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The LaTeX source of the Lectures is long and heavily formatted, so the conversion to HTML involved writing a large amount of custom software, including lots of
by mhartl 13y ago
The LaTeX source of the Lectures is long and heavily formatted, so the conversion to HTML involved writing a large amount of custom software, including lots of tests to catch regressions. In other words, this was a speculative software project; as anyone who has experience with such projects can tell you, it is virtually impossible to anticipate all the problems you'll run into. (The costs would have been even higher had I not worked for a reduced rate, often pro bono, because I wanted to help make the Feynman Lectures accessible to a wider audience.)
- npsimons 13y agoI am very grateful for your work, and I hate to pick on details, but surely you reused much of what's already available for LaTeX? I hope you didn't spend much of your time reinventing the wheel. I freely admit that I am probably vastly underestimating the amount of work that went into this, reuse or no.
- mhartl 13y agoWe did make use of as many existing resources as possible. If you take a look at the [Ruby on Rails Tutorial book](http://railstutorial.org/ http://railstutorial.org/) and [The Tau Manifesto](http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto), both of which are converted to HTML from LaTeX, you'll see that I have deep experience in such conversions. Combined with my previous role as Caltech's editor for the Definitive and Extended Edition of the Feynman Lectures (and my Caltech physics Ph.D.), this made me uniquely qualified to work on this project, which is the main reason I did it. (It certainly wasn't for the money; the opportunity cost of the time I spent on this project was high.) Unfortunately, there's a vast gulf between "kinda-sorta mostly converted"—which is the best you can get with off-the-shelf converters—and "a faithful representation of the Feynman Lectures". Closing this gap required a large amount of gruesome work.
- vermontdevil 13y agoWe should actually do a crowdfunding effort to pay you for your hard work for doing Volume I and for future volumes. Really really appreciate this effort. I've sent this to some of my deaf friends who are studying or trying to get into Physics and they are over the moon about this.
- edanm 13y agoI would absolutely pitch in if someone organised a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for mhartl, even just to pay him back for the current efforts. I'm ecstatic that the lectures now exist online!