8 ms·

A LaTeX-Package that comes up with synonyms for 'Therefore,'

80 points by dlsym 13y ago

leephillips 13y ago
This is a welcome development for LaTeX: they achieved perfection in visual presentation years ago, so there's nowhere to go but to the content itself. I fully expect a proof checker package to be available for LaTeX within a few years.
- bpedro 13y ago
  It's already available: http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb30-2/tb95neveln.pdf http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb30-2/tb95neveln.pdf
  - leephillips 13y ago
    Gadzooks! The perils of comedy in the modern age.
- jkldotio 13y ago
  I'd rather they spent some effort on installation, documentation and package management as it's a nightmare that needs to be fixed.
  - ht_th 13y ago
    It is? I've used the Tex Live distribution for years now and I don't believe I've ever wanted for a package that wasn't installed (or in the distribution if you're short on space). Installation is a breeze as well, just running a simple installer.
    - leephillips 13y ago
      Installation is no problem but what people usually complain about are conflicts among packages, which are easy to run into and hard to diagnose. Recently I used LaTeX to make a bunch of nametags. I used the labels package and a package that extends the capabilities of tables. Each package is awesome on its own, but using them together caused some weird bugs to expose themselves, that I had to find ad-hoc workarounds for.
k2enemy 13y ago
A list of the synonyms... Therefore, Hence, So, It is trivial that Clearly, Behold! Ergo, And verily it goes that Thus, By logical extension, And verily, It is the will of the Gods that We find It can be shown that It transpires that As an exercise, prove that Wherefore said He unto them, As must be obvious to even the meanest intellect, The power of logic reveals the conclusion that This implies As Gauss proved, As Euler proved, And it was handed down from the heavens that It pleases the symmetry of the world that It just needs to be content aware so that it can use "As an exercise, prove that" for the most difficult step.
- loevborg 13y ago
  Of course, most of these are far from being synonyms of "therefore", whose function is to express that the following sentence is a logical consequence of what was said before. The following are real substitutes: Hence; So; Ergo; This implies that; Thus and also As a consequence; It follows that; This means that; From this we can infer that; This could not be true unless
  - leephillips 13y ago
    But those aren't as funny.
  - dlib 13y ago
    I always enjoy the 'From this we can easily infer that' as I on more than one occasion had to work pretty hard to get to that easily inferred result. Either, being experts in the field the result is indeed not difficult for them to get at or the authors mock my intelligence. I assume the latter as I enjoy a little humour in my math books, even if it is at my expense.
    - leephillips 13y ago
      Russian physics papers from a certain era are notorious for skipping vast and none-too-obvious swaths of derivation, making do with a terse "it follows that" or some such. Some of my colleagues assumed that this was some sort of machismo; I thought maybe they were just smarter than me. Later I had the chance to mention this to an emigre physicist from the former USSR, and he said that it was just to reduce the number of pages to save on the costs of publication.
groovy2shoes 13y ago
My favorite synonym in this package is "Wherefore said He unto them".
- karamazov 13y ago
  I have to vote for "And verily it goes that".
olympus 13y ago
As a casual LaTeX user I never really got into the macro/package programming side of it, but for some reason I really don't want to have to type a backslash before every 'therefore.' Is it possible to write a procedure that finds every instance of 'therefore' and replaces it with a synonym at compile time? I still wouldn't use this package for formal papers but it might be fun to play with.
- rca 13y ago
  Hum, you could use something like sed -re "s/[Tt]herefore[,]?/\\\Therefore/g" on your .tex before compiling it with the 'therefore' package. This will not allow you to choose which 'therefore' you want replaced though. Then again, if it's just for fun you probably don't care :)
- gus_massa 13y ago
  You can change the catcode of the upercase "T" and define it as a macro that peeks some characters to see if it if part of a "Therefore". This may break other commands that have the upercase T in their name, so it will create some random unexpected incompatibilities. (Many babel languages change catcodes to make accents easier to use, and therefore they create some random unexpected incompatibilities.) More info about catcodes: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=activechars http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=activechars
  - adiM 13y ago
    With LuaTeX (the modern version of TeX), such catcode trickery is not needed. LuaTeX provides a hook into the file reader, and you can simply change transform the input as you read it. For an example in ConTeXt, see this answer on Tex.sx: http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/4174/323 http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/4174/323
jdleesmiller 13y ago
"And it was handed down from the heavens that" -- man, I wish I'd used that one in my thesis... Here it is on writeLaTeX, if you'd like to see it in action: http://www.writelatex.com/docs?snip_uri[]=https://raw.github.com/bgschiller/latex-therefore/master/sqrt_two.tex&snip_uri[]=https://raw.github.com/bgschiller/latex-therefore/master/therefore.sty http://www.writelatex.com/docs?snip_uri[]=https://raw.github...
kirk21 13y ago
We are creating new tools for academics: bohr.launchrock.com

