Depending on your testing needs/ability, you should easily be able to do optical testing of multiple choice or true/false tests (or have them submit tests via computer). A lot of more valuable tests require reading and thinking to grade. This still isn't fun.
But to make it less of a time sink, just multitask; grade during your commute or tv or laundry or workout or whatever.
The first key to productivity is that you are comfortable in the environment. Additional keys are that it is expressive & doesn't force you through tedium & allows you to script away as much tedium as possible. Certain people ARE more comfortable with LaTeX & know it well enough (and use the right tools) such that it isn't tedious. The most tedious parts about LaTeX are not knowing how to do something (which is combatted by knowledge or good tools or good code to steal) and compilation errors (which is combatted by knowing the syntax well, by using editors that prevent/fix/point out errors, and by compiling frequently (sometimes in the background)). LaTeX is CERTAINLY more scriptable than Word & automating references & formatting can be quite trivial. An example I recently used was a solution to placing a series of dozens of figures & captions. It is easy to generate the plain text code to do this. Less easy to write a VBA script in Word. LaTeX is also more reusable & versioning CAN be better. In short, people CAN BE PRODUCTIVE in LaTeX
Products with shallow learning curves have simple interfaces. It is true that Word has an easier-to-understand GUI than many of the LaTeX GUIs. More importantly, it is (whether we like it or not) omnipresent & most administrative assistants already have some experience with (or at least knowledge of) it. Shallow learning curves do mean increased productivity for the novice. They don't translate to increased productivity for ALL users or ALL applications.
Unfortunately, most of the converters will do only a subset of the markup languages & so few (if any) will work well with custom macros.
The Chikrii TeX2Word MIGHT do it. TeX4ht may also be worth a try (->HTML/XML, which can easily become other formats). Can't comment on TeXPort. Those are really your only options. If worse-comes-to-worse, you can also look fo ps/pdf->word solutions, but those are just as bad as (La)TeX->Word.
Yes--it does plug into Word (95 or later). And only the windows version. It would probably run on crossover office or similar. It might also need MathType (another program that plugs into Word to provide better equation support).
One claims to use a full-scale TeX interpreter, but my queries as to whether it can handle home-brew Metafont fonts, PIC graphics etc. have gone unanswered.
I've use Chikrii Softlab's products & they are good. Not something I'd shell out $100/license for, but good. One of the best things about them is that they offer 30-day evaluations. So you don't need to get your queries answered by them--you can make basic examples to test & see for yourself.
I've never seen a scientific journal which doesn't accepd LaTeX output. Some don't accept MS-Word.
Most will accept PDF, fewer postscript, and fewer still LaTeX. Many who do accept LaTeX also say their preferred format is Word 97 or something similar. A lot of the Elsevier journals really want Word. And Elsevier publishes a rather lot of the journals out there....
This has increasingly caused problems with publishing in journals.
You are a contributor to the journal. You donate content gratis, which makes Elsevier/Oxford/whoever fat. Let them know you are distressed they don't take LaTeX submissions and/or at-least camera-ready PDFs. Any who have recently stopped supporting LaTeX can be encouraged to start again. Even some journals which haven't taken LaTeX submissions recently have switched due to scientist-demand.
but my queries as to whether it can handle home-brew Metafont fonts,
Yeah--good luck with that. metafont->ttf conversion is very tricky. Furthermore, the journals don't really like weird fonts (once they get the DOCs, they often strip ALL formatting). You can go metafont->postscript image->wmf/emf. It is far from ideal
but when the editor can't or won't budge, is there any alternative to reformatting the document entirely in Word or a clone?
Ask them what formats they will accept and for which reasons. Many are happy as long as they are able to extract plain-text from your document.
Is the solution to write in something very abstract like DocBook?
This would be an O.K. solution. It would allow you to go to RTF or typeset with LaTeX. But it is both less powerful than LaTeX & less "friendly" than Word.
And if so, will the market go this way?"
The publishers are dependent on content. A lot of your peers probably do use Word. It is important to know that you can influence which way the market goes & to let them know your preferences.
The F/OSS LaTeX2rtf is probably your best bet. Coverts cross-references, eps pictures to jpeg, or png (pdflatex users will be happy to know rtf supports jpeg and png), equations to either an EQ field or to a bitmap picture, and does tables right. It isn't perfect, but it is good.
There is another link going around about an intentional Skype prank:
A profile is put up with a girl's name and picture, and put in "Skype me" mode. Within minutes some seedy guy will invariably try calling/chatting, and there's a little program I made running the whole time which will partner up people 2 at a time, and send messages from the first person to the second, & vice versa. This way both people think they're talking to a girl, when they find out, well, they're not normally too happy about it... It'll also accept and receive all files sent, and if someone tries to call, it'll accept the call with an answerphone message and log what the person says.
