How many people in this world know LaTeX ?
fajar
which I think is heard and used by more people. This makes me wonder:
How many people in this world know and use LaTeX ? Around 1 million?
10 million?
Peter Flynn
No-one knows. I did start setting up a LaTeX User Counter (a bit like
the Linux Counter) which would allow users to self-register as a user so
that we would get to have some estimate, however patchy. But the demands
of my thesis took over, so the project is on the shelf for the moment. I
hope to awake it next year.
For an estimate, you could start with the number of universities in the
world with Computing Science, Engineering, and Mathematics departments,
and get a total number of students per year since the mid-1980s. Then
deduct an appropriate rate for recidivism and death, and add a factor
for the number of professors/lecturers who taught them.
Do the same for other disciplines who have a significant usage level:
Statistics, Economics,,,there must be many more. Add the "new-growth"
areas in the Humanities as well as the oldies like me who have been
showing and teaching them. Finally, add an estimate for all the
publishers worldwide who use it, and for all the individuals in
companies who use it in secret :-) And anyone else you can think of.
It's a *lot*.
///Peter
Ross Maloney
When I returned to research directed study at a well established School
of Information Technology, I was astonished to find LaTeX and company
was not used or even mentioned. But then again, this same School was
teaching C programming on a Windows platform, which knocked my for six
when I arrived. I remember talking to an honours student in the School,
who I had tutored several years before, as to whether she was using
LaTeX for her thesis. LaTeX! - what is that? was the reply. Needless
to say, I used LaTeX in my thesis. But I bought LaTeX with me.
The university as a whole had guidelines on thesis preparation. But
those guidelines were Word directed and constrained by what Word could
provide. For research students, the university also had a series of
teaching workshops. None of those workshops included LaTeX. When I
finished by research, I sent off an email to the person ressponsible for
those workshops, offering to provided such a course. I did not receive
a reply, not even the "we are happy with our standard of ignorance - so
go away" reply.
Another more telling insight would be to look at how students,
particularly research students, are encouraged to collect references.
The university I am speaking of actively supported and promoted EndNote.
Bad move. All your valuable references were held in binary files
which needed EndNote to read. And EndNote is not noted for retaining
backward compatibility. Compare that with BibTeX - a text file which
you will be able to get at twenty years down the track. But then again,
Word is a binary documents, LaTeX isn't. The university I speak of has
the full range of departments and apparently a good reputation in the
research community.
At least in Australia, university, federal government, state government,
local government, and business insist that Word be used when applying
for a job. Without Word you cannot even get the job outline. I have
heard if a manuscript is submitted for publication, it is converted from
LaTeX to Word, because Word is the publisher's platform. Conferences
also increasingly are insisting on Word submissions. With these facts,
the users of LaTeX are shrinking, not widening. This adds support to
behaviour of the university mentioned here.
Ross
Timothy Murphy
> When I returned to research directed study at a well established School
> of Information Technology, I was astonished to find LaTeX and company
> was not used or even mentioned.
If only there were an official LaTeX thesis class,
on a par with article, report, book and (yes) letter.
This would do more to promote the use of LaTeX in universities and colleges,
and thereby in the wider academic community,
than all the improvements to the code since Leslie Lamport.
If only the student could just sit down and start:
\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{thesis}
\usepackage{universityoflife}
...
--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland
Herbert Schulz
Timothy Murphy <gayl...@alice.it> wrote:
> Ross Maloney wrote:
>
> > When I returned to research directed study at a well established School
> > of Information Technology, I was astonished to find LaTeX and company
> > was not used or even mentioned.
>
> If only there were an official LaTeX thesis class,
> on a par with article, report, book and (yes) letter.
>
> This would do more to promote the use of LaTeX in universities and colleges,
> and thereby in the wider academic community,
> than all the improvements to the code since Leslie Lamport.
>
> If only the student could just sit down and start:
> \documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{thesis}
> \usepackage{universityoflife}
> ...
Howdy,
The problem is that the University would, one way or another, have to
support (La)TeX so that there could be an official version of the thesis
class or package. There are Universities that have thesis document
classes for their particular thesis formats. Many can be found on CTAN.
