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? :)

[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.

[anonamyst.livejournal.com]

are you going to run in toe shoes?

MathML in WebKit

[samarin.livejournal.com]

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