Life as a Physicist

This just floored me. Dave mentioned this in a comment in one of my last posts. It looks like the major pre-print archive accepts the OOXML format now. I thought they only accepted PDF and .tex submissions.

This makes be beg the question (though it might not do it to you), but is there a tex2ooXML converter (some found here, but one or two I tried didn’t seem to work)? Hear me out before you write me off as crazy (as I think some of you already have). The reason that interests me is that PDF is a static page format. I now read almost all my papers on a screen. The size of the screen and its resolution rarely match with letter. For example, my last laptop purchase was delayed 6 months because I needed a high resolution screen so I can read my PDF’s full screen when it was rotated on its side – in tablet mode. The increased screen resolution, btw, makes PDF’s look a lot better – especially when the computer modern font is used (sorry, couldn’t resist that dig).

What I’d love is to be able to re-flow the documents on the fly to adjust to the screen size. Now, what I could do is run latex in the background. The upside is that no format translation is required and TeX is certainly up to the task. The downside is that automation of this isn’t trivial – some programing work would be required (column sizes, screen sizes and resolutions, font rasterization?). On the other hand, Word will do re-flow and columns automatically, as well as resizing fonts. The downside is you would loose fidelity in the translation.

The place this I’m particularly interested in this is these new MID devices – slow CPU’s and relatively low resolution (and small screen sizes). They have relatively weak CPUs. I’ve seen Word reflow documents on these devices – it performs ok on a 100 page document (not ideal). I have no idea how long it would take to regenerate a 20 page latex paper (which would then be 100 pages or something). Would it be fast enough to be usable?

For those of you out in the real world: you use Word or something similar to write all of your documents. In Physics we use two typesetting packages, TeX. Unlike Word, TeX uses text input files to fully describe the document being produced. This is not WYSIWYG!!

TeX’s inception was in 1977 (the first released version was much after that). Many people in the field of physics will disagree with me when I say that the output that TeX produces is ugly and hard to read (partly because of the font family it uses), and is quite hard to use – especially if you are an infrequent user.

For example, I am editor of a note in ATLAS that needs an internal and external version. The internal version is the same as the external version along with a bunch of extra material. I needed the equivalent of an if statement to turn on and off sections of text depending on what version of the note I was producing. In Word it would take me about 5 minutes to create a new style that would do this – because of the user interface almost all the options are basically “in your face.” When it came to TeX, however, I spent about 2 hours searching the web and trying to create my own commands to do the job before I finally stumbled on a good web page. What a waste of time!

That said, before people in physics think I’ve totally lost it, there are two things I think that TeX does better than word: handles long documents (like a thesis) better than Word, and deals with figure placement better than Word.

TeX is a macro language – built to solve a specific set of typesetting problems. It’s macro language is amazingly flexible and gives you access to almost all parts of the layout engine from its code. But its power is also its weakness for someone like me: I almost never need advanced features – so I can never remember what or how to access them. And, in fact, the TeX macros are so low level there are numerous packages on top of it (LaTeX is probably the most popular). Word exposes a full object model that you can program against in easily in any dynamic language (like the .NET version of python or VB) and with a little more difficulty, C++. However, my impression is for really complex typesetting jobs TeX is a bit easier to deal with. Of course, that is just it: as a physicist I rarely, if ever, need or want that level of control. And that is just it: exposing all of that means the TeX macro language is prohibitively hard to use.

Well, I suffered all day, so you will too (well, only as long as it takes you to read this post). My new portable spent most of the day masquerading as a door stop. It was doing a darn good impression too.

It was me being stupid. I installed a recent OS update despite warnings to the contrary (that this very thing might happen). But I saw several others on the net had done it, and they owned the same portable. No prooooblem!

Er… no. I guess there are different versions of the same portable out there. Whatever, my computer would never get beyond a blank screen in the boot process. Of course, after it happened I started reading about it.

Recovery was pretty painless, considering I didn’t have a backup. It is very cool we’ve gotten to the point I can boot my portable off a USB key – there really is no longer a need for a DVDROM reader in my portable!

At any rate, the lesson is: when the vendor says “don’t install, might cause bad problems,” listen — especially the night before you will be depending on it! Yes, I have gone to school. Perhaps I’ll learn sometime soon!