80 points by dlsym 13y ago

This is a welcome development for LaTeX: they achieved perfection in visual presentation years ago, so there's nowhere to go but to the content itself. I fully expect a proof checker package to be available for LaTeX within a few years.

bpedro 13y ago
It's already available: http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb30-2/tb95neveln.pdf http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb30-2/tb95neveln.pdf
- leephillips 13y ago
  Gadzooks! The perils of comedy in the modern age.
jkldotio 13y ago
I'd rather they spent some effort on installation, documentation and package management as it's a nightmare that needs to be fixed.
- ht_th 13y ago
  It is? I've used the Tex Live distribution for years now and I don't believe I've ever wanted for a package that wasn't installed (or in the distribution if you're short on space). Installation is a breeze as well, just running a simple installer.
  - leephillips 13y ago
    Installation is no problem but what people usually complain about are conflicts among packages, which are easy to run into and hard to diagnose. Recently I used LaTeX to make a bunch of nametags. I used the labels package and a package that extends the capabilities of tables. Each package is awesome on its own, but using them together caused some weird bugs to expose themselves, that I had to find ad-hoc workarounds for.

k2enemy 13y ago

A list of the synonyms... Therefore, Hence, So, It is trivial that Clearly, Behold! Ergo, And verily it goes that Thus, By logical extension, And verily, It is the will of the Gods that We find It can be shown that It transpires that As an exercise, prove that Wherefore said He unto them, As must be obvious to even the meanest intellect, The power of logic reveals the conclusion that This implies As Gauss proved, As Euler proved, And it was handed down from the heavens that It pleases the symmetry of the world that It just needs to be content aware so that it can use "As an exercise, prove that" for the most difficult step.

loevborg 13y ago
Of course, most of these are far from being synonyms of "therefore", whose function is to express that the following sentence is a logical consequence of what was said before. The following are real substitutes: Hence; So; Ergo; This implies that; Thus and also As a consequence; It follows that; This means that; From this we can infer that; This could not be true unless
- leephillips 13y ago
  But those aren't as funny.
- dlib 13y ago
  I always enjoy the 'From this we can easily infer that' as I on more than one occasion had to work pretty hard to get to that easily inferred result. Either, being experts in the field the result is indeed not difficult for them to get at or the authors mock my intelligence. I assume the latter as I enjoy a little humour in my math books, even if it is at my expense.
  - leephillips 13y ago
    Russian physics papers from a certain era are notorious for skipping vast and none-too-obvious swaths of derivation, making do with a terse "it follows that" or some such. Some of my colleagues assumed that this was some sort of machismo; I thought maybe they were just smarter than me. Later I had the chance to mention this to an emigre physicist from the former USSR, and he said that it was just to reduce the number of pages to save on the costs of publication.

groovy2shoes 13y ago

My favorite synonym in this package is "Wherefore said He unto them".

karamazov 13y ago
I have to vote for "And verily it goes that".

olympus 13y ago

As a casual LaTeX user I never really got into the macro/package programming side of it, but for some reason I really don't want to have to type a backslash before every 'therefore.' Is it possible to write a procedure that finds every instance of 'therefore' and replaces it with a synonym at compile time? I still wouldn't use this package for formal papers but it might be fun to play with.

rca 13y ago
Hum, you could use something like sed -re "s/[Tt]herefore[,]?/\\\Therefore/g" on your .tex before compiling it with the 'therefore' package. This will not allow you to choose which 'therefore' you want replaced though. Then again, if it's just for fun you probably don't care :)
gus_massa 13y ago
You can change the catcode of the upercase "T" and define it as a macro that peeks some characters to see if it if part of a "Therefore". This may break other commands that have the upercase T in their name, so it will create some random unexpected incompatibilities. (Many babel languages change catcodes to make accents easier to use, and therefore they create some random unexpected incompatibilities.) More info about catcodes: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=activechars http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=activechars
- adiM 13y ago
  With LuaTeX (the modern version of TeX), such catcode trickery is not needed. LuaTeX provides a hook into the file reader, and you can simply change transform the input as you read it. For an example in ConTeXt, see this answer on Tex.sx: http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/4174/323 http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/4174/323

jdleesmiller 13y ago

"And it was handed down from the heavens that" -- man, I wish I'd used that one in my thesis... Here it is on writeLaTeX, if you'd like to see it in action: http://www.writelatex.com/docs?snip_uri[]=https://raw.github.com/bgschiller/latex-therefore/master/sqrt_two.tex&snip_uri[]=https://raw.github.com/bgschiller/latex-therefore/master/therefore.sty http://www.writelatex.com/docs?snip_uri[]=https://raw.github...

kirk21 13y ago

We are creating new tools for academics: bohr.launchrock.com