[Journal] Finally an Update on Volume 6

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 8:22 PM, Sunburned Surveyor
<sunburned.surveyor at gmail.com> wrote:

> The big elephant in the room is the remaining LaTex work. Barry has
> been carrying most of the load in this area. (Thanks Barry!) I'm
> afriad my limited LaTex knowledge means I won't be much help, beyond
> converting the news section to LaTex format.
>
> I sent Tyler some ideas about publishing the Journal directly to HTML
> online, and/or putting together the PDF copies of the articles in
> Scribus. I know we've got some hard core LaTex fans, but I think we
> might be able to spread the actual publication process among more
> volunteers if we use something more user friendly. I'm waiting for
> Tyler to comment. Maybe we don't do that for this volume, but try it
> on the next. I'd volunteer to putting together HTML/ Scribus files in
> parallel with the LaTex process for the next Journal volume, so at
> least we could see if an alternative publication process works better.
>
> At any rate, I'm going to be looking for help to get the final LaTex
> based PDF files for Volume 6 out the door. Maybe I am too optimistic,
> but I hope we can get this done by the end of March. Do we think this
> is possible?

 [dons his LaTeX ninja uniform]

 I'm not totally busy up to March 31st so I can fairly rapidly deal
with arising LaTeX issues.

 Here's some thoughts on document preparation in general. Prefix all
this with "IMHO":

 Firstly, if you want it to look drop-dead gorgeous, then you have to
use LaTeX *at some point*. It does *everything*. I never want to see
another ugly MS Office equation, or bad hyphenation, or incorrect
cross-reference again. It's doing what commercial software costing in
the TENS of thousands [US/CDN $, £] does for newspapers and magazines.

However, LaTeX is clearly only really useful for print and PDF final
outputs. There's no reason that all inputs and submissions need to be
given in LaTeX, nor that all final outputs must derive from it. It
just has to be easy to make the required output set from the allowed
input set.

 It may be that article submission in other formatted text systems
should be encouraged - such as ReStructured Text
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReStructuredText] or Sisu
[http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/] or DocBook
[http://wiki.docbook.org/topic/DocBookTutorials] (although nobody
should really be writing articles in XML, it may be useful as an
intermediate format).

 What I would really like to build is a way for authors to check their
documents conform to what is needed for the journal, which means, for
example, providing a LaTeX master document they can plug their article
in to to see how it comes out. Not sure how this works for .doc or
OO.org submissions though. My real answer is 'use LaTeX'. Otherwise we
just convert by hand as ever...

 *kapow* ninja smoke bomb!

Barry