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Apple and LaTeX
- webwielder2 9y agoBetter title: Dr. Drang Notices Some Crappy Formatting in a Slide and Also Programmers Aren’t Mathematicians
- ioquatix 9y agoWoah there, some programmers are mathematicians.
- rasz 9y agoJobs would fire 5 people for something like this. Nowadays nobody at Apple cares anymore.
- webwielder2 9y agoI think both of those sentences are untrue.
- cooper12 9y agoJeez, even after the wealthy man died from curable cancer, his cult of personality persists. (or should I say "reality distortion field") This isn't the main keynote at WWDC, but rather is just a panel, so I don't see why Jobs would have cared or had the resourced to care about each presentation. Additionally, while Jobs did take a calligraphy course and was in tune with typography, I doubt he was especially knowledgable about mathematical typesetting as this author is. Lastly, which 5 people would be fired due to shoddy typesetting? The author likely just made their own slides and the WWDC coordinates obviously can't work on each and every presentation.
- coldtea 9y ago>Lastly, which 5 people would be fired due to shoddy typesetting? Or you know, it might just be no persons fired, but just the team/presenter scolded. It's not like the parent made an absolute statement. Rather they wanted to make what we call "a point".
- cooper12 9y agoMeh, saying "five people would have been fired!" is too hyperbolic for my tastes. If you click through to this other HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14671047 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14671047), you'll notice they don't use proper typographic emdashes (typewriter dashes `--` instead of `—`) and they have a black diamond where their asterism [0] or some other mark would have gone. However, you don't see me commenting there to derail the discussion away from the fascinating topic of these creatures' breathing. In the same way, this is just a minor aspect of the WWDC presentation and isn't such a big deal necessitating people to have been fired for. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterism_(typography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterism_(typography)
- coldtea 9y ago>However, you don't see me commenting there to derail the discussion away from the fascinating topic of these creatures' breathing. Only in this post's case, the quality of the typography WAS the topic under discussion.
- cooper12 9y agoMy point is that it's such a minor aspect of an otherwise edifying talk on photography. Certainly not something to demand firings for.
- ClassyJacket 9y agoSource, please, that pancreatic cancer is "curable".
- coldtea 9y agoTwo words: iPod socks.
- tptacek 9y agoNo, he would not have. He would happily have gotten on stage in front of this slide.
- coldtea 9y agoWhile he might not have cared for a slide from a technical presentation, he would not have "happily gotten on stage in front of this slide". This is all contexture of course, but even if he didn't know the nuances of minus vs dash etc, he wouldn't have left the extra space on the "e" and the misaligned equals signs to slip by.
- drfuchs 9y agoHaving tagged along with Knuth when Jobs invited him over for a personal demonstration of a pre-production Macintosh, I can attest that Jobs was knowledgable about, and cared strongly about, typography. And having been in the room when Jobs pitched the NeXT cube and printer to Frame, to convince us to do a port of FrameMaker, this was again clearly the case. So, no way he would have allowed this slide in any stage appearance of his. For further evidence, remember that what (once) saved Apple was the the Jobs-driven pair of Macintosh and Apple LaserWriter (the first PostScript printer). This combination sparked the desktop publishing revolution, as it allowed the masses to get typographically reasonable output semi-affordably. He made both of these devices happen, and good typography was a core goal.
- FabHK 9y agoYes. Jobs famously took a calligraphy class at Reed college, and mentioned frequently how it influenced him and e.g. the design of the Macintosh. http://www.leemunroe.com/steve-jobs-calligraphy/ http://www.leemunroe.com/steve-jobs-calligraphy/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-tribute-to-a-great-artist-steve-jobs-99783256/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-tribute-to-a-gr...
- Finnucane 9y agoYou worked for Frame? I used to love FrameMaker. To this day I haven't forgiven Adobe for killing the Mac version.
- xkcd-sucks 9y agoWith the "positive anymore," [O] you can say: "Anymore, nobody at Apple cares" [O] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_anymore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_anymore
- nxc18 9y agoI remember when I moved from the northeast and heard the positive anymore for the first time. I assumed the speaker was just somewhat dim, or maybe suffering from a minor stroke. It turns out this is an established construction if you venture away from the west and best coasts...
- mwfunk 9y agoWeird, I've never heard this either and I grew up in Michigan (not quite "positive anymore" territory according to Wikipedia, but certainly in the neighborhood). I believe it, I'm just always pleasantly surprised to learn about common things that everyone but me seems to have known about.
- JadeNB 9y ago> if you venture away from the west and best coasts... Typo, editorialising, or both?
- planb 9y agoWhoa, why is this downvoted so heavily? It's obviously a joke, and it's funny because Jobs really cared about typography, so he probably would have objected to this.
- nikdaheratik 9y agoExcept that Apple has been pushing better support for math in their office suite. It's just that the people handling these slides didn't use it.
- oneplane 9y agoBut what about LaTeX in any Microsoft software? As far as I know, they don't even know how to say LaTeX over there... I knew it was in the iWork suite (has been since 2009? not sure...), but having it and using it are two different things I guess ;-) It's not supported in Grapher, however, so that's somewhat strange (but also not totally unbelievable, one could argue that LaTeX is more of a markup language than anything else).
