I was always upset that my PhD advisor would read printouts of my paper drafts and correct my LaTeX by hand in the margins.

[sellathechemist@mastodon.social]

@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.

[vicgrinberg@mastodon.social]

@sellathechemist I love when it works but I have collaborators at faculty level who still seem not to care. It hurts (I know theybare stressed and under tenure pressure, but it's not like I have tons more time...)

[sellathechemist@mastodon.social]

@vicgrinberg I then spent 25 minutes explaining to another that copying references from Zotero and pasting them into Word footnotes might not be the most efficient way to build an essay. An amazed and relieved student headed off for another week….
It’s easy to laugh or snort. But we all have to learn, forgetting how clueless we were back then. I still remember my boss rearranging the total car crash of a practice talk and turning it into a smooth and polished story.

[masek@infosec.exchange]

@vicgrinberg I‘m handing out corrections of the source code of apps based on their network traffic . I think you’re doing the right thing.

[vicgrinberg@mastodon.social]

@masek bwahaha... Ok, that's a level above the TeX corrections

[prefec2@norden.social]

@vicgrinberg haha done the same. It is unbearable to see ill written LaTeX documents or misuse of macros.

Unfortunately, I am now no longer at a university and see butchered documents written in Word or Writer.

And I only have to blame myself for becoming such a pedantic or it was that book on typography I got back in the days as a birthday present.

[masek@infosec.exchange]

@vicgrinberg I can’t do TeX corrections, so that sounds more difficult

[srdas@mastodon.online]

@vicgrinberg You have any idea how long it too me to not type 2 spaces after a period in Word?!

[dimpase@mathstodon.xyz]

@vicgrinberg looking back, I cannot help noticing that the next stage is to keep the TeX versions of a text in a VCS (e.g. git) and only look at the changes (not looking through the whole text all over again) when co-authors send you an update.

Then (in my case) one gets annoyed when co-authors needlessly re-format the whole text, rendering looking at the changes much less straightforward. (And the last stage for me was a serious burnout ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

[aneel@mefi.social]

@mxk @vicgrinberg Warning: this is also true of welding

[tessarakt@mastodon.social]

@vicgrinberg The textbook by my Echtzeitsysteme prof was apparently typeset in Word or whatever. Oh my did that look crappy ...

[sci_photos@troet.cafe]

@vicgrinberg ️
@sim

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@vicgrinberg @baszoetekouw @knud oh Knuth himself clearly mentions this as a viable strategy, don't worry, it's nothing to be ashamed of. But only do that when the text is FINAL

[jannem@fosstodon.org]

@oblomov @vicgrinberg @baszoetekouw @knud
Do it when the text is "final_reallyfinal_v2.2_done_corr3_edits.tex"

[deadda7a@chaos.social]

@mxk It is true and my life is ruined @vicgrinberg

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@jannem @vicgrinberg @baszoetekouw @knud

I guess using git for source tracking and collaboration is a bit too much still 8-D

[jannem@fosstodon.org]

@oblomov @vicgrinberg @baszoetekouw @knud
I did use git for my papers. It's a godsend! Check in every new revision as you write. Edited versions from your coauthors go into a branch with their name before being merged into main.

Highly recommend.

[edgeofeurope@mastodon.social]

@mxk @vicgrinberg Teach a person languages and they will suffer from seeing bad machine translations for life