It is a well-known fact that spammers crawl web pages and automatically extract email addresses not only from HTML files, but
also from other formats, e.g., PDF.
It is therefore desirable to have an obfuscation method for email addresses in TeX
that works with commonly used formats (e.g., PDF, P...
I'm looking for short lists of key packages which would be useful for postgraduates in particular disciplines. I'm also looking for sites which specialise in the use of LaTeX for specific disciplines. For example, for all things logic, I use LaTeX for Logicians and, through that site, I'm also somewhat familiar with LaTeX4Ling for linguists. Are there similar sites for other subjects?
I'm more looking for reference sites to direct students to. I figure that any list of packages I create is going to be incomplete, especially for other disciplines.
@cfr It's seriously out of date, and recommends too many ancient things. It also doesn't really make recommendations, which on the one hand seems fair, but on the other hand doesn't really help new people decide which would actually be best.
@AlanMunn Your list is nice but (1) it uses non-CTAN stuff which I'm trying to avoid recommending and (2) it uses stuff which won't work with pdfTeX which I'm also trying to avoid. Also, I wasn't sure how specialised it was because I don't know enough about linguistics! Nonetheless, I've got a longer list from that for linguistics than for any other subject. (Except logic.)
@cfr Hmm. I could possibly work up a more annotated version of my selections by then. Part of the reasons I have strong opinions on them is from dealing with others' problems with the things I don't like. Unfortunately for almost every old package out there, there's someone who still uses it, so when you ask for a group consensus it never happens. I think this is roughly source of the Essex page is.
Recommendations are hard for logic. There are a bunch of packages for more-or-less the same thing. However, most of them seem quite inflexible so if you need a different style of proof, for example, you really need another package. So I've got 2 packages for Gentzen sequents and no fewer than 3 for Fitch. And that doesn't even touch the Lemmon ones, which I can only find a non-CTAN package for.
@AlanMunn In logic, I've mostly seen people here trying to use the wrong package which typically makes their task impossible. Support for logic is really... not good at all. The spacing comes out wrong using amsmath etc., and the only package which does much to address that independently of a particular system seems to be gene-logic, which seems old.
@cfr The only non-pdfLaTeX(and also non CTAN) thing there that IMO is essential is the OTtalblx package. It will work with XeLaTeX, and lots of linguists use that because of superior IPA fonts. That's an area where TIPA and pdfLaTeX really is at the "gangrenous edge" (opposite of "bleeding edge").
@AlanMunn Hmm. I just don't really want to go there in the workshop. I don't actually know I'll have any linguists, and I'm sure I won't have any logicians. (Nobody seriously does logic here - indeed, they seem to be cutting even the undergraduate course next year.)
I will probably have have computer scientists, mathematicians, people from the business school, mechanical engineers... at least, judging by the last workshop.
@cfr Yes, looking at Cardiff's offerings, I'm not surprised. And even if a linguist did show up I could almost guarantee that they wouldn't need OTtablx.
@cfr The other non-CTAN thing (cgloss) isn't essential, since it's a small modification to the cgloss4e package which is used by gb4e and linguex.
@AlanMunn I don't know much about what they do, to be honest. Or, rather, I don't understand when people tell me they do X. A reading group on the evolution of language just finished but I think most of the people attending work on other subjects.
@AlanMunn So what's the right sort of linguistics? And what's the wrong sort? (Other than requiring vs. not LaTeX.)
@cfr The LaTeX users are a smaller subset of that. But linguistics seems to love sectarian squabbles, so some of the areas that would previously be considered firmly part of the generative tradition (and are big LaTeX users) seem to be allying themselves with other groups, even though from what I can see they have nothing in common.
@AlanMunn Well, the book we read had very bad arguments against Chomsky. But almost all of its arguments were bad. Linguists and philosophers agreed ;).
@AlanMunn Philosophers love squabbles. But we'd never agree with each other for long enough to form a sect.
I'm hoping that @JosephWright may give me a list for chemistry, though.
@cfr Which book was that? There's a recent book by Vyvyan Evans who's at Bangor which is full of absolute crap.
@cfr There's a great quote from a famous psycholinguist which says that non-Chomskyans are like Protestants, they all agree they hate the Catholics, but they can't agree on anything else.
@AlanMunn You might think it is great! Our main objection was that it never actually explained how language might have evolved. It explained how language might evolve if people already had language. Also, if the book is right, it requires human beings to completely forget a useful, if limited code in order to evolve language prior to language actually having reached a point at which it would be easy to use.
@cfr I don't think there's a single 'evolution of language' story that isn't a just-so story. And it's entirely dubious that anything in the fossil record will allow us to determine when brains got the language stuff they have now.
@cfr Also there's usually an assumption, unmotivated for the most part, that language evolved as a communicative system. It's far from obvious that that's true, despite the fact that it is obviously used for communication a lot.
@FaheemMitha I'm not sure I know how to answer that question. Part of it depends on what counts as 'experimentally verifialble', and also what you think is the object to be modelled.
@FaheemMitha but while you're here, are you an R user?
So I'm using `dplyr` and want to group some of my data and I'm getting an error "In Ops.factor(c(1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, : + not meaningful for factors"
@FaheemMitha Well using proper MWE technique I got things to work. There must have been something off in the longer version of the command I was using.
@PauloCereda @TorbjørnT. Zeef is something I found through Emacs (emacs.zeef.com) – perhaps the easiest way to understand what it is would be to explore that link :)
@FaheemMitha Yes. The user interface sucks big time, especially for someone like me who is used to TikZ's wordy, but memorable syntax. But it's quite powerful.
Lots of people use a main tool like Excel or another spreadsheet, SPSS, Stata, or R for their statistics needs. They might turn to some specific package for very special needs, but a lot of things can be done with a simple spreadsheet or a general stats package or stats programming environment.
...
@AlanMunn Hmm... Yes. Lots of 'just so' stories. Mostly about berries. For some reason. What else might language have evolved for? I can see the capability for language evolving for some other reason. (Not sure about that combined with Chomsky. Or, anyway, with Fodor.) But language itself? Probably I just lack imagination.
@cfr I don't see any reason why it couldn't have emerged as an internal representational system that turned out to be very good also for communication.
@FaheemMitha I think the second highest voted answer there is quite telling. Also, there's the sociological factor: in fields where statistics is merely a tool, it's helpful to use what everyone else uses. This makes peer review simpler and also makes sharing data and know-how easier too.
@AlanMunn I think that answer has a point, but overstates things.
For example "Python will limit the way you think about data analysis.". What does that even mean? R is essentially an overgrown DSL for statistics, so in some ways it is an easier environment to work with data, but OTOH it is a truly terrible programming environment. So, there are tradeoffs.
I don't think the use of the language is significant unless you have collaborators working with you.
If you do, then yes, there are network effects. But my experience of academia is that nobody wants to write code.
@FaheemMitha You are seeing this as a language issue, but I would bet that most of the people who use R for their Stats don't even really think of it as a language. In exactly the same way as most people who use LaTeX don't really think of it as a language.
@AlanMunn Oh, in that case R is probably fine. Sorry for the noise. Though if you do find yourself doing statistical programming, consider alternatives.
I actually think a sensible language like Common Lisp would be a better base than either when it comes to serious statistical sw, but said software doesn't exist.
