On Wednesday, 20 May 2015 05:32:00 PM William G. Scott wrote:
> > On May 20, 2015, at 5:38 AM, Randy Read <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> >
> > Thanks, as always, to everyone for a thoughtful discussion!
>
>
> Alternatively, as a scientific community, perhaps it is finally time for us to untwist Clippy, bending him backwards and forwards until he snaps at those horrid beady little eyeballs, ditch the Comic Sans, flip Redmond the bird, HTFU and learn to use LaTeX equation markup, and ask that our journals do the same. It really isn’t any harder than learning basic HTML (and predates it as one of the original mark-up languages).
I don't know that we have much leverage over the whole range
of relevant publishers and journals, but certainly the IUCr
journals have in my experience always welcomed latex
submissions. The IUCr web site provides templates and examples.
I highly recommend LyX as an alternative to Word and its ilk.
I've been using it for years to write and prepare papers for
submission, to Acta and elsewhere.
I happen to know that the IUCr website also provides a LyX
layout template to improve the WSIWYG experience in LyX
(because I donated it :-)
Contrary to rumors mentioned up-thread, I have LyX/latex
documents going back 10+ years that open just fine in the
current version of LyX. Yes, older documents may go through
a markup conversion step when opened, but the one-time
delay is no big deal. You can save the updated version or not,
as you choose.
You don't really need to learn any latex to use LyX, although
it does help if you want to customize the output (i.e. you
aren't using a journal-supplied template).
None of this, however, addresses the problem of collaborating
with people who want to use MSWord. I have not found anything
better than running MSWord in an emulator, and this of course
does not address bugs or other problems in MSWord itself.
(Well actually it does, kind of. It used to be that fonts,
PDF conversion, and some graphics worked better inside a linux+wine
emulation than they did in the same MSWord executable running
natively on Windows. I don't know if this is still true).
> Journals and funding agencies should not be demanding that
> we use crappy broken and restrictive proprietary formats for
> submitting papers and proposals.
Thankfully the NIH now wants PDF. I use LyX for my NIH proposals also.
I could package up a template and bibtex style sheet if
there is interest.
Ethan
>
> Ascii text documents provide the ultimate form of universal interchangeability.
>
> The syntax is actually quite straightforward and easy to learn (or look up), eg:
>
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Mathematics
>
> LaTeX allows you to focus on content rather than document formatting. Although it is definitely more badass to do this in vim, other ascii text editors often have very useful LaTeX functionality. (My favorite on OS X is TextMate, version 2 of which is now free. If you code on OS X, you should take a look at this.)
>
> Once you make the small investment of time learning LaTeX, it makes other tasks easier. For example, you can use jsMath to embed LaTeX-encoded equations (including chemistry symbols) in web pages, eg:
>
> http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsmath/examples/welcome.html
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