[ale] LaTeX question?

[George Allen]

On Sunday 09 December 2007 17:36:20 Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> My main motivation for trying to find something like this is because
> using the APA package and BiBTeX for managing references, well, would
> make my life a /lot/ easier than doing all that crud manually in
> OpenOffice. ?I wound up developing a template for OOo for the task, but
> it falls short, because OOo falls short.

I studied both history and physics and LaTeX/BibTeX was the best thing on 
Earth for both. I had a Bibtex file with every reference I ever found or 
thought might be useful... with symlinks to working folders of different 
papers... and a style file I cooked up that took care of all formatting 
per-school standards.

In bibtex - you can write comments in your bibliography file - quotes... 
notes... whatever - if it's not inside a statement - bibtex will ignore it. 
You can't beat a flat-text file for freeform annotation.... or grep for 
searching.

And the best part - I had a PhD student try and sell me on EndNote... then I 
showed her what I could do with LaTeX/BibTeX and VI.... she was astounded... 
but swore she could never learn such a system. Even after I explained that it 
would work on her Mac.


But - regarding your DOC vs PDF vs plagarism. I'd be a bit livid about it 
myself.... I submitted all my papers ... on paper. Rarely I sent a few of 
them I sent in as PDF, but our school was pretty good on being sane about 
that...  If I were in school now - and they demanded Word format... I'd slap 
ApprovIT or GPG or somekind of stuff on that to lock it down, make it read 
only... and provide digital signatures and verifiability... becasue - I 
frankly wouldn't trust other people with a word-doc of my handiwork. What if 
the prof opens it up and accidentally hits <ctrl-A>,<del> 

Besides - to me it seems any teacher worth his/her salt would know the 
students well enough to tell by their writing, by their references and by 
their ability to discuss a topic, whether or not they are plagarizing. So I 
think that whole 'plagerism check' is contributing to the problem not solving 
it. I could rant on this and my take on education for a while... but... the 
point is... LaTeX is Awesome.

-G