Alon Lischinsky's homepage: Thoughts and rants

Thoughts and rants

Here you can have a look at assorted writings about my interests. If you are looking for academic material, that's just around the corner, at the publications page.

LaTeX

The worst thing about writing is not writer's block, journal guidelines, deadlines or endless proofreading. It's word processors.

I know that editing and correcting were much more complex and time-consuming in the days of typewriters or pen-and-paper, but there was one good thing to be said for the system: when writing, you concentrated on writing, not on making your work look pretty. It was assumed that the fancy decisions about layout and design would be better attended to by a proffessional typesetter, leaving authors to do what they're actually supposed to: produce quality writing.

Word processors and their DIY approach have had two main consequences: first, much increased work for writers, who now have to spend time choosing typefaces, font size and weight, adjusting alignement and generally worrying about the unprofessional look of their documents, rather than focusin on writing professional-sounding prose; second, much worse design, since most of us are not seasoned professionals with a good eye for things such as margin-to-print ratios or adequate title blackness, let alone sophisticated kerning. Documents written in word processors are almost invariably idiosyncratic, inconsistent and poorly laid-out.

Those of us who want to focus on writing and leave layout to professionals do not need to hire a graphic designer. We can use LaTeX, a powerful typesetting system based on the idea that one should focus on document content, letting the program work out the specifics of presentation. LaTeX documents are written in plain text, with just the necessary markup to indicate their semantic structure. Once the document is ready, the typesetting program produces high-quality and publication-ready output.

Here you have a few useful documents and resources about LaTeX:

The not-so-short introduction to LaTeX, possibly the best work to get acquainted with the system
The rather solid Wikibook on LaTeX, less systematic and well-written but also informative
A very useful page about using LaTeX in Linguistics, including a number of resources for satisfying the complex writing needs of a research linguist
Not strictly LaTeX-related, but on the same vein, linguists willing to actually make use of what computers have to offer should check Kenneth W. Church's Unix™ for Poets tutorial. It is a wonderful lesson about why is it sensible to avoid binary formats

Thoughts and rants

LaTeX

About

Contact