Agree with your diagnosis. But saving a document template & replacing Normal.dot with that new template didn't work. I also saw no message saying that the template wasn't saved & also no setting that could possibly be flipped to not save it.
There is no reason for any piece of software, open or closed, to read & write OpenDocument perfectly. There is a reason for no program other than those written by MS to read/write Word DOC the same way MS does. This is sometimes good; OO.o Writer has saved Word DOCs that would otherwise be unusable more than once. But proper interoperability demands that the document format be the same across any product on any platform. Having to rely on Abiword or OO.o or others to read/write a closed format is inane.
It crashes very easily, and the interface seems to be going BACKWARDS with each version.
Don't know what to tell you. It is perfectly stable for us, even when working with a TON of rows & columns (after increasing the number that are allowed at compile time).
They can't even get the save-file box right.
What are you talking about?
The graphing facilities are also very very poor compared to even Excel 97. It can't even get them in its own tab, just as a floating object over a spreadsheet which is ridiculous.
I acknowledged (in another post) that quick-and-dirty graphing has a long way to go in the F/OSS spreadsheets. Graphing in Excel isn't that great either. I personally use xmgrace or matplotlib or hippodraw to make my plots.
Seriously, isnt working on every computer part of a software's usability?
I can only speak of my system, just as the poster I replied to can only speak of his. I can't replicate his bugs & no one (including you) have posted to say they can reproduce his bugs. No one has posted a link to an issue/bug tracker showing that these are acknowledted bugs that will/won't/can't/shouldn't be fixed.
I mean, even Word's bugs are consistent over different systems.
I don't think so. Refer to my post on shortcut keys or other posts in this thread on various nuisances which some people do/don't have with Word.
Isn't the row-column limit basically a signed int, being 32k rows & 32k columns?
In Excel, it is 65,536 rows (16^4). Given that it is closed source, I can't attest to why this is the case. But the open source programs don't force this on you. The default is 65,536 for Excel compatiblity.
I wonder how many people have really run into this,
I wouldn't think that many, but I've had to show people gnumeric can handle larger sets three times & there are a number of sites on the net which show how to work-around this in Excel
it would seem that some other data handling system would be better for handling such large amounts of data.
Which I did say. I agree with you, but "worse is better." People prefer the quick-and-dirty which they know how to use over "better alternatives."
excell handles curve fits much better than open office,
Here, I assume you mean "easier."
and it statisical anaylis of data is much better also.
Please see these reports on unfixed bugs in Excel. I've seen similar documents (which compare to other commercial software, such as Origin, Kaleidagraph, Profit, etc.) Hardcore spreadsheet users have zero tolerance for error & many consciously avoid excel.
So, the next question is: what is the killer feature that will make people convert from Excel to something else? Or, to put it another way, what feature of Excel is still a bit clunky to use?
I love and use Gnumeric. I sometimes use OO.o sheet.
But neither of these makes quick-and-dirty graphing as easy as MS Excel does. Until that happens, I don't think we need to figure out what to add.
However, the arbitrary row/column limit in Excel has frustrated some of our users. Personally, I think the solution is to use something other than a spreadsheet once you reach that limit (scientific plotting/analysis software and/or a database). However, showing them that you can set the row/column limit in Gnumeric (at compile time), made their jaws drop & they started using that instead. If the F/OSS spreadsheets offered this at runtime and made it easy, they might pick up a few more converts.
I think that encouraging open XML formats will at least allow for LaTeX typesetting. Many DocBook users use LaTeX to typeset to dvi/ps/pdf/whatever.
One thing which the LaTeX GUIs (like LyX and TeXmacs and Scientific Workplace) & even the XML GUIs (like OO.o) need is revision control. They should all support a common standard for comments/change suggestions (as MS Word does). Support should be both inline (to save to the same file) & support some revision control backend (to work seamlessly with CVS/subversion/etc.). Two things limit wider adoption over here & this would be the easier/more useful/more fun one to add. Change tracking could easily surpass what is found in MS Word.
Hell, sometimes you have to open a Word doc in OpenOffice, save it, and then go back to Word. If you ever open a document and it comes up blank, Word probably decided it's having a bad day. Try the OOo trick and it comes back.I alluded to needing to use this trick. The most recent time was because Word on a colleague's machine read my Word document fine...but it would frequently crash & it took a LONG TIME to display pictures and equations. The OO.o trick reduced the filesize by half and made it usable on Word again. I just curse having used MS Word in the first place--I much prefer LaTeX and, when not possible (due, usually, to collaborating with colleagues who don't grok it), would like to use OO.o. But using OO.o writer or abiword to make a DOC file leads to unpredictable results in Word sometimes.
Basically, OOo is more version compatible with Word docs than Word is.
Sometimes.
Also, don't forget the new Office format is XML. That makes it incompatible with all other versions of Office.
