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posting from office hours!
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
no subject
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.)