Good Luck,
Herb Schulz
Robin Fairbairns
> Ross Maloney wrote:
>
>> When I returned to research directed study at a well established School
>> of Information Technology, I was astonished to find LaTeX and company
>> was not used or even mentioned.
>
> If only there were an official LaTeX thesis class,
> on a par with article, report, book and (yes) letter.
after hearing your suggestions many times, and i still don't understand
what a "thesis" class would gain us that "report" doesn't.
> This would do more to promote the use of LaTeX in universities and colleges,
> and thereby in the wider academic community,
> than all the improvements to the code since Leslie Lamport.
>
> If only the student could just sit down and start:
> \documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{thesis}
> \usepackage{universityoflife}
in this context, one might as well use report, and stuff all the
significant stuff into your package.
the fact remains that no two universities, that have any views at all,
can bear not to fiddle with minutiae of the structures of theses; so
your magic package has to be written/rewritten for pretty much every
university, and at every biennial review of thesis format at every
university that feels that way.
i've worked on the thesis class here, and i've worked on various classes
for journals. it's mind-bogglingly boring work, since one has to do the
sums to work out how to make latex jump through the various hoops, over
and over again, for every class.
--
Robin Fairbairns, Cambridge
my address is @cl.cam.ac.uk, regardless of the header. sorry about that.
Peter Flynn
[...]
> When I returned to research directed study at a well established School
> of Information Technology, I was astonished to find LaTeX and company
> was not used or even mentioned.
Alas, not surprising. We have been very remiss in not doing enough
outreach. TUG tries, we all try, but the materials aren't there. They're
easy enough to create, but IMHO we need direction from someone expert in
Marketing. And it needs to be aimed at *all* students, not just math/sci.
Is there anyone in the TeX community who works/worked in Marketing?
> But then again, this same School was
> teaching C programming on a Windows platform, which knocked my for six
> when I arrived. I remember talking to an honours student in the School,
> who I had tutored several years before, as to whether she was using
> LaTeX for her thesis. LaTeX! - what is that? was the reply.
That too is commonplace.
> The university as a whole had guidelines on thesis preparation. But
> those guidelines were Word directed and constrained by what Word could
> provide.
As Tim just posted:
> If only there were an official LaTeX thesis class,
> on a par with article, report, book and (yes) letter.
>
> This would do more to promote the use of LaTeX in universities and colleges,
> and thereby in the wider academic community,
> than all the improvements to the code since Leslie Lamport.
>
> If only the student could just sit down and start:
> \documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{thesis}
> \usepackage{universityoflife}
I'm just about done doing a local thesis class, which will join the
others on CTAN when testing is finished. But I like the approach: if
there was an agreed common core (and report is a good starting-point),
then each college only needs to write its local mods as a package.
> Another more telling insight would be to look at how students,
> particularly research students, are encouraged to collect references.
> The university I am speaking of actively supported and promoted EndNote.
> Bad move.
Yes. Fortunately students here are voting with their feet and using
Zotero and Mendeley. I encourage them to use these to gather material,
and JabRef to let them edit it. And if they really, really, want to use
Word/OO, then the plugins will let them.
> All your valuable references were held in binary files which
> needed EndNote to read. And EndNote is not noted for retaining backward
> compatibility. Compare that with BibTeX - a text file which you will be
> able to get at twenty years down the track. But then again, Word is a
> binary documents, LaTeX isn't.
No longer. Word is XML. So is OO. Even EndNote will export to XML,
although the format sucks nearly as badly as Word/OO. But all of them
are convertible to LaTeX.
> At least in Australia, university, federal government, state government,
> local government, and business insist that Word be used when applying
> for a job. Without Word you cannot even get the job outline. I have
> heard if a manuscript is submitted for publication, it is converted from
> LaTeX to Word, because Word is the publisher's platform.
Partly because Word has an excellent revision interface, which no LaTeX
editor has. And partly because the typesetters used by most publishers
are entirely unaware of LaTeX. Marketing, Awareness, Examples...
> Conferences
> also increasingly are insisting on Word submissions. With these facts,
> the users of LaTeX are shrinking, not widening. This adds support to
> behaviour of the university mentioned here.
So what are we going to do about it? Some random thoughts
1. Karl, can you fix a Nocturne or BoF for proselytising at the TUG
meetings, and another one for thesis formats?