It isn't the default format in 2003. DOC still seems to rule the nest.
What specific gripes do you have with Open Office? What does MS Office do for you that Open Office doesn't?
In this context, the argument should really be about OpenDocument vs..DOC or MS XML file formats, as that is what MS has complained about. I think people would find it far more difficult to come up with gripes.
In fairness, that isn't the question parent post responded to. I agree that OO.o isn't perfect. But I disagree with some of the complaints.
The usability is terrible.
Applies to both products. There was an IT Conversations piece about how some support guy helped some famous actress/screenwriter with MS Office & ended up removing all functionality except save, print, and bold.
Shortcut keys for selecting styles and inserting special characters, anyone?
This doesn't work for me in MS Office. I'm sure that the problem exists between the keyboard and chair, but I assign a shortcut key to the angstrom or degreee symbol or various greek letters & they don't persist beyond the current session. That is, I close office & reopen it & the shortcuts don't work. Even if I open the same document.
Assigning persistent macros in OO.o works fine for me. (What's your problem? Ease of assigning them?) However, a better solution is to use deadkeys, Multi_key and/or Mode_switch in X. This makes my special symbols work in every application.
Writer is a goddamn word processor, and I shouldn't have to reach for my mouse every two or three characters in order to type common special symbols and do routine formatting.
Again, this is far from my experience. I'm anti-mouse as well.
I have similar gripes about direct formatting. Where are the shortcut keys (or even the menu commands, sometimes) to simply remove all character formatting or all paragraph formatting and return to the style's default settings?
Navigating the cursor around things like text boxes and tables is almost impossible to do reliably.
Different from MS is not impossible. I find programs to be frustrating. But I also think Word Processors were never intended to be layout programs, so I forgive both.
Want to update a table of contents that's marked non-editable? Try right-clicking on it to get the menu option and... oh, you can't.
Works over here (OO.o 1.1.4 on Linux).
Tables of contents don't work reliably. Try doing a typical book thing of having an abbreviated table of contents with just the chapter titles, followed by a more detailed one with the sections as well. Writer can't, at least not without getting all the page numbering and title information seriously wrong.
Again, seems to work here.
OO.o (and Abiword/Gnumeric) are already serving as needed supplements to MS Office in our organization & are solely used for some major documents by some people. Despite your personal gripes (some of which are legitimate bugs), it is being used right now.
Yes opendoc may actually be less functional than the word-format
HOW?
I haven't used any of this additional functionality since 1997 and neither has the US government.
Well, no functionality has been added to the format. The.DOC format hasn't changed since Office 97--many people complained (and still do) that MS didn't write backwards-compatible files. In theory, Office is now backwards compatible to Office 97. (I say in theory, as I still have to open up some MS Office documents in OO.o & resave them to share them between different versions of MS Office).
You haven't used any additional functions in the file format because there aren't any. The software may add extra doo-hickeys (and have some utitility which OO.o and other OpenDocument software currently lacks), but that doesn't mean future software won't have these improvements (and be backwards-compatible, or at least conform to the next version of the open standard). It also doesn't mean these functions are actually used by end users (as you point out).
Microsoft's Yates said the company agrees with the adoption of XML but does not agree that the solution to "public records management is to force a single, less functional document format on all state agencies." Microsoft also states they will not support the OpenDocument format.But do they agree that public documents should truly be open? Do they realize that
interoperability is one big function which is needed that their own "alternatives" to the OASIS OpenDocument format lack completely? Why should anyone of us believe that this isn't hot air from Redmond, who are both irked that they will lose license lockin with this deal & that others may follow the example?
If MS really cared about the "functionality" offered by document formats, they had a lot of options: TRULY open up MS XML & drop patents they took out on it, make DOC or other formats they use truly open standards, propose useful changes to the OpenDocument format at OASIS, etc. They don't even offer gratis viewers that work on any operating system but their own.
MS also didn't mention whether or not they'd support PDF. I wonder if we'll see a truly open export format that is intended to be read-only in Word 2005.
Slashdot Mirror
Depending on your testing needs/ability, you should easily be able to do optical testing of multiple choice or true/false tests (or have them submit tests via computer). A lot of more valuable tests require reading and thinking to grade. This still isn't fun.
But to make it less of a time sink, just multitask; grade during your commute or tv or laundry or workout or whatever.
