yield many more.

Honest, before all the Deities, it's that simple.

either that, edit some photos, create some music, even make a nice drawing or perhaps write a book. The fact that the Linux and *BSD excel at IT and programming jobs doesn't mean that's all they're good for, as you'd know had you actually used them.

or you could just troll on Slashdot like you're doing right now, you can use Opera or Firefox perfecly fine for that under Linux, too.

HTML, CSS and javascript are for display purposes. You are confusing them with SGML, of which HTML is a subset. Formatting documents for good old fashioned paper printing or indeed common display is a lot more complex than what is possible in Ajax, simply due to the limitations of the browser. The adoption of XML based formats in Word and Word-type applications has been a step forward but the issue of implementation still remains a problem.

Word quite simply isn't very good at addressing modern publishing requirements. I'm suffering from this at the moment in having to write quite a few documents based on templates that haven't been made very well and are often impossible to fix once they have been populated. A search finds ways to fix these things, such as trying to make numbering do what you want it to but very often it's a case of 'can't get there from here'. This problem spreads to OpenOffice et al because they have to emulate Word and the habits that users develop from using Word, which perpetuates the errors and problems without finding a solution. Personally, if I ever get around to doing any serious writing I will do it LaTeX. Until then I'm stuck with Word and its slightly less idiot cousins.

HTML and CSS are quite capable of rendering and displaying webpages. What happens with a simple thing like a file header showing page number and author name. Footers with footnotes? How about dealing with table of contents etc. How would a page in a document be broken down? Anyone who's tried to print HTML knows there are many issues with layout. What's sad though is that even HTML and CSS is not supported the same in all browsers.

I'm a latex junkie. Latex though is a PITA to create templates and styles for. Someone willing to take up the task to modernize latex or completely replace it?

Abiword
OpenOffice
LaTeX

To my knowledge, there is no other document format that is intended to work this way.

Errrr.... Tex?

http://www.latex-project.org/

And I ain't ever used it, but my friends here do their entire print magazine in it.

I have a big problem with WYSIWYG word processing: I spend more time "formatting" than "writing". Even with the shear amount of templates available, it still puts a severe lag in my productivity. LaTeX is nice and powerful, but at the same time, it is complex and generally overkill for what I need. So, I started on simply use HTML for my documents, but tagging sucks just as bad. I prefer to write just plain text files with minimal markup and limited formatting, so I can focus on what I am communicating. Well, wiki syntax is relatively simple. So, I decided to find some tools that allow me to do simplified wiki markup. I ended up finding Muse, an Emacs mode that allows the user to create wiki text and have them compile into various output formats (LaTeX, DocBook, HTML, PDF, etc). So now, I create documents and resumes in text, compile it into HTML, apply stylesheets and publish/print.

Mathematical equations editing that doesn't crash or slow to a crawl? Sane bibliography/reference management without a stupid payware addon? Page layout that doesn't randomly change according to your printer drivers.

I mark up text files with Latex and then print them out for my own use. I find a two-column layout on 8.5 x 11 paper works best. An average novel usually works out to 30-40 pages printed on both sides of the page. Depending on your printer costs, you can print an entire novel for less than a dollar. Leave an offset on the left for a binding, and what you end up with is alot like a magazine or newspaper (which is where novels used to be published).

Project Gutenberg is an obvious source for text files of public domain books to print. But I've also noticed that most science fiction, from classic to contemporary, is available in text files from a host of torrent sites. Not that I would download them -- that would be piracy! But I will note that used editions of Philip K. Dick's books now run $10.00 at my local bookstore (where other sci-fi writers hover around $5.00). If Dick wrote 50 novels, that's 50 x $10.00 = $500.00!

Just started out with Vex http://vex.sourceforge.net/. It looks to be a pretty neat XML editor, based on Eclipse, with the DocBook DTD http://www.docbook.org/ built in.