2. Both sessions should circulate a summary of the ongoing discussion
on a mailing list.
3. UKTUG, DAnTe, GUTenberg, etc, etc...can you also hold such sessions,
picking up where the last one left off.
4. After a year, would we have gathered enough agreed material to make
a start?
///Peter
Peter Flynn
[...]
> after hearing your suggestions many times, and i still don't understand
> what a "thesis" class would gain us that "report" doesn't.
A number of things need adding and fixing (just based on my local findings).
a. Default format: 11pt or 12pt, parskip package and \raggedright
unless forbidden locally. After all, the most important person
reading it is your Extern, who is likely to be significantly older
than your average graduate student, so don't make things hard to
read: make them easy to read without glasses!
b. Margins and line-spacing of course have to be set to what local
weirdness applies. Changing that is an entirely separate matter.
Single-sided should be assumed, I suspect, until the institution
decides otherwise (and for electronic submission, who knows?)
c. The quotation environment should have a mandatory argument, a BIBTeX
key, which would cause the correct citation to appear at the end,
neatly tucked into the white-space at the end of the last line (if
any), and otherwise on the next line, flushright. Quotations must be
in \small, and should never indent their first line.
d. Fix the horrible bug in \descriptionlabel so that long arguments to
\item in description lists wrap properly at the end of the line.
Preferably put the label on a line by itself (à la <dt> in HTML),
instead of run-in to the text of the definition.
e. Fix the float mechanism so that multiple successive floats with
little or no intervening text do *not* go to the end of the chapter,
but simply appear in order, at top, bottom, middle, or page as
necessary, with the text resuming once the succession of floats is
done. Yes, it will look silly, but far less silly than having them
at the end of the chapter.
f. Add a new epigraph environment, almost identical to quotation, with
the same citation mechanism but with the text content italicised.
Lots of writers want epigraphs at chapter-starts.
g. Make the appearance of the ToC automatic, ditto LoT and LoF (but
only if tables or figures were used -- a simple toggle written to
the .aux file can do this), and add an automatic Declaration (that's
the "I wrote this myself" page).
In essence, make it easy to use, and make it do what the writer expects.
Make it stop doing stuff the wrong way. Half the problem in persuading
people to adopt LaTeX resides in persuading them that the ghastly
default formats *can* be changed, and easily. But they should be there
in the first place -- nowadays.
At the moment, far too much of the default formats do the opposite. Life
has moved on from the days when Leslie Lamport wrote LaTeX, and we need
a whole new set of styles which we can overlay on the existing material.
///Peter
OKB (not okblacke)
> On 18/08/11 16:44, Robin Fairbairns wrote:
> [...]
>> after hearing your suggestions many times, and i still don't
>> understand what a "thesis" class would gain us that "report"
>> doesn't.
>
> A number of things need adding and fixing (just based on my local
> findings).
<snipped suggestions>
These sound fine to me, but why do you say they should be in a
"thesis" class instead of just fixed for LaTeX as a whole (i.e., in one
of the standard document classes)?
--
--OKB (not okblacke)
Brendan Barnwell
"Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is
no path, and leave a trail."
--author unknown
Timothy Murphy
>> If only there were an official LaTeX thesis class,
>> on a par with article, report, book and (yes) letter.
>
> after hearing your suggestions many times, and i still don't understand
> what a "thesis" class would gain us that "report" doesn't.
1) To you there is no difference,
because you pen classes in your sleep.
But to a student sitting down to write his thesis there is a big difference.
"Why don't you try LaTeX.
There is a special thesis class.
Just start \documentclass{thesis} ..."
2) Personally, I would not feel able to write a thesis class for my college.
And I don't know anyone there who would.
But I think I could write a package based on a documented thesis class,
to fit in with the absurd requirements of the Dean of Graduate Studies,
which have not changed since theses were written on papyrus.
Victor Ivrii
Usually they consult someone in business schools or in humanities who advise them how formulae should look like exactly like vegetarians advising how to cook beef steaks.
Therefore there could be no thesis class.
Victor Ivrii
I believe that there is a certain similarity between knowing TeX and Calculus:
"Leibniz dreamed to create a Calculus so everyone could use it even without understanding. Vladimir Arnold acidly noticed that Leibniz dream came true even in the larger degree as now everyone can teach it even without understanding. "
Victor
Peter Flynn
> Peter Flynn wrote:
>
>> On 18/08/11 16:44, Robin Fairbairns wrote:
>> [...]