The first key to productivity is that you are comfortable in the environment. Additional keys are that it is expressive & doesn't force you through tedium & allows you to script away as much tedium as possible. Certain people ARE more comfortable with LaTeX & know it well enough (and use the right tools) such that it isn't tedious. The most tedious parts about LaTeX are not knowing how to do something (which is combatted by knowledge or good tools or good code to steal) and compilation errors (which is combatted by knowing the syntax well, by using editors that prevent/fix/point out errors, and by compiling frequently (sometimes in the background)). LaTeX is CERTAINLY more scriptable than Word & automating references & formatting can be quite trivial. An example I recently used was a solution to placing a series of dozens of figures & captions. It is easy to generate the plain text code to do this. Less easy to write a VBA script in Word. LaTeX is also more reusable & versioning CAN be better. In short, people CAN BE PRODUCTIVE in LaTeX
Products with shallow learning curves have simple interfaces. It is true that Word has an easier-to-understand GUI than many of the LaTeX GUIs. More importantly, it is (whether we like it or not) omnipresent & most administrative assistants already have some experience with (or at least knowledge of) it. Shallow learning curves do mean increased productivity for the novice. They don't translate to increased productivity for ALL users or ALL applications.
Unfortunately, most of the converters will do only a subset of the markup languages & so few (if any) will work well with custom macros.
The Chikrii TeX2Word MIGHT do it. TeX4ht may also be worth a try (->HTML/XML, which can easily become other formats). Can't comment on TeXPort. Those are really your only options. If worse-comes-to-worse, you can also look fo ps/pdf->word solutions, but those are just as bad as (La)TeX->Word.
Yes--it does plug into Word (95 or later). And only the windows version. It would probably run on crossover office or similar. It might also need MathType (another program that plugs into Word to provide better equation support).
The F/OSS LaTeX2rtf is probably your best bet. Coverts cross-references, eps pictures to jpeg, or png (pdflatex users will be happy to know rtf supports jpeg and png), equations to either an EQ field or to a bitmap picture, and does tables right. It isn't perfect, but it is good.
Agree with your diagnosis. But saving a document template & replacing Normal.dot with that new template didn't work. I also saw no message saying that the template wasn't saved & also no setting that could possibly be flipped to not save it.
There is no reason for any piece of software, open or closed, to read & write OpenDocument perfectly. There is a reason for no program other than those written by MS to read/write Word DOC the same way MS does. This is sometimes good; OO.o Writer has saved Word DOCs that would otherwise be unusable more than once. But proper interoperability demands that the document format be the same across any product on any platform. Having to rely on Abiword or OO.o or others to read/write a closed format is inane.
But neither of these makes quick-and-dirty graphing as easy as MS Excel does. Until that happens, I don't think we need to figure out what to add.
However, the arbitrary row/column limit in Excel has frustrated some of our users. Personally, I think the solution is to use something other than a spreadsheet once you reach that limit (scientific plotting/analysis software and/or a database). However, showing them that you can set the row/column limit in Gnumeric (at compile time), made their jaws drop & they started using that instead. If the F/OSS spreadsheets offered this at runtime and made it easy, they might pick up a few more converts.
I think that encouraging open XML formats will at least allow for LaTeX typesetting. Many DocBook users use LaTeX to typeset to dvi/ps/pdf/whatever.
One thing which the LaTeX GUIs (like LyX and TeXmacs and Scientific Workplace) & even the XML GUIs (like OO.o) need is revision control. They should all support a common standard for comments/change suggestions (as MS Word does). Support should be both inline (to save to the same file) & support some revision control backend (to work seamlessly with CVS/subversion/etc.). Two things limit wider adoption over here & this would be the easier/more useful/more fun one to add. Change tracking could easily surpass what is found in MS Word.
In fairness, that isn't the question parent post responded to. I agree that OO.o isn't perfect. But I disagree with some of the complaints.Applies to both products. There was an IT Conversations piece about how some support guy helped some famous actress/screenwriter with MS Office & ended up removing all functionality except save, print, and bold.This doesn't work for me in MS Office. I'm sure that the problem exists between the keyboard and chair, but I assign a shortcut key to the angstrom or degreee symbol or various greek letters & they don't persist beyond the current session. That is, I close office & reopen it & the shortcuts don't work. Even if I open the same document.
Assigning persistent macros in OO.o works fine for me. (What's your problem? Ease of assigning them?) However, a better solution is to use deadkeys, Multi_key and/or Mode_switch in X. This makes my special symbols work in every application.Again, this is far from my experience. I'm anti-mouse as well.I have a macro to do this: Different from MS is not impossible. I find programs to be frustrating. But I also think Word Processors were never intended to be layout programs, so I forgive both.Works over here (OO.o 1.1.4 on Linux).Again, seems to work here.
OO.o (and Abiword/Gnumeric) are already serving as needed supplements to MS Office in our organization & are solely used for some major documents by some people. Despite your personal gripes (some of which are legitimate bugs), it is being used right now.
What about Apple?
You haven't used any additional functions in the file format because there aren't any. The software may add extra doo-hickeys (and have some utitility which OO.o and other OpenDocument software currently lacks), but that doesn't mean future software won't have these improvements (and be backwards-compatible, or at least conform to the next version of the open standard). It also doesn't mean these functions are actually used by end users (as you point out).