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The highly involved build process for my doctoral dissertation
- applied_heat 3y agoDoes anyone know any library that can swap a page in the pdf with another without destroying the metadata?
- analog31 3y agoI use a Python library called pdfrw to take PDFs apart, notably to work with sheet music. I think when you ask it for a page, it returns the whole thing, and the PDF files that get written are still readable PDFs. I assume that within the file structure are things that enable an internal integrity check, such as maybe checksums or CRC's, which would necessarily be different if the file contents are different.
- cozzyd 3y agoqpdf?
- clankyclanker 3y agopdftk?
- agarsev 3y agoYou can dump the metadata and then restore it, maybe that'll work for you?
- cozzyd 3y agoI too had a complicated Makefile for my dissertation, but since then I've learned to use latexmk which seems to more or less do everything for you... (ok, I guess I still often have a Makefile that calls latexmk and sometimes produces some figures from scripts)
- tkiolp4 3y agoI’ve known PhDs in philosophy who can barely create slides in power point… while others (like OP) go and use latex, create open source software and use emacs. I’ve never seen such a drastic difference in any other field.
- KeplerBoy 3y agoLatex is the norm in all natural sciences and engineering fields. Most people however are happy with putting their content in someone else's templates.
- progbits 3y agoHonestly I wish it was even templates, usually it is just default Word document with random extra whitespace and hand-written section references that get out of sync.
- something98 3y agoAs someone who has degrees in both, I can firmly say this is wildly incorrect.
- KeplerBoy 3y agoWhat's your experience?
- jacurtis 3y agoI'm not sure how its possible to get a PhD in the modern era without learning LaTex. It is the required markup and publishing tool for any respected research publication. Since PhDs require (at least mine did) multiple published works in respected journals and conferences, I feel like LaTex is table-stakes for doctoral research and degrees. Furthermore, outside of my dissertation work, the classes I took often required you to produce other research works which also had to be created with LaTex. Overleaf (a SaaS platform for Latex collaboration and sharing) was essentially the operating system of my PhD. I spent 75% of my time in there. I feel like it would be impossible to get a Doctoral degree without LaTex knowledge. Maybe it depends on the university?
- rnadomvirlabe 3y agoMicrosoft Word still reigns supreme in many fields. Some journals still require it as the format for submission.
- nohuck13 3y ago"goals: ... replace the second page with a scanned copy ...after it was signed by the examiners... reproducibly." Oh man, purist side quests like this are exactly how I would procrastinate a philosophy dissertation. But building a complex process for _reproducibly_ handling the once-in-a-lifetime event of accepting your dissertation examiners' signatures is taking it to a whole other level.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoFor my M.S. I just looked up the relevant PDF merge utility for Linux online. I can't even remember what it was now, but it took the first x pages from the unsigned thesis, intercollated the signed signing page, and then took the remaining pages from the unsigned thesis, and output a single PDF. Edit: .zsh_history had it: > pdftk A=thesis.pdf B=approval.pdf cat A1-5 B1 A7-end output signed_thesis.pdf
- heyoni 3y agoHow have you never cleared out your history? Or do you rarely use your terminal? /edit not cleared but filled up so that it gets rotated out
- stevekemp 3y agoNot the parent, but I always tried to keep an "infinite" bash shell history, on each of my machines. Nowadays I run a mac at work, and I use "atuin" which stores zsh history in an SQLite database. No fear of losing anything, and it really can save you in a lot of ways.
- sitkack 3y agoHave you thought of recording everything with space ASCII cinema?
- cinntaile 3y agoThis doesn't really work as intended when I tried to do something similar. Pdftk produces pdfs that were much bigger than the ones generated by LaTeX and you might end up outside of the allowed size range.
- lapcat 3y agoWhat struck me was "Copyright © 2018–2023 Sean Whitton" on the dissertation. 5 years? Ugh. True story: While writing my philosophy dissertation, I dropped out of grad school to become a Mac developer, and a key factor was the open source Mac bibliography app BibDesk. https://bibdesk.sourceforge.io/ https://bibdesk.sourceforge.io/
- dmd 3y agoFive years seems pretty normal? Shorter than that would be extremely unusual. What are you saying here?