>>> after hearing your suggestions many times, and i still don't
>>> understand what a "thesis" class would gain us that "report"
>>> doesn't.
>>
>> A number of things need adding and fixing (just based on my local
>> findings).
> <snipped suggestions>
>
> These sound fine to me, but why do you say they should be in a
> "thesis" class instead of just fixed for LaTeX as a whole (i.e., in one
> of the standard document classes)?
You are quite right, perhaps some of them should be done globally...but
I was just thinking of theses at the time I wrote...
///Peter
Peter Flynn
> Robin Fairbairns wrote:
>
>>> If only there were an official LaTeX thesis class,
>>> on a par with article, report, book and (yes) letter.
>>
>> after hearing your suggestions many times, and i still don't understand
>> what a "thesis" class would gain us that "report" doesn't.
>
> 1) To you there is no difference,
> because you pen classes in your sleep.
>
> But to a student sitting down to write his thesis there is a big difference.
> "Why don't you try LaTeX.
> There is a special thesis class.
> Just start \documentclass{thesis} ..."
>
> 2) Personally, I would not feel able to write a thesis class for my college.
> And I don't know anyone there who would.
I am happy to look at the requirements and see what needs doing.
> But I think I could write a package based on a documented thesis class,
> to fit in with the absurd requirements of the Dean of Graduate Studies,
> which have not changed since theses were written on papyrus.
Ah. All in Metafont... pickup pen lookslike goosequill ...
///Peter
Peter Flynn
> General thesis class. What is it? There are plenty of different
> thesis classes for different universities by the very simple reason:
> paper pushers in the schools of graduate studies have nothing better
> to do than invent their own thesis formats
I think this varies. Our rules are very simple and basically say a 4cm
binding margin and use a sensible layout. They actually need to tighten
up, as they have to reject some drafts every year (people using Comic
Sans, people who can't measure 4cm, people who use 7pt type single-spaced).
God strangles a kitten every time someone uses Comic Sans.
> in MS World (then someone
> creates a matching LaTeX thesis class), different from any other
> university and then measuring with the ruler margins, font sizes
> etc.
If you had to rad some of the rubbish I have seen students produce, you
would want to measure and check too :-)
> Usually they consult someone in business schools or in humanities who
> advise them how formulae should look like exactly like vegetarians
> advising how to cook beef steaks.
I think that level of detail tends to be a N. American obsession.
> Therefore there could be no thesis class.
I think all those things should go in a local style file, as Timothy
suggested. A class file should restrict itself to architectural changes
like additional environments or automated ToC/LoT/LoF.
///Peter
Ross Maloney
When I started my research studies, the university had just finished
revising their thesis guidelines. Those guidelines were very open. So
my approach was to use the report class. I had looked at theses classes
on CTAN, but they were restrictive and some how incomplete. I could
drop in other packages into the report class when I needed to setting
basic university requirements into a style file. The extra bit of
effort is warranted, for your PhD thesis is THE one book which will
remain on your bookself for the rest of your life. A nicely presented
work (as LaTeX produces) promotes you.
The wondering figures/tables was a constant issue. The criteria my
supervisor set was the figure/table should appear on the page it was
first referred to, or on the page following. Logical, achievable, but
required some work.
An interesting footnote is that on the team which developed these new
guidelines was a person who published in LaTeX because his work is full
of funny symbols (spoken by a true maths graduate). I have wondered
what affect his presence had on the final product.
Ross
Ross Maloney
But that quotation is brilliant. I can think of many an application for it.
Ross
David Griffith
That reminds me of a professor I had who was so terrible that his
lectures were nothing more than reading straight out of the book.
Whenever anyone asked his to clarify some point or do a sample problem,
he'd reread a section of the text. We couldn't ever get anything useful
out of him. How's that for teaching without understanding?
