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

[vicgrinberg@mastodon.social]

@sci_photos haha, true but only because I was taught what the properly formatted maths looks like. Oh, the lost bliss of ignorance!

[vicgrinberg@mastodon.social]

@ellane @mxk well played

[space_flounder@hachyderm.io]

@Klara @mxk @vicgrinberg *keming

[vicgrinberg@mastodon.social]

@space_flounder @Klara @mxk

[Gæst]

@vicgrinberg @sci_photos
Typographic quality is on a downward trend everywhere and I think it is sad and a terrible cultural loss.

[anachronistjohn@zia.io]

@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.

[vicgrinberg@mastodon.social]

@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

[echopapa@social.tchncs.de]

@vicgrinberg

oh, torturing poor MS-fans (or was this SM?).

very nice.

[edwintorok@discuss.systems]

@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.

[vicgrinberg@mastodon.social]

@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.

[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