gateman9's Journal: ASCII/Unicode then type-set, makes a damn lot of sense

This came up in the poll about files, and I think its interesting (more so than some of the more hilarious comments, gotta stop reading /. so early).

In my freshman year of college, because of class scheduling, I got to start my CS classes a semester before a lot of people, and as such was saved from suffering from the lectures of the Physics Dean (the bolding is intentional, and honestly, if the guy could, I think he would speak in all bold, but his being a pompous ass aside). So I had a lot of free time to dink about on well setup and maintained Unix and Unix-like machines (Solaris and Debian GNU/Linux). So, one day, after reading a PDF prepared by the TA that had all kinds of fancy symbols, I asked how he made such a spiffy thing (I naively thought only Acrobat full-something-pay-$500 could do that). He said we wrote it in plain ASCII using good ol' Emacs (still my favorite editor, you vi elitists can save it (never should have been part of the POISX standard if you ask me)) and used LaTeX to lay it out, and then a helper progam to convert (a filter in true Unix parlance for those of you who have forgotten or do not know) it to a bunch of formats, including the PDF. He then showed me which modules to load up and where I could find documentation.

And so I went off and merrily dinked around and read a lot of documentation. Generally good times. Maybe I'm weird, but I can read good documentaion for hours (maybe the historian in me). Anyway, I figured out a lot of the more scientific aspects of LaTeX and did a lot of experimentaion with generating said documents. By the end of the semester, I could whip off fancy documents fairly easily.

So, up comes the first Physics paper. And I needed to place a few summations in the middle of a paragraph. For some reason (probably my then girlfriend), I started using Word. And then I came to the summations, and I was stuck. Word had some reasonably okay things to do formulas, but the boneheads at M$ (I know, I shouldn't have expected much) didn't put a Sigma in there. So after finishing the paper, I sat and looked at it and said, "I could do better." I copied the text out of Word and into Emacs to ensure I had good ASCII text. I then went to town with my knowledge of LaTeX and formatted up the paper in a nice clean way, including nice scientific symbols. I then uploaded the file to the Unix boxen (I hadn't gotten TeX of any variety on my machine at that point) and ran all the filters over the file and downloaded the resulting PDF. I open said PDF, and here is this beautifully formatted document (okay, nicely formatted) just like I would see in my textbooks.

So I print off my paper and hand it in to the Physics TA. When I got the paper back, the TA asked how I got the document to format with all the scientific symbols. Did I have the fancy extension to M$ Word that apparently exists for scientific work? Nope. Did I figure out some trick in regular M$ Word? Nope. What did I do? I typed it up, and marked it up for LaTeX and did the necessary filtration to make the document. The TA was baffled (she had never used a Unix or Unix-like device before, apparently the scientists studing magentism use Windows, even for hardware control!), and I explained what the CS TA had told me. Apparently after that, she consulted with other TA's and the prof (who, most notably, already used LaTeX to format his lecture notes suitable for online posting after lecute) and was subsequently introduced.

The point of this long and weakly annecdotal story? We need to dump WYSIWYG editors (this includes my beloved OO.org) and switch back into that old wirte/typesetter modality. Soemthing with the author concentrating on content with vauge ideas for physical layout and the typesetter unconcerned of content and concerned only with good looking and appropraite layout. Generally, this will still be one person, but that one person should concentrate on writing first, and presenting second.

Now I need to go an refresh my LaTeX knowledge, I haven't written anything besides ASCII text (oh yeah, side-note to up-comming college kiddies who have not yet had a literature class: they hate it when you send them unformatted, plain-text documents) for a long time.