- lapcat 3y agoI think you're confusing time spent in the doctoral program vs. time spent writing the doctoral dissertation? This appears to be your résumé, according to which you spent five years total in the doctoral program. I'm pretty sure you didn't start writing your dissertation on day one, since there are years of coursework and other requirements before you start writing your dissertation. https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmdrucker https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmdrucker
- dmd 3y agoOk, yeah, that’s true. I’d guess “started working on stuff that went into my thesis” to final product was about 3 years. I actually remember the day I did “mkdir thesis” and then said “WELP that’s enough work for today!”
- lapcat 3y agoLooks like 10 years in the program for the author. There could have been a break before grad school, though he was a teaching assistant as early as 2016. https://spwhitton.name//philos/CV.pdf https://spwhitton.name//philos/CV.pdf Ph.D. Philosophy, University of Arizona (expected 2023) MMathPhil, Mathematics and Philosophy, University of Oxford (2013)
- joosters 3y agoIMO, LaTeX is just a way for computer scientists to keep on programming when they've finished their research project and are writing it up.
- rubicks 3y agoIt's also a great way to keep on programming when you need a CV and cover letter.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoIt's a clever way to foist effort on all other fields and enable research paper procrastination by playing with a complicated publication toolchain. Or is it an intelligence and quality barrier-to-entry filter to reduce the number of papers that need to go through review? ;@]
- ribit 3y agoMy dissertation building process was similar. Only it also involved a bunch of custom pandoc filters and the markdown had runnable R code in it. Fun times. I didn't bother with replacing the signed page though, because enough is enough.
- progbits 3y agoSo, why not use \includepdf{the printed, signed and scanned page} in the .tex file? You can do \ifdefined to have it generate both the initial draft for signing and then second iteration with the scanned page. This should preserve document metadata as far as I can tell.
- hnarayanan 3y agoThis prompted me to pull the code of my 15+ year old dissertation[1] and see if it still builds. Still does! 1: https://github.com/hnarayanan/phd-dissertation https://github.com/hnarayanan/phd-dissertation
- pimlottc 3y agoPDF metadata is interesting, there’s a lot of fun stuff you can do like custom page numbers, sections, page sizes, tables of contents, internal links, OCR overlays… But the format and syntax for these can be tricky, and tools and documentation can be hard to find.
- BrandoElFollito 3y agoPhD thesis are overrated. People create some kind of life achievement monument where they seek to summarize the world knowledge and yet nobody is going to read the document. Same for MSc thesis. What matters (to a point) are your papers and it should be enough to just gather the in a file, add a conclusion and call it a day. We have this in France and some people use the opportunity. My PhD thesis (physics) was 45 pages long. The expected number of pages was about 200 or 300, a friend of mine wrote two tomes. The introduction was basically "if you do not know about the topic you should probably to read this thesis anyway but if you really want to, here are some books you can use". 2 lines, introduction done. The main part was mostly copy/paste from my articles. The conclusion was that the results were great and groundbreaking. I added a special section called (I think) "Is this thesis really useful, a discussion with the author" - where I pointed out everything wrong with what I did and where to go further. 75% of the reviewers loved it (less work for them) and 25% were wrong :) Finally, the acknowledgments were thanking my thesis director profusely (he did not help me much in the research part but eased considerably (considerably) my life and helped me to navigate the muddy waters of Academia), a fried who during a dinner gave me an idea that changed the whole thesis, my wife, my parents and my dog. The defense was epic (3 hours instead o the expected 45 minutes) because some people decided to manage their political battles there. I was switching between grabbing the popcorn and mopping my forehead when some questions out of the end of the universe were asked (one of them was asked by the dept asshole in residence (AIR) and I understood all the words, but not put together in one sentence (nothing to do with my topic). The president of the jury waited for me to answer, I mumbled something, he said that this was disappointing and asked the AIR to answer. He said that he has no idea but thought I may.) I will go one day to my dept (I left academia in the meantime) and ask if someone has ever borrowed the thesis (it exists only in one copy).
- yummypaint 3y agoIm an experimentalist and I'm constantly looking at the online copy of my thesis to grab measurements of the facility, setup info, formulas, etc. I also look at theses of other people for the same reason. It's generally more convenient than going through accelerator documentation.