I have been a longtime user of LaTeX http://www.latex-project.org/ and have found TeXnicCentre http://www.toolscenter.org/ to be a nice front end for LaTeX. I have tried word-processors, but haven't really played with OO.org long enough to understand the sectioning and styles feature. Now, I recently re-stumbled over LyX http://www.lyx.org/
I think I will stick with LyX/LaTeX till I understand DocBook better.

On a side note, I came across NaturalDocs (http://www.naturaldocs.org/) yesterday. It looks to be a neat way to generate documentation without messing up the whole thing with tags.

Now, it would be a nice idea to take all these diverse ideas and combine them together into a single tool that can work as a driver for various formats (somthing like GCC, which can compile multiple languages). So, you need to know 1 tool, which can parse reST, NaturalDocs, Doxygen etc. You know, the great unified theory of text processing ...

Nothing useful, I'm afraid. In theory it's great but don't hold your breath. Any author would have to download an OWL editor, understand the editor, understand the formal language used, and then code up his/her article in OWL using the EXPO distionary, and submit it (in electronic form) along with his article. Good luck to you authors!

Scientific authors have been doing this runaround for years with this product

I suppose that Knuth has a very "computer science" definition of what a bug is whereas the guy that I was quoting has a "marketing" definition of what a bug is. To marketing, a bug is something wrong with the application. So, a missing or mis-perceived feature could be a bug. If my previous head of marketing were ever to encounter TeX, I would guess that the first "bug" he would find is the lack of WYSIWYG.

I, myself, have used LaTeX and have not been able to get word wrap within a tabular block to work. Whether or not there is something I am doing wrong or there is an elegant explanation as to why you should never do that is irrelevant to me. I would like that and I can't get it, so it feels like a bug.

Last time I scanned my system for porn, all that was detected was LaTex (which isn't porn). I hope it doesn't delete tex files or I know a lot of people who will get frustrated.

Aside from the issues already mentioned (type-setting quality and the lyx GUI), there are quite a number of reasons why LaTeX might be preferable for many people currently using WYSIWYG word processors...

The quickest way (as for most things!) is to find someone who knows it and start asking them (or just start copying what they do).
More seriously, you can start at http://www.latex-project.org/ and start following links. Take a look at their intro page, then maybe start reading the usual The (Not So) Short Introduction to LaTeX2e. Be careful not to give up — when something gets overwhelming, skip it and move on.

The quickest way (as for most things!) is to find someone who knows it and start asking them (or just start copying what they do).
More seriously, you can start at http://www.latex-project.org/ and start following links. Take a look at their intro page, then maybe start reading the usual The (Not So) Short Introduction to LaTeX2e. Be careful not to give up — when something gets overwhelming, skip it and move on.

I agree with the sibling AC : LaTeX is the perfect tool to write scientific publications.
And if you don't like the "coding style" of LaTeX, you can use LyX.

Trust me, If you are writing a PhD thesis then a word processor is last thing you want to use. Open up a text editor and use LateX.
It will save you loads of time and grief in the long run. Word documents are fine for 1 page memo's and the like, but if you want a beautiful looking manuscript there is only one option.
I've seen people literally go mad trying to write their thesis in Word once the page count gets high.

I wish some companies look towards and invest money in http://www.tug.org/ and http://www.latex-project.org/ as well.
TeX is a far-far superior way of formatting and writing documents compared to any of the word packages.

I was clueless... I had to look it up, for more info check out there intro page:
http://www.latex-project.org/intro.html

The ability to typeset sublime mathematics and papers based not on WYSIWYG, but form and content; both of which may be possible under MiKTeX, but it seemed most natural to migrate, if not to whose nativity, then to the least hostile environment for work.

If you only want to sit down for 5/30 minutes and just write up part of some document, and not worry about formatting/settings etc, have a look at http://www.latex-project.org/. It will let you get down into the writing of the document, and you won't have to worry about formatting or anything like that.

Depends on your search terms.

I happen to use a certain typesetting system[1] whose most prevalent macro package is named for a fetishist material[2] --- it can be downright embarrassing sometimes at work trying to look up solutions for specific difficulties.