--
David Griffith
davidmy...@acm.org <--- Put my last name where it belongs
David Kastrup
We had that for the introductory mechanics courses. The book was
written by a different professor, and the professor doing the lectures
was a renowned specialist in fluid dynamics (where you don't really have
tensile forces) and got the job because of that (Germany has an
education system where education and research directed by the same
professors, following the ideas of Humboldt). He was increasingly
alternating the lectures with an "akademischer Rat" (not a full
professorship but sort of a sidetrack), and students were acting
rebellious when it was the professor's turn again. He told them that he
understood that they liked the lectures of the Rat better, but if he did
not deliver at least half the lectures, students failing the tests could
hand in a formal protest. He tried improving his "lectures" at one
point of time by not just reading things, but also explaining them.
However, not being familiar with the material, he merely explained those
things that were obvious in the first place which did nothing to
increase the useful content delivered.
To be fair, that was really more an exception than the rule, but it did
not make one all too convinced of the system.
--
David Kastrup
UKTUG FAQ: <URL:http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html>
Victor Ivrii
Comic Sans is an abomination even on the web pages. However its usage is by no means the fault of kittens.
Try to read a 100 y.o. math book - you often encounter a lot of Fraktur notations. BTW I noticed that at that time capitals with umlauts (\"U) were not used even in Germany - and typesetter used Ue.
> I think that level of detail tends to be a N. American obsession.
Yes, this is true because universities are ran by administration often delegating its duties to illiterate staffers. F.e. many years ago a secretary of SGS asked me to chair a jury for some thesis in Physics, describing a title as having some funny fork-looking character (\psi) :-)
Victor Ivrii
At universities it is an exception. In Canadian high schools most of the math teachers never grasped the notion of derivative and do not have a mathematical education.
One of my colleagues who used to teach a course about teaching Mathematics in high-school told me about his dream about his students (future math teachers): "I only want them not to hate mathematics" -- love to or knowledge of Mathematics he considered as an unrealistic expectation.
Victor
Victor Ivrii
Disagree: thesis should comply university guidelines first and whatever members of jury like second (f.e. I request that thesis I get in pdf should be typesetted with hyperref).
If you want a BOOK - re-typeset it nicely in the format you consider appropriate - for yourself and colleagues (it may even have a different number of pages than thesis).
Different goals request different typesetting. There are plenty of morons who never heard about presentation specific packages and display a journal article on the screen. There are two kinds of them:
* those who display "fit to height" thus displaying everything so small that it is unreadable
* those who display "fit to width" thus scrolling up and down every 10 sec
Victor
Robin Fairbairns
> I think this varies. Our rules are very simple and basically say a 4cm
> binding margin and use a sensible layout.
ours used to be as sensible, but the pernicious invasion of "business
practices" into univ admin seems to be manifesting itself as stupid
requirements from the bogs (board of graduate studies, desperately
trying to persuade us all that the "o" isn't there).
> They actually need to tighten
> up, as they have to reject some drafts every year (people using Comic
> Sans, people who can't measure 4cm, people who use 7pt type single-spaced).
>
> God strangles a kitten every time someone uses Comic Sans.
my wife used to use it when preparing stuff to project in (primary)
class -- but she's retired now.
i've snipped and forwarded your remark...
>> in MS World (then someone
>> creates a matching LaTeX thesis class), different from any other
>> university and then measuring with the ruler margins, font sizes
>> etc.
>
> If you had to rad some of the rubbish I have seen students produce, you
> would want to measure and check too :-)
>
>> Usually they consult someone in business schools or in humanities who
>> advise them how formulae should look like exactly like vegetarians
>> advising how to cook beef steaks.
>
> I think that level of detail tends to be a N. American obsession.
but most of the theses we need to aim at are n. american, surely?
>> Therefore there could be no thesis class.
>
> I think all those things should go in a local style file, as Timothy
> suggested. A class file should restrict itself to architectural changes
> like additional environments or automated ToC/LoT/LoF.
but scrreprt (or whatever) does all that already, with format less
obtuse than report. what's the fuss about?
Robin Fairbairns
> Victor Ivrii wrote:
>> How many people know LaTeX? What does it mean "know"? Among my
>> esteemed colleagues (mathematicians) everyone uses it but not many
>> know it.
>>
>> I believe that there is a certain similarity between knowing TeX and
>> Calculus:
>>
>> "Leibniz dreamed to create a Calculus so everyone could use it even
>> without understanding. Vladimir Arnold acidly noticed that Leibniz
>> dream came true even in the larger degree as now everyone can teach
>> it even without understanding. "
>
> Great analogue, Victor.
