Interview with Martin Scharrer

Paulo Cereda

Dec 9, 2011 16:28

@MartinScharrer: Could you tell us a bit about you?

Martin Scharrer

@PauloCereda I'm 32 years old (starting next Tuesday, I mean) and from Bavaria, Germany.

I'm an electronic engineer and currently finishing up my PhD, which I did in Limerick, Ireland for the last couple of years.

I'm using LaTeX since my final year project thesis ("Diplomarbeit") and it's one of my main hobbies since a few years.

Paulo Cereda

How do you feel in your first contact to TeX, LaTeX and friends?

Martin Scharrer

@PauloCereda You mean LaTeX or TeX.SX?

Paulo Cereda

@MartinScharrer LaTeX (first). :)

Martin Scharrer

@PauloCereda My very first contact with LaTeX was a little earlier than my first thesis, when a group of students I belongs to had to write a report about a project we did as part of a practical term. We had written most things as HTML, to post it on your website, but the professor wanted a PDF.

So one of the other students which had heard about LaTeX used it to compile a PDF. I was very interested when he told me that it does the ToC by itself, what I found impressive. My programming spider-sense got tiggled by it and I then started to use it for my final year thesis.

I liked the possibility of programming your own macros and use semantic markup etc.

However, some things confused me a little bit. I had to learn the concept of floats first, for example.

Also I was surprised that you had to load a package just to use images and colors, something I thought should work directly.

egreg

Dec 9, 2011 16:42

(Floats are a big problem for many people, particularly when used to "put my figure here and never mind if the pagination is horrible".)

Martin Scharrer

I got a little confused at first what to use for images, because there were many different tutorials.

Some told you to use epsfig or something. It took me a while to figure that some packages are simply outdated.

Also at the beginning I tried to use as few packages as possible, because I thought they slow down in compiling much, but I stopped doing that very quickly.

Some other things like \raggedbottom etc. were a little funny at the beginning as well, but I got used to it.

In summary, I liked LaTeX a lot better than Word after a short while, but had the impression that it was a little strict, which has its drawbacks if you want to write a thesis, where the professor has a certain layout in mind.

About TeX.SX:

I got here first because I was looking for some LaTeX macro or solution (can't remember what exactly). I knew stackexchange a little before and was surprised in a nice way to find a TeX version of it.

I liked the Q&A format and the fact that there is no much noise here, like in forums.

Joseph Wright

@MartinScharrer What prompted you to stand in the moderator election? Do you see it as 'extra work'?

Martin Scharrer

I visited every day for the following week and read the new questions. After a few days something came up which I could answer. It felt very good to get up-votes for it, so I stayed :-)

@JosephWright I wasn't around for long (6 weeks or so?) until the elections came up. Because I started to answer a lot of questions my reputation was increasing steadily and I got some good feedback from other people to keep up the good work. At first I was holding back because I felt as kind of new user I didn't know yet how the site fully worked, didn't know the people for long, etc.

But I got the feeling that people thought I was a good candidate and I liked the idea of the democratic election for a site moderator, so I decided to go for it.

It was very nice to get elected.

I don't see it much extra work. Most moderator duties can be handled in 10min or less every day and this time I'm here anyway.

Joseph Wright

@MartinScharrer I'd agree there :-)

Martin Scharrer

And if you don't have time, because you are busy, it isn't a problem to keep some flags unmoderated for a day longer.

After all, we are three moderators.

Paulo Cereda

Dec 9, 2011 16:57

@MartinScharrer: 54.5k - highest rep on TeX.sx. What's your secret? :)

Joseph Wright

@MartinScharrer Speaking of that, do you think that a moderator based outside of Europe is desirable?

Martin Scharrer

@JosephWright Well, it would be good to have the moderators more spread across the timezones, but it isn't a critical thing.

@PauloCereda It is from benefit to have some work with constant Internet access and some flexible working hours.

I learned a lot about LaTeX programming and had a read of most chapters of The TeXBook, so I know my way around it.

Joseph Wright

@MartinScharrer Appendix D?

The OR one - I think it's 15?

Martin Scharrer

@PauloCereda: I also like programming a lot, so I don't mind coding a solution for people here, while I have a Matlab or Verilog simulation for my PhD work running in the background.

@JosephWright Dirty Tricks, you mean? I didn't went through it completely. Mostly I skipped the chapters about the output routine and the actual typesetting.

Paulo Cereda

@MartinScharrer Speaking of which, you are also a Perl enthusiast. :) What other tools do you use?

Martin Scharrer

Dec 9, 2011 17:02

@JosephWright: At this time I was more interested in the programming possibilities.

@PauloCereda I used Perl a lot, because it is IMHO a nice programming language for my things. I started to learn Python two years ago in order to write plugins for "trac" (a project management, SVN frontend).

I'm using Linux of course a lot, including shell scripts.

I do a little (X)HTML, CSS and Javascript (I love jQuery) when I find the time and think it's time again to update my website.

I'm a heavy (G)Vim user. I like it because you can do really a lot and with nice shortcuts which are very useful for programmers.