- yomritoyj 9y agoThere may be no LaTeX in Microsoft Word, but people working on its equation editor seem to be very much aware of LaTeX. Take a look at Murray Sargent's blog: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/
- pflats 9y agoWord does its own mathematical typesetting with a GUI, but it also lets you use some LaTeX-like formatting if you want. 5\cdot2=10 will give you exactly what you typed, but if you hit space after the cdot, you'll get the centered dot symbol. Notably, it uses parens instead of braces, so you'll want to do \sqrt(2x+1). Most annoyingly to me, \frac and other commands not directly associated with a symbol do not seem to be supported. That said, it's still extremely useful for my narrow use case (high school teacher semifluent in TeX with colleagues who are not). edit: Also, it supports more symbols than its GUI provides; the only way to get the arc symbol that Geometry teachers like is to use \overparen.
- dredmorbius 9y agoI suspect someone does. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/lamport/ http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/lamport/
- aviggiano 9y agoEven if you are not a mathematician this slide is clearly very ugly. A better title would be: "Apple does not send their slides to design revision."
- objclxt 9y agoExcept that's not the case, all WWDC slides from all sessions go through design review. I've presented there several times when I was at Apple.
- et2o 9y agoArrogance of the post coupled with labeling of "Dr. Drang" suggests to me this guy has some insecurity issues.
- coldtea 9y agoThanks for the detailed psychological profile of the Dr.
- omegote 9y agoWhy wouldn't he use the "Dr." preffix if he's a doctor?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- thebooktocome 9y agoIt's a bit in vogue these days for PhD non-MD to forgo the title in informal settings. Refusing to do so can appear egotistical.
- omegote 9y agoI think the opposite. It's unfair for medics without a PhD to be called doctor. If you have a PhD you've earned all the rights to be called doctor and to use the preffix whenever you feel like. I would if I had a PhD.
- KGIII 9y agoWhilst this veers off-topic, I don't use the formal title, even though I have earned the right to do so. It's actually not just a matter if humility. I find that, when introduced with the title, people ask me for medical advice. I am a mathematician, not a physician.
- Veen 9y ago"Dr Drang" is a pseudonym. He doesn't use his real name to blog, and goes to some effort to obscure it (for professional reasons). Edit: I was wondering why Dr Drang, and found the answer here[0] > When I started blogging, I thought I’d do more political posts, and it seemed like a good idea to keep my online and real life personas separated. I didn’t want potential clients Googling my real name and having all the hits come from my personal blog. > I do have a Ph.D. in engineering, with an emphasis in stress and structural analysis. > “Drang” is the German word for stress and is part of the name of a famous engineering textbook, Drang und Zwang, written by the father and son team of August and Ludwig Föppl. The father, August, also wrote an even more famous textbook, Vorlesungen über technische Mechanik, but “Dr. Vorlesungen” just didn’t have the right ring to it. [0]: https://512pixels.net/2012/06/writers-i-read-dr-drang/ https://512pixels.net/2012/06/writers-i-read-dr-drang/
- kuon 9y agoI'm a programmer and I noticed that this slide was looking ugly. But well, I write my documentation with pandoc/latex and tikz so I guess I'm biased.
- KKKKkkkk1 9y agoDoesn't using Latexit mean that each of your equations potentially has a different size?
- rustole 9y agoNo. Using Latexit, your equations will use the same (configurable) font size. If you wanted them to have the same width for some reason, you could resize them once they're in the document.
- draw_down 9y agoHe's right that the formatting is bad and Latex's is better. The italicized parens are just bizarre. But math stuff rendered by Latex also usually looks "ugly" to me, I'm not sure why. Maybe the typeface or something.
- padthai 9y agoThe default typeface is called Computer Modern but if you do not like it there are plenty of options: http://www.tug.org/pracjourn/2006-1/hartke/hartke.pdf http://www.tug.org/pracjourn/2006-1/hartke/hartke.pdf
- greglindahl 9y agoIt's easy to spot resumes typeset with TeX; they always make me smile.
- copperx 9y agoOn the contrary, I think it's really difficult to distinguish TeX and InDesign on a resume. Using Computer Modern is a giveaway, though.
- greglindahl 9y agoComputer Modern is pretty obvious. The superior kerning of TeX is more subtle. I mostly see the really shitty kerning of Microsoft Word, which has no excuse, it's had plenty of time to imitate TeX.
- copperx 9y agoYou can get decent kerning in Word, but you have to enable it manually in every style along with automatic hyphenation. The result looks good as long as the paragraphs are not justified. Justification is terrible because of the awful line-breaking algorithm Word uses. InDesign, on the other hand, basically copied TeX's line-breaking algorithm but they tweaked it so that it could be applied in real time.
- deleted 9y ago
- 80211 9y agoOur company's software is very "math intensive". We never hire CS Majors. Only Math or EE majors, who have a working knowledge of the Calculus. We rarely need to use anything that you wouldn't learn in Calc 101, other than practical application of FFT, but still, CS Majors are all stumped.
- legulere 9y agoAs a counterpoint: I once had to work on a codebase solely of EE majors. There were no comments except commented out code (~1/5 of the codebase), no uniform formatting, horrible variable names and nothing really worked. I wouldn't expect anything like that from someone at the end of the first semester of CS. Still, I don't generalize this to all EE majors.
- comstock 9y agoOther post from this author providing some background on mathematical typesetting is interesting: http://leancrew.com/all-this/2017/07/math-without-latex/ http://leancrew.com/all-this/2017/07/math-without-latex/