[ale] LaTeX question?

[tom]

A few responses sandwitched into the rest of the text...
However, to summarize: I see a value in automated plagerism checking, and 
I agree that restricting the format to MS Word is questionable to wrong.

On Fri, 21 Dec 2007, Michael B. Trausch wrote:

> On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 19:44 -0500, Thompson Freeman wrote:
>> In any event, it was early in the era of
>> computer checking of student papers, using a home grown
>> system. In the second or third year of the systems use, the
>> final course paper showed something horrible like 30%+
>> students reusing papers from the previous years students,
>> many of which were literal full copies. Which amounts to my
>> other big reason for rather liking computer assistance: a
>> huge percentage of students is looking for, and working
>> very hard at, finding a way to avoid doing something that
>> they don't want to do - the assigned work.
>
> Very true, however...
>
> If Evince can read the output of my documents as generated by any flavor
> of LaTeX to PDF output, I don't see why a plagiarism checker couldn't do
> the same.  The system that the school that I go to uses is probably not
> home-brew, but it only supports Microsoft Word documents, which I find
> rather annoying and obtuse.  At the very least, if it supports other
> filetypes, it is configured to not permit them to be uploaded if one of
> those filetypes is PDF.  It gives the error message "Only files
> with .doc extension are allowed."

Agreed, and not really the point I was addressing originally. Using MS 
Word formats only is almost certainly an internal political decision, and 
as such almost certainly immune to factual argumentation from the customer 
(you).

>
> It is a shame, I think, given that a PDF document renders 100% correctly
> no matter what viewer you use to view it, so long as the viewer is
> adhering to the standards that PDF is.  The thing is that any technical
> argument is lost on this school, and I am beginning to think that
> technical arguments are lost on many more institutions than not anymore
> simply because many of the people that control the flow of things
> monetarily and technologically are not educated enough to see the merit
> of such arguments.  The more that I use this system to create documents
> over using OpenOffice.org, the more I can't stand OOo---and I am sure
> that the same would go for Microsoft Word, if I had access to one
> currently.  The output in PDF format is just so attractive, and the
> documents are so easy to generate.

Well, I probably would agree with you on relative ease of creation if I 
created enough text to matter. I started with a DEC version of runoff 
almost thirty years ago. A number of years wandering in the MS wilderness 
pushed a word processor on me, starting with the need to stay employed. 
I've not recovered from the "abuse".

>
> I recently learned how to typeset a greeting card, as an example.  Now,
> I have tried to learn how to do cards in minimal time with
> OpenOffice.org, but have not succeeded.  It requires that you create
> frames and rotate things about, and you wind up getting pretty cruddy
> output.  However, I typeset a few greeting cards this year with XeLaTeX,
> and I was absolutely amazed at how easy it was---particularly how good
> looking it came out to be.  The requirements for making the images look
> wonderful are of course to use high-resolution images, but it deals very
> nicely with a 300 or 600 dpi JPEG image that is hardly compressed, and
> the output looks wonderful both on the screen and printed.  I cannot say
> that for OOo.
>
> Of course, thinking about it more, I might be able to side-step the
> requirement altogether by simply submitting the PDF with a copy of the
> text contained within the PDF in .doc format, perhaps copy-pasted from
> the PDF...

Thats the spirit! Subvert the system!

>
> --- Mike
>