Well, I don't use much other tools atm, I do most things in the command line window with either shell (bash) commands or Vim.

Maybe I should mentioned SSH (which I love) and rsync which I use for back-ups and copying.

I used Subversion a lot, but now switched to Mercurial. I like its flexibility.

Paulo Cereda

:)

@MartinScharrer: CTAN lists 24 of your packages. It's an impressive number! Could you tell us a bit about your first package?

Martin Scharrer

@PauloCereda 24!?

I think my first one was svn-multi

Paulo Cereda

@MartinScharrer ctan.org/author/id/scharrer :)

There are 24 entries. :)

Martin Scharrer

I wrote it because wanted to display the latest Subversion revision used for the document and there was no tool which did exactly that.

Also I liked to program something at this time and thought it was time for my first LaTeX package.

I knew how parsing using parameter texts worked from The teXBook, so I thought I shouldn't be difficulty to parse the SVN keywords and then keep only the latest.

I friend of mine, also a PhD Student in the same centre and LaTeX and Subversion user, started to use it as well and gave me some hints on how to improve it.

It started to get bigger and bigger when I found features I needed for my thesis.

I really like LaTeX for this, because you write basically your own extensions.

With MS OFfice you can define some own macros (which work completely different) in order to make your live easier, but with LaTeX you can do REALLY a lot.

Actually I can do TOO MUCH, because on some weeks I programmed more LaTeX than I was writing on my thesis.

Paulo Cereda

:)

Martin Scharrer

Dec 9, 2011 17:17

@PauloCereda: Most packages I wrote and write because I needed or wanted the features of it. Some things I only needed a little bit, but I decided that it would be very useful to other people so I made a full package out of it.

Paulo Cereda

@Martin: Didier Verna mentioned you during his keynote in this year's TUG. How did you feel? :)

Martin Scharrer

@PauloCereda Well, it felt nice. At the beginning of his story it wasn't all that positive ;-)

I one wrote him an email with a feature request (I think with a patch) for fink, which I needed for svn-multi. I thought the features / interfaces of this package should be more general in order to be more useful for other packages.

Paulo Cereda

@MartinScharrer Indeed. :)

Martin Scharrer

So I started to write my own currfile and filehook packages for this purpose.

As he said he was initially surprised that someone wrote an almost identical package (which kind of happens more often than people think with LaTeX), but then saw that it was actually better and asked me if he should deprecate fink in favor of currfile.

@PauloCereda: So it was nice to get mentioned by name on a LaTeX event! It really like to visit it next year myself.

Joseph Wright

@MartinScharrer This seems like the plan for several people

Martin Scharrer

Dec 9, 2011 17:29

@JosephWright I hope it works out. It's also a pity that most LaTeX regulars' tables are not in my area in Germany. I would love to meet some other LaTeX people in person, especially the well known ones like Herbert or Heiko.

Joseph Wright

@MartinScharrer I've seen before that there regular meetings in Germany, but then there are a lot of LaTeX users there. Are you in DANTE, and if so are you an 'active' member?

Martin Scharrer

@JosephWright Are in DANTE, but not active.

I think Munich would be the next one. Berlin is just too far away :-)

Paulo Cereda

@MartinScharrer: How do you see another year for TeX.sx? Will you reach 100k? :)

Martin Scharrer

@PauloCereda Well, I'm busy with wrapping up my PhD. Then I will find a job and move houses, so I won't have as much time as before.

It depends also on the questions. Some days there are hardly interesting ones there and then the next day there are 3-4 and a lot of rep is caped :-)

I'm not working actively towards 100k, so I don't think it will happen next year, but maybe I come close.

Paulo Cereda

(/me pokes @JosephWright) @MartinScharrer: Ready for LaTeX3? :)

Martin Scharrer

Dec 9, 2011 17:38

@PauloCereda Aeh, no, not at all. I didn't got around learning the new coding style so far.

It looks kind of an investment, which I didn't had time to make so far.

Paulo Cereda

@MartinScharrer: And how about Lua? :)

Martin Scharrer

Also, I think LaTeX2e will still be around for a while. Many packages should still work with LaTeX3.

@PauloCereda I didn't do much with LuaTeX or Lua itself yet, but I think it is easy enough to learn once I need to.

I like pdflatex I don't have any reason to switch to XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX yet, especially since they lack some PDFLaTeX features.

I don't need unicode or special font support myself, but I understand that this is a must for some people abroad.

Paulo Cereda

@MartinScharrer: What do you recommend for a newbie eager to learn TeX, LaTeX and friends? :)

Martin Scharrer

@PauloCereda Well, LaTeX yes, TeX itself is for later. TeX.SX of course (I would give him my business card :-)

I think you need a good tutorial to get started with LaTeX, unfortunately I'm too advanced to remember which one to use and didn't read any for a good while.

Paulo Cereda

Dec 9, 2011 17:54

(Let me see if somebody wants to ask you something)

@MartinScharrer: Thanks for your time! Tausend Dank! :)

Martin Scharrer

@PauloCereda Sure, thanks for having me!

Paulo Cereda

:)

Thanks a lot Martin! :)

Great interview. :)

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