>
> But that quotation is brilliant. I can think of many an application
> for it.
interestingly, it's clear (in retrospect) that my school maths teachers
_did_ understand it, and they led us along the lines that ended in
undergraduate study of limits and things. (i was at that school in the
mid-60s).
Robin Fairbairns
maybe they should be done globally, but latex 2e is feature frozen.
memoir would be another place to start, apart from scrreprt, of course.
i wonder if either has fixed the description infelicity...
Robin Fairbairns
> On 18/08/11 22:02, Timothy Murphy wrote:
>> Robin Fairbairns wrote:
>>
>>>> If only there were an official LaTeX thesis class,
>>>> on a par with article, report, book and (yes) letter.
>>>
>>> after hearing your suggestions many times, and i still don't understand
>>> what a "thesis" class would gain us that "report" doesn't.
>>
>> 1) To you there is no difference,
>> because you pen classes in your sleep.
actually, not: writing the things is trivial, getting them working as
required is often a wet-towel-around-the-head matter.
>> But to a student sitting down to write his thesis there is a big difference.
>> "Why don't you try LaTeX.
>> There is a special thesis class.
>> Just start \documentclass{thesis} ..."
>>
>> 2) Personally, I would not feel able to write a thesis class for my college.
>> And I don't know anyone there who would.
>
> I am happy to look at the requirements and see what needs doing.
and i'm sure that many people would be happy to be recruited to
reviewing such an effort.
>> But I think I could write a package based on a documented thesis class,
>> to fit in with the absurd requirements of the Dean of Graduate Studies,
>> which have not changed since theses were written on papyrus.
>
> Ah. All in Metafont... pickup pen lookslike goosequill ...
i was looking at a wikipedia entry about old universities in europe,
yesterday. it would seem that timothy's at an institution that predates
bologna (the earliest university the entry lists) by several centuries,
if not millennia. i suppose we should consider ourselves lucky that the
irish didn't get into universities when they were writing on clay
tablets in cuneiform, in the "fertile triangle"...
Peter Flynn
[...]
> i was looking at a wikipedia entry about old universities in europe,
> yesterday. it would seem that timothy's at an institution that
> predates bologna (the earliest university the entry lists) by several
> centuries, if not millennia. i suppose we should consider ourselves
> lucky that the irish didn't get into universities when they were
> writing on clay tablets in cuneiform, in the "fertile triangle"...
Not quite. The _Irish Times_ is running a nice little Saturday series on
A History of Ireland in 100 Objects, and last weekend it featured a set
of writing tablets from the 6th century, found buried in a peat bog,
still intact, and with the inner surfaces still with their wax filling
and writing intact (two fragments from the Psalms). With its leather
shoulder strap it looks exactly like a narrow wooden laptop :-) The
online page at
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/0813/1224302356545.html
unfortunately only has the picture of one of the tablets, not the
overall view of the whole thing (which I may be tempted to scan and
republish, in flagrant breach of their copyright).
///Peter
Peter Flynn
> Peter Flynn <peter...@m.silmaril.ie> writes:
[...]
>> God strangles a kitten every time someone uses Comic Sans.
>
> my wife used to use it when preparing stuff to project in (primary)
> class -- but she's retired now.
Its use for children, and in actual comics is, of course, exempt.
> but scrreprt (or whatever) does all that already, with format less
> obtuse than report. what's the fuss about?
I've never used it. Time to dig it out and have a look.
///Peter
Peter Flynn
> How many people know LaTeX? What does it mean "know"? Among my
> esteemed colleagues (mathematicians) everyone uses it but not many
> know it.
>
> I believe that there is a certain similarity between knowing TeX and
> Calculus:
I'm unconvinced. I grok TeX but I sweated to understand the calculus and
failed miserably. My Add. Maths. O-Level result was a grade "U"
(unclassified, ie less than 5% :-) Oxford Local Board, of course :-)
///Peter
Peter Flynn
[...]
> The wondering figures/tables was a constant issue. The criteria my
> supervisor set was the figure/table should appear on the page it was
> first referred to, or on the page following. Logical, achievable, but
> required some work.
