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Sphinxtr: Creating a Portable PhD Thesis
- jterrace 14y agoOther output formats: http://jterrace.github.com/sphinxtr/ http://jterrace.github.com/sphinxtr/ GitHub repository: https://github.com/jterrace/sphinxtr https://github.com/jterrace/sphinxtr
- decebalus1 14y agoSorry, but the project name is totally unfortunate.
- jterrace 14y agointentional :)
- troyk 14y agoLove the name, laughed my ass off ;) Disclaimer: I'm immature...
- decebalus1 14y agoOh.. OOOHH. I get it :)))))
- Nowyouknow 14y agoThis is an impressive undertaking, but good lord, what an unfortunate name.
- jterrace 14y agoit had to be done
- dljsjr 14y agoTo be totally fair, a sphincter (I'm assuming this is what you're referring to) refers to a circular muscle structure in the general case. Not just the butthole. There are sphincters in your eyes. There is a sphincter in your esophagus. Your body is full of sphincters. The anal sphincter is just one of many sphincters. And now you really do know.
- mirkules 14y agoThat's irrelevant, because the association is ever-present. As an example, if people lived on Venus, they would be called "Venerials" by the proper genitive form. Alas, doctors got to it first (Venus, Roman goddess of love...) so it was changed to "Venutians". (Source: Neil DeGrasse Tyson's podcast, StarTalk radio).
- dljsjr 14y agoI know, I was being a little pedantic and tongue-in-cheek at the same time, hah. Still true though.
- crntaylor 14y ago...would be called "Venerials" by the proper genitive form... I'm going to keep telling myself that your use of 'genitive' right next to 'Venerials' was entirely conscious and deliberate.
- mirkules 14y agoHeh, not at all.
- jonnathanson 14y ago"Your body is full of sphincters." I'm sorry, but this cracked me up. It brought out my inner Beavis and Butthead. I apologize. But, I mean, come on. Most people do associate the word sphincter with the butthole, and surely the creator should have known that. (Unless the, umm, cheeky association is intentional?)
- muneeb 14y agoThis is awesome! I can totally see myself using this. We also need better make files for Latex. Changing one line, hitting make, and then watching crap fly across your screen is not a pleasant experience ...
- jterrace 14y agoIt's using http://code.google.com/p/latex-makefile/ http://code.google.com/p/latex-makefile/ which is a really awesome makefile. It has nice colored output and throws away all the garbage output.
- qznc 14y agoAt least you can build your own scripts around this stuff. Building LaTeX for me goes like this: I use vim, change a line, and hit ":w". My git-onNotify [0] script detects a change and issues "make show". The Makefile uses rubber or latexmk to build a pdf, then issues "gnome-open $PDF", which opens the new version in my pdf viewer. If my screen is tiled, the preview on the side just updates. Essentially, I just save my tex file and wait for the change. [0] https://github.com/beza1e1/dot/blob/master/bin/git-onNotify https://github.com/beza1e1/dot/blob/master/bin/git-onNotify
- adiM 14y agoHow does this compare to existing text formats that generate multiple outputs, in particular pandoc (which supports an extended version of Markdown)?
- andreasvc 14y agoThe section on typography is actually about formatting. Also, an epigraph is not the same as a quotation: [...] 2. (Literature) A citation from some author, or a sentence framed for the purpose, placed at the beginning of a work or of its separate divisions; a motto. Epigraphic
- jterrace 14y agoPull requests accepted :)
- cmccabe 14y agoIf the tex2html tool is poor, why not improve that tool? Re-inventing TeX seems like quite a waste of time. Every time someone invents a new markup format for absolutely no reason, I die a little bit inside.
- jterrace 14y agoThis uses an existing format, restructuredtext, not a new markup format.
- andreasvc 14y agoTeX and restructuredtext have very different goals. The first lets you specify every little typographical detail for a fixed page-oriented output. The latter focuses on a minimal set of semantic markup which can be used for different presentation media.
- coliveira 14y agoWhat you said is just the difference between TeX and LaTeX. If you want just semantic meaning, use LaTeX without lower level TeX commands, then use an automated tool to convert it to html or other formats.
- andreasvc 14y agoNo it's not. LaTeX is still page-oriented. You can convert it to HTML and other formats but not as well as multi-format markup specifically designed for that purpose.
- coliveira 14y agoThere is nothing page oriented about LaTeX. All commands assume only content, the exact formatting is left to the combination of class/packages used. In fact, this is one of the weaknesses of LaTeX, because people like so much to be able to position pictures, tweak with title formatting, etc.
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- freeslave 14y agohere's an eclipse based editor specifically built for writing/managing your thesis. http://www.chapterlab.com/ http://www.chapterlab.com/
- neonkiwi 14y agoUnfortunately this (good) product will take at least a generation to make it to the academic world. I put my thesis together in HTML using Pandoc, customized to look a bit like a Tufte publication with margin notes. It had animations, anchor links when cross-referencing paragraphs, and in my eyes, made sense for a document like a thesis. My committee members, on the other hand, were in consensus that a thesis should be a PDF with page numbers, not some multimedia document with hyperlinks. When I made a PDF[0] and submitted it to the university, someone even checked it to make sure the page numbering switched from Roman to Arabic at the correct point as stipulated by the submission guidelines (it didn't, hence my knowledge of their thoroughness). Considering that universities today often don't even want a hard copy of a thesis, this is a world that is tied very strongly to the paper paradigm. [0] Fortunately Pandoc did this quite nicely, though I did have to make a few changes to deal with citations. Incidentally, there is no good, cross-platform way to put an animation in a PDF.
