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Twelve LaTeX packages to get your paper accepted (2017)

205 points by azhenley 7y ago

kleer001 7y ago
ha
waynecochran 7y ago
My eyes were getting wider until package 4 — then I realized the joke. I was trying to figure out what DB autocite scanned…
- parsimo2010 7y ago
  The best part of the joke is that this is somewhat plausible. It would be relatively simple to write a package that threw in a “nocite” of your leadership’s key papers so they show up in the references even if you don’t cite them in your paper. The translate package could be implemented with Google Translate or similar. The INTERCAL language required saying “please” in your code, something similar could be done for the boast package. I bet someone sufficiently motivated could make a decent stab at most of these, except for the award and accept packages. Some might require a few config options though.
  - grenoire 7y ago
    Translate was the one that threw me off immediately, and then I caught on the joke. To my knowledge, you cannot make HTTP requests with LaTeX (maybe some processor has commands to do so, alas I don't know of any).
    - trombonechamp 7y ago
      You should be able to do this with \write18.
    - mehrdadn 7y ago
      Nope, I actually found that one possible. There's already a package (minted) for syntax highlighting, and it calls external programs (the pygments Python script IIRC), so I don't see any reason why they couldn't do that.
  - waynecochran 7y ago
    I think what made me more gullible is all the modern claims of machine learning... maybe, I thought, LaTeX was now using RNN's...
- bArray 7y ago
  Yeah, i was thinking "huh, I guess you could build a Markov model to figure out a string of keywords that leads to a given citation, then auto-insert for the author". All you would need to do is tell it to load a certain database/package for a given research area. Given how many papers are online you could quite "easily" build up a nice little database. Add in some checks for quality and you've got yourself something that can make a reasonable guess for you. You would probably want some way to stop it from adding incorrect citations, but other than it would probably generally help.
  - jrochkind1 7y ago
    As long as you citing things you haven't actually read is considered good practice (hint: Turns out it is!). I think it's probably harder to do this tech than you think; on the other hand, I am continually amazed at the acceptance of throwing whatever citations you haven't read that you want in, so the bar may be low.
dhosek 7y ago
I actually wrote code for the autofit. Didn't do multiple pages, but it would adjust the size of a text to fit it into a given space (it was for printing chemical bottle labels). That was a fun project. I had a customized font set made by Bitstream for setting the Japanese text (this was years before Unicode was a viable thing, so we were encoding non-Latin scripts using SJIS) and had to go through a couple hundred pages of character tables to verify that we didn't have any coding errors when we switched to that font from the free bitmapped font we had previously.
smitty1e 7y ago
#6 was written by Udo Dirkschneider.
- mhd 7y ago
  The only solution when your submission deadline's got your balls to the wall, man.
BlackRing 7y ago
You'll also want this to give it a bit of that "used/read" feel: http://hanno-rein.de/archives/349 http://hanno-rein.de/archives/349
- yesenadam 7y ago
  "It adds a coffee stain to your documents. A lot of time can be saved by printing stains directly on the page rather than adding it manually."
leemailll 7y ago
Caution: if you can’t figure out this is a joke, your academic career is in jeopardy; if you can’t nod on a few, your academic career is in jeopardy
- bakuninsbart 7y ago
  Reading the first package: I really need this. Reading the second package: Wow this is amazing, but slightly implausible. Reading the third package: Ah fuck.
imurray 7y ago
A tool that did something like #1: https://web.archive.org/web/20080705135647/http://www.jmlg.org/pssq_postscript_squish.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20080705135647/http://www.jmlg.o... A small number of old NIPS (now NeurIPS) papers may even have used it.
Hitton 7y ago
I suspect that something like coauthors package could actually work.
mkettn 7y ago
These packages are already implemented in emacs.
zerogvt 7y ago
Where is the {makemyresultsreproducible} package?
- EvgeniyZh 7y ago
  You don't need it to publish
ulises314 7y ago
So that's why TeX needs to be Turing complete.

205 points by azhenley 7y ago

My eyes were getting wider until package 4 — then I realized the joke. I was trying to figure out what DB autocite scanned…

parsimo2010 7y ago
The best part of the joke is that this is somewhat plausible. It would be relatively simple to write a package that threw in a “nocite” of your leadership’s key papers so they show up in the references even if you don’t cite them in your paper. The translate package could be implemented with Google Translate or similar. The INTERCAL language required saying “please” in your code, something similar could be done for the boast package. I bet someone sufficiently motivated could make a decent stab at most of these, except for the award and accept packages. Some might require a few config options though.
- grenoire 7y ago
  Translate was the one that threw me off immediately, and then I caught on the joke. To my knowledge, you cannot make HTTP requests with LaTeX (maybe some processor has commands to do so, alas I don't know of any).
  - trombonechamp 7y ago
    You should be able to do this with \write18.
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    Nope, I actually found that one possible. There's already a package (minted) for syntax highlighting, and it calls external programs (the pygments Python script IIRC), so I don't see any reason why they couldn't do that.
- waynecochran 7y ago
  I think what made me more gullible is all the modern claims of machine learning... maybe, I thought, LaTeX was now using RNN's...
bArray 7y ago
Yeah, i was thinking "huh, I guess you could build a Markov model to figure out a string of keywords that leads to a given citation, then auto-insert for the author". All you would need to do is tell it to load a certain database/package for a given research area. Given how many papers are online you could quite "easily" build up a nice little database. Add in some checks for quality and you've got yourself something that can make a reasonable guess for you. You would probably want some way to stop it from adding incorrect citations, but other than it would probably generally help.
- jrochkind1 7y ago
  As long as you citing things you haven't actually read is considered good practice (hint: Turns out it is!). I think it's probably harder to do this tech than you think; on the other hand, I am continually amazed at the acceptance of throwing whatever citations you haven't read that you want in, so the bar may be low.

dhosek 7y ago

I actually wrote code for the autofit. Didn't do multiple pages, but it would adjust the size of a text to fit it into a given space (it was for printing chemical bottle labels). That was a fun project. I had a customized font set made by Bitstream for setting the Japanese text (this was years before Unicode was a viable thing, so we were encoding non-Latin scripts using SJIS) and had to go through a couple hundred pages of character tables to verify that we didn't have any coding errors when we switched to that font from the free bitmapped font we had previously.

smitty1e 7y ago

#6 was written by Udo Dirkschneider.

mhd 7y ago
The only solution when your submission deadline's got your balls to the wall, man.

BlackRing 7y ago

You'll also want this to give it a bit of that "used/read" feel: http://hanno-rein.de/archives/349 http://hanno-rein.de/archives/349

yesenadam 7y ago
"It adds a coffee stain to your documents. A lot of time can be saved by printing stains directly on the page rather than adding it manually."

leemailll 7y ago

Caution: if you can’t figure out this is a joke, your academic career is in jeopardy; if you can’t nod on a few, your academic career is in jeopardy

bakuninsbart 7y ago
Reading the first package: I really need this. Reading the second package: Wow this is amazing, but slightly implausible. Reading the third package: Ah fuck.

imurray 7y ago

A tool that did something like #1: https://web.archive.org/web/20080705135647/http://www.jmlg.org/pssq_postscript_squish.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20080705135647/http://www.jmlg.o... A small number of old NIPS (now NeurIPS) papers may even have used it.

Hitton 7y ago

I suspect that something like coauthors package could actually work.

mkettn 7y ago

These packages are already implemented in emacs.

zerogvt 7y ago

Where is the {makemyresultsreproducible} package?

EvgeniyZh 7y ago
You don't need it to publish

ulises314 7y ago

So that's why TeX needs to be Turing complete.