Tweaking the final position is fine, I would expect to have to do that,
and students don't mind it either. It's the default behaviour when it
can't cope that I object to.
Hmm. Maybe use the float package, and have the default "can't fit it"
action be to switch to the "H" positional specifier instead of the "p".
///Peter
Jeffrey Goldberg
> Do the same for other disciplines who have a significant usage level:
> Statistics, Economics,,,there must be many more.
I would add Linguistics. Modern Theoretical Linguistics can roughly be
separated into two camps, West Coast and East Coast. The West Coast camp
are largely (La)TeX users. (Indeed, when I was a grad student in the mid
1980s, the only reason I logged on to the TOPS-20 system was because
web2c hadn't been perfected yet.)
> And anyone else you can think of.
I wonder if sales figures for various editions of The LaTeX Companion
are available. (Though I'm sure I'm not the only one who has gone
through multiple copies after they wear out).
Cheers,
-j
--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read HTML or poorly quoting posts
Reply-To address is valid
Jeffrey Goldberg
> When I started my research studies, the university had just finished
> revising their thesis guidelines. Those guidelines were very open. So
> my approach was to use the report class
When my wife was working on her thesis, the official guidelines assumed
that you were using a typewriter, but they were actually very flexible
on most matters.
Her particular department didn't have guidelines either, but her
supervisor kept making things up as they went along. Early on he
insisted on full double spacing. My wife didn't want to argue, so what
we did was comply in the first draft and then in each subsequent draft
we reduced the baselinestretch by a small amount. He never noticed (or
never said anything) and we eventually got it back to where we had
started without complaint.
> The wondering figures/tables was a constant issue. The criteria my
> supervisor set was the figure/table should appear on the page it was
> first referred to, or on the page following. Logical, achievable, but
> required some work.
Lucky you. My wife's supervisor initially wanted all tables and figures
at the end. Fortunately we talked him out of that.
Dan
> On 18/08/11 23:43, Victor Ivrii wrote:
>
> > Usually they consult someone in business schools or in humanities who
> > advise them how formulae should look like exactly like vegetarians
> > advising how to cook beef steaks.
>
> I think that level of detail tends to be a N. American obsession.
Because there are a large number of US universities, there are
certainly many that are quite detailed in their requirements, but I
think
no more as a percentage than elsewhere. The University of Arkansas
has essentially only 4 requirements:
1. Font size range
2. Margin sizes
3. Requiring certain parts (title page, signature page, etc.) and
their order.
4. Simple head/foot requirements
Everything else is covered by the requirement to follow "generally
accepted standards for the field". In practise this just means your
committee (usually the advisor plus 2 professors in the same
department) has to accept it. In math, his usually amounts to a
series
of gentle suggestions against unclear wording or unusual choices of
notation.
My own (University of Illinois) thesis requirements were similar.
The only difference was that a math department "thesis inspector"
had to OK its style. The only change my inspector asked me
for was to never start a sentence with a mathematical symbol.
Dan
William F Hammond
> I'm just about done doing a local thesis class, which will join the
> others on CTAN when testing is finished. But I like the approach: if
> there was an agreed common core (and report is a good starting-point),
> then each college only needs to write its local mods as a package.
An 'agreed common core' could be an example of what I called a
'LaTeX profile' in my talk at TUG 2010,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq7_6Gd8q10
Then the local mods could be effected using XML transformations.
> No longer. Word is XML. So is OO. Even EndNote will export to XML,
> although the format sucks nearly as badly as Word/OO. But all of them
> are convertible to LaTeX.
These documents are often not convertible to well-structured LaTeX.
While Word and OO are formally implemented as (compound) XML document
types, nonetheless in the hands of inadequately trained authors, the
document instances generated by such tools commonly lack structure to
the point where good translation to anything other than a printer
language (e.g., .ps or .pdf) is realistic.
-- Bill
Paul J Gans
Of course the <report> class can do the job. However, having
a thesis class is excellent advertising for TeX. It makes users
feel that they are being catered to and users like that.
One can say to a friend: "LaTeX can do that very well. There
is even a special setup for it."
The class can be a reworked <report> class. But with the unfortunate
choices made in some packages fixed for the <thesis> class.
--
--- Paul J. Gans