- jterrace 14y agoYeah, my university formatting requirements are crazy also. This allowed me to have one source that outputs (nicely) to a bunch of different formats, including the university PDF requirement.
- andreasvc 14y agoThere's a good reason to require proper page numbers: citations. In general you can't refer to a particular passage in a huge HTML document. Anchor links are a technical solution, but that's not how normal citations work. I think that more generally when a document becomes sufficiently complex it is better to use a page-oriented, typesetting approach. You'll want to fiddle with where certain page breaks and figures end up, and if you do that you might as well stick with one canonical format. You can view it as the paper paradigm. Alternatively, you can also see it as sticking to a uniform, canonical format. Getting fluid layouts right is a very difficult problem, and manually getting the layout right for a fixed format is simply a much better solution for this purpose.
- jterrace 14y agoThe HTML format does generate multiple pages for different sections and chapters, completely configurable. The format above is the singlehtml format where everything is on one page. I'd much rather have a link to a specific anchor tag on a page that goes directly to where I want than a citation to a page number on a 200 page document.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- frisco 14y agoThis is what thesis writing procrastination looks like.
- jterrace 14y agoTo be fair, I only released it after my thesis was done :)
- pmr_ 14y agoI have written my Bachelor thesis in org-mode and was incredibly happy with it. There is certainly a difference in requirements for a PhD Thesis, but I cannot think of any missing feature or hard to overcome problem right away.
- drothlis 14y agoWhat did you use to convert to pdf / html?
- pmr_ 14y agoorg-mode comes with HTML/pdf/DocBook export and you can extend the exporter with your own formats.
- drothlis 14y agoDid you find it easy to extend with your own formats? Or to modify an existing format, say html, to produce slightly different output? I usually use perl/sed/awk + markdown for generating html from my own made-up mini-formats. I'd love to keep the sources in org-mode instead, but I wonder whether elisp is the right language for the type of text munging I want to do.
- pmr_ 14y agoelisp isn't really good at text munging (that sounds counterintuitive at first, given it is the extension language of an editor) and works much better if your data is structured as s-expressions. AFAIK there used to be project to build a modern parser for org-mode files, but I couldn't tell you how much this has progressed or how usable it is. So, if your export process contains heavy text-munging I'd avoid it. Modifying the HTML output (adding classes etc.) was fairly OK, I haven't tried anything crazy though.
- kghose 14y agoAlso relevant: https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX
- jterrace 14y agoThis is a nice project, but different goals. I don't want my HTML output to look like a PDF. I want it to look like a nicely formatted web document
- abbot2 14y agoAs someone who did typeset his thesis not too long ago to forget all that lot of tiny tweaks I had to make to get a perfect print out from LaTeX, I would say that this project has a lot of issues. Some of them a more or less easy to fix, but some of them will be hard. Consider wrapping some specific paragraph in a \fussy / \sloppy pair, or hammering a specific float to this page, or ... (this list is really long). Not to mention bibliography tools. I don't claim that these issues are unsolvable, but the deeper you go into solving them the more you will discover that you are basically re-implementing LaTeX. While the idea of multi-format thesis, or at least double format - PDF and HTML, is very compelling, I doubt there could be good enough solutions for that for any thesis which contains more then just text and some inconsiderate amount of figures/tables/formulae at all.
- jterrace 14y agoAgreed, but for my case, I didn't really care too much about the PDF output. The printed version of my thesis is going to sit in my university library untouched forever. I'm much more concerned with having a semantically correct, searchable, beautiful HTML output.
- abbot2 14y agoWhy not to go the other way round in this case? Typeset your thesis in semantically correct, searchable, beautiful HTML5, and then just add some specific CSS to get the hard print copy?
- pserwylo 14y agoLooks nice. Currently, I am quite happy writing my thesis in LyX [0], which outputs to various formats, including HTML. I also have a script which periodically converts the source files from LyX to both HTML and PDF, then dumps them in the webroot of the Apache server running on my Uni computer. This folder has a .htaccess file which restricts access to my supervisors and myself using the Uni's LDAP server. It works a treat for me. [0] - http://www.lyx.org/ http://www.lyx.org/
- Heliosmaster 14y agoI don't get it, what's the problem on writing good handcrafted (no WYSIWYG editors) LaTeX?!
- qznc 14y agoIt seems out of place in a web-dominated world. Compare Brat Victor's "learnable programming" [0] or "Scientific Communication As Sequential Art" [1], which includes animated or interactive things. [0] http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ [1] http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt/ http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt...
- lrem 14y agoLooks cool. But I guess doing things like using IEEE classes is out of question? And does it really miss a way of typesetting inline math?
- jterrace 14y agoIt has inline math. I just forgot to add an example for it. If by IEEE style, you mean bibtex, then yes, you can easily swap the bibtex format.
- lrem 14y agoI mean writing things meant for publishing in IEEE conferences, using the IEEEtran class. Another concern is: is it practical to include figures drawn with Tikz? I find it the easiest way to lay out many things, but it effectively means LaTeX lock-in.
- _hobgoblin_ 14y agoI read that as Sphincter...