And of course, this sort of thing isn't helped by bookmarked sites going away and being purchased by others for far different uses[3]

Other inocuous terms can have similar difficulties --- try ``baby doll'' sometime.

William
[1] TeX http://www.tug.org/
[2] LaTeX http://www.latex-project.org/
[3] the company which was Y&Y and sold fonts web site isn't about fonts anymore. http://www.yandy.com/

LaTeX

The damn spec hasn't changed in ages and is designed especial for posterity. If you have a textbook (you know, those expensive things you have to buy for school?) they're all written in LaTeX.

A way shorter and imho more legible notation would be Latex's: CO_2.

It usually takes our new crop of grad students until October or November to figure out that http://www.latex.com/ is not, in fact, the place to look for help on LaTeX (http://www.latex-project.org/). I haven't seen it in a while (and I've no particular desire to look just now), but I used to see that one around the labs with due frequency. It was easily recognisable -- the background was a lovely shade of #FF0000, with some suitably unclad ladies in interesting poses. As one of the few female CS grad students around here, I always find the reaction of the newbs highly amusing when they see I've caught them surfin' the pr0n.

... the normal process you expect in open source: You start with some one else's code, hack on it until you really understand what you wanted to do with it, and in that process replace all the original code to make your own product.

Indeed. Perhas the author can point us to the original "pre-hack" code for Emacs, LaTeX or LyX ?

> I'll hand it to PDF for being pretty good, even if the software to use PDF (read AND write) is very expensive

On what planet, exactly, is writing PDFs expensive ? I manage to do this for free all the time with a variety of software packages. I thought everyone else did the same. If not, well, I'm glad to have possibly helped you cut your PDF production expenses ;-)

> I believe a browser should be smart enough to withstand whatever's thrown at it, and if it recieves errored data, to notify the user as such, and move on

Most browsers, when they receive erroneous[*] data, are perfectly able to "withstand" it (actually, they just ignore whatever tags or parameters they can't understand). I suppose you're talking about not rendering the page if it has bugs ? Well, you *can* force a browser to do that (Gecko will do it if you send an application/xhtml+xml MIME type header), but you cannot generalize this beahviour, for the following reasons : (1) the *vast* majority of Web pages out there are invalid (*cough*Slashdot*cough*), and (2) even those who are valid can be rendered invalid by external factors (ad banner code, for instance). And you cannot fail to render much of the Web, at least, if you want to have users, because without a large userbase, you won't be able to push for more standards support (yes, it's quite ironic, I know).

> it is also our fault for not implementing all of the features

It would probably help if the standard was a tad less obscure. Of course, you've a lot of conformance tests out there, but still...

> As Microsoft does have more of the market share, that shouldn't stop people from creating pages that don't work with Internet Explorer

Huh... Yeah, sure. Whatever. I'm sure my customers would be thrilled at the opportunity to break their site for ~80% of their visitors, don't you think so ? Seriously, that's not (yet) possible, the best people can do is make standards-compliant pages that work on most browsers (note I didn't even say "all browsers" because there are differences in CSS rendering between nearly every one of them. *Sigh*).

> If it was anyone's "fault" [...] it's the Web Developers for not using the standards

What about the funny people at Netscape who started the nonstandard tag mania in the first place ? The W3C for not being vocal enough ? I only heard about Web standards fairly recently (a few years). That campaign should have been launched much earlier, *before* the damage (i.e. gazillions of invalid pages all over the Web) was done !

[*] Yes, I'm a grammar Nazi, too. You're out of luck, today *grin*

Moreover the calculus book requires specialist typesetting, less of a problem nowadays but the average printing house isn't set up for printing sigmas.

That's why most textbooks nowadays are formatted using LaTeX. Besides, most printing houses for textbooks require camera-ready, so it's the author's problem to get those wacky symbols onto paper.

Using OpenOffice is admirable, but for a 134 page document? I stay away from office suites for documents longer than a handful of pages...

They never heard of LaTeX? :)