I was always upset that my PhD advisor would read printouts of my paper drafts and correct my LaTeX by hand in the margins.
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I was always upset that my PhD advisor would read printouts of my paper drafts and correct my LaTeX by hand in the margins. I mean, not even seeing the code...?
Now I'm reading paper drafts by my PhD students and collaborators as PDFs and also correcting their TeX code because I cannot stand wrong font for maths or wrong spaces between numbers and units. I wish I could stop, but I just can't...
It's all my PhD advisor's fault! *shakes fist in the direction of her old institute*
This post and comments thread are just
Thanks @vicgrinberg and all who contributed. You made my day.
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@vicgrinberg teach a person typography and they will suffer from seeing bad typography for life
@mxk …and those around them who have not yet learned typography shall be made to suffer also, via commentary from the former @vicgrinberg
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@rstub @mxk @vicgrinberg there will come a day where we just mention the number and start laughing
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I was always upset that my PhD advisor would read printouts of my paper drafts and correct my LaTeX by hand in the margins. I mean, not even seeing the code...?
Now I'm reading paper drafts by my PhD students and collaborators as PDFs and also correcting their TeX code because I cannot stand wrong font for maths or wrong spaces between numbers and units. I wish I could stop, but I just can't...
It's all my PhD advisor's fault! *shakes fist in the direction of her old institute*
would it be better if your students used Word for their papers?
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would it be better if your students used Word for their papers?
@echopapa they could not - in my field, astrophysics, all the journals require paper submissions to be in LaTeX, using their respective style files.
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I was always upset that my PhD advisor would read printouts of my paper drafts and correct my LaTeX by hand in the margins. I mean, not even seeing the code...?
Now I'm reading paper drafts by my PhD students and collaborators as PDFs and also correcting their TeX code because I cannot stand wrong font for maths or wrong spaces between numbers and units. I wish I could stop, but I just can't...
It's all my PhD advisor's fault! *shakes fist in the direction of her old institute*
@vicgrinberg You need to stop. If you do it for them, they won't learn.
Ditto marking up word documents for papers - students just hit that "accept changes" button and learn nothing.
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@baszoetekouw @knud pssst, nobody admits to this loudly...
Oh, I've never done that. But I use \-
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@vicgrinberg You need to stop. If you do it for them, they won't learn.
Ditto marking up word documents for papers - students just hit that "accept changes" button and learn nothing.
@ginoputrino *sigh* I love it when ppl tell me what to do... Believe me, if it's my students I'll also have a discussion with them. And you have zero idea of how or who I am as an advisor.
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This post and comments thread are just
Thanks @vicgrinberg and all who contributed. You made my day.
@dacmot haha, glad you enjoyed! I'm definitely having fun (mostly)
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@vicgrinberg Yes, I feel that; but reading poorly formatted math takes sooo much brain power, too
@sci_photos haha, true
but only because I was taught what the properly formatted maths looks like. Oh, the lost bliss of ignorance! -
@mxk …and those around them who have not yet learned typography shall be made to suffer also, via commentary from the former @vicgrinberg
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@mxk @vicgrinberg knowing kerning can be hard on the senses
@Klara @mxk @vicgrinberg *keming
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@sci_photos haha, true
but only because I was taught what the properly formatted maths looks like. Oh, the lost bliss of ignorance!@vicgrinberg @sci_photos
Typographic quality is on a downward trend everywhere and I think it is sad and a terrible cultural loss.
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would it be better if your students used Word for their papers?
@echopapa@social.tchncs.de @vicgrinberg@mastodon.social The only way Microsoft Word could make anything better is by imagining your work done in Microsoft Word. Suddenly your biggest problems with your current programs aren’t quite so big.
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@vicgrinberg @sci_photos
Typographic quality is on a downward trend everywhere and I think it is sad and a terrible cultural loss.@sim @sci_photos I honestly think my generation wasn't that different (at least in my little corner, where our journals all require to submit latex files using their own stylefiles) - it's just that I had an advisor who has typesetting as a hobby and learned a bit too well
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@echopapa they could not - in my field, astrophysics, all the journals require paper submissions to be in LaTeX, using their respective style files.
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@baszoetekouw @knud pssst, nobody admits to this loudly...
@vicgrinberg @baszoetekouw @knud although in theory LaTeX should take care of the layout, it can only do so if the input is correctly described. When looking at its rendered form and fixing layout issues I'd only fix one instance of a "bug", but that doesn't make the input correct under all possible scenarios. It is like fixing a bug in a program only for x=42, and having everything break when x=433.
I recently looked at how a paper I wrote looks in arXiv's experimental HTML rendering. The footnotes are now on the right margin (great, it is nearer the text), but they have big whitespace gaps in the middle of a sentence and it looks horrible. Not LaTeX's fault, I explicitly told it to keep the name of a company together using ~, which was needed to fix some weird hyphenation when rendered to PDF. But when displayed on the much narrower right margin that is now wrong. It probably would've been better if I told LaTeX to avoid hyphenating the word, instead of telling it to avoid breaking at a space.
But that is all still too low-level (layout fixes leaking into the text). Would be great if LaTeX had a way to semantically say "this is a company name", and then do whatever is appropriate for that based on the current render target.
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@echopapa it's not used in my field at all; too many formulae, even at first year student level. It's more the other way around - at some point you reach a point in your career when you have to deal with administration and then they torture you with Word documents.
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I was always upset that my PhD advisor would read printouts of my paper drafts and correct my LaTeX by hand in the margins. I mean, not even seeing the code...?
Now I'm reading paper drafts by my PhD students and collaborators as PDFs and also correcting their TeX code because I cannot stand wrong font for maths or wrong spaces between numbers and units. I wish I could stop, but I just can't...
It's all my PhD advisor's fault! *shakes fist in the direction of her old institute*
@vicgrinberg It has to be done. I spent an hour explaining style sheets and, yes, conventions for physical quantities, units and where spaces go. All very formal but clarity matters. And once you get the hang of it it lasts a lifetime.
