posting from office hours!

[alexr_rwx]

If you have any questions about introductory CS, or maybe about life, feel free to come see me. I'm in room 112 for the next hour or so.

Also: Lindsey lindseykuper and I are both extremely signed up for the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon. Big running, here we come!

I'm enjoying my classes; for two of them, I've been busy LaTeX'ing up some basic problems about probability. It's good practice; I want to be fluent with both probability and LaTeX.

That said, I think I'm developing a distaste for PDFs. (Portable Document Format, not Probability Density Functions) We have this fantastic system for distributing documents (the web), and nice programs for viewing those documents, wherein you can easily search, copy, paste, highlight, resize and restyle the text. But we don't use those for serious academic papers. That seems dumb. Although I guess it doesn't help that MathML is pretty clunky.

I suppose a possible approach is just using LaTeX as a source language, and converting it to HTML/MathML for reading online, and a PDF for printing. (what's the best tool for that?)

Edited to add! Well, it turns out that browser support for MathML is pretty shaky. I just installed some extra Math Fonts, and my Firefox 3.5 renders MathML just fine. But Chrome (or really, browsers other than Mozilla and Opera) don't do so well at it, and IE doesn't do MathML at all without a plugin.

Comments

[msbeanhead.livejournal.com]

I loved your recitation! Do you still give out small pots of jam to people who ask good questions? :)

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

Awww! :) Thanks for remembering that!

I haven't taught a regular class for years. I might have to start back up finding condiments to give out, though!

(forgive me for not remembering; did you take the class, or just come sit in? Was Stevie teaching too, or was it somebody else?)

[msbeanhead.livejournal.com]

I wasn't in your section of that class, but I ended up at the recitation that you and sstrickl were teaching... no memory of how.

[sstrickl.livejournal.com]

Just as a side note, I haven't found a recently generated (academic) PDF where I couldn't search, copy, paste, or highlight (if we're just talking about selecting text). Now older papers that are really just conversions of postscript files and/or scanned versions of typed papers, then yes, those aren't, but without someone doing the work of typesetting them in LaTeX and regenerating them, we're not going to get them with those anyway.

Speaking of which, one of my friends from the lab once had an idea of creating an undergraduate course in the use of TeX/LaTeX solely for the purpose of having their projects be retypesetting old academic papers.

Of course I grant you the resize/restyle thing. There's no CSS equivalent for PDFs that I'm aware of, and I'd be surprised, given the reason for PDF existence.

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

*nods* It's true that you can do these things with most new PDFs -- it's just not very smooth. On a semirelated note, there's a lot of complaining that one could do about the two-column format. Ian Bogost has done some of that (http://www.bogost.com/blog/why_i_hate_acm_format.shtml) recently. (and his icon looks quite a bit like yours!)

At least for me, it'd be more pleasant to read text that reflows and resizes nicely than something that's beautifully set on the page. On a similar note, I've become a big fan of Readability (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/) recently. It makes reading blogs super-easy, even in the face of web design.

[sstrickl.livejournal.com]

I am definitely sympathetic about complaints about the ACM 2 column format.

But yes, if you come up with a tool that can produce better webpages from the given LaTeX source for a paper or such, I don't think you'd find yourself for lack of customers. It's just that right now, most of the stuff that does that results in stuff that's, sadly, pretty crappy.

And since LaTeX is a major academic publishing format precisely because of its typesetting, it's going to be difficult to try and shoehorn people away from that as a primary medium for paper writing. As I've written before, (La)TeX is the worst system for writing papers except all those others that have been tried. As a programming language, it's definitely subpar, but that's what you get when you try to avoid turing completeness by restricting your language and end up getting it anyway.

(And really, the only alternative to LaTeX found out in the wild right now is... Word. And... yeah. Yeah. Ugh.)

[anonamyst.livejournal.com]

are you going to run in toe shoes?

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

Yes. I've been doing all my running in toe shoes, actually!

(except for a brief burst of no-shoes on Monday! But then we came up on mud and construction debris, so I put my toe-shoes back on :) )

MathML in WebKit

[samarin.livejournal.com]

MathML in WebKit is steadily improving -- at least judging by the mailing list!

Re: MathML in WebKit

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

That's pretty exciting! :) Maybe there'll be more use of MathML once support is wider.

Quite a lot of articles out there would benefit, I suppose -- do you think there's interest? Maybe it wouldn't be worth switching big chunks of the web until it works in IE too?

Re: MathML in WebKit

[samarin.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't be surprised if IE never supports MathML. :(