On 06/07/2010 00:15, Elazar Leibovich wrote:

On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 11:51 PM, Micha <mi...@post.tau.ac.il
<mailto:mi...@post.tau.ac.il>> wrote:

    On 05/07/2010 18:18, Elazar Leibovich wrote:


[snipped]


        Another option is to print it to PDF, but it's rather clumsy,
        because
        the reviewer cannot edit directly your document.


    First of all, you should stop top posting. It's frown upon in linux
    mailing lists even more than giving microsoft documents to linux users.

I apologize, I wasn't aware to this fact.


    Second, I don't know what field you are in, but at least in applied
      mathematics in Israel, I don't know anyone who knows what to do
    with a word document.


Well, in undergraduate math courses in the open University they accepted
homeworks as doc files. I sent it as PDF file, but then I wouldn't get
any inline comments (and actually thus almost no comments at all).
Because good free PDF-commenting tools are not available, or that the
graders are not willing to use such a tools.

WYSIWYG tools really shines for grading assignments. It's much easier to
include comments in such a tool, and MS Word is the de facto standard.


Well, I tell my students not to bother sending me word documents as I can't read them. They either scan them or learn a better notation.

However they send it though I send the answers back in pseudo latex notation and they seem to be just fine with it.

I agree that word is not ideal for mathematical notations (although in
the latest versions it's better than TeX in some aspects IMHO), and
anyhow TeX is the standard for papers and thesis. But it's still usable,
and might be better for some purposes. If I'll send to anyone in the
open university a short word document describing a proof - I know he'll
be able to read it, and to easily edit it.
If I'll send an ".odt" documents - I know for sure almost no one will be
able to read that.

I'll be surprised if in the Tel Aviv University many applied math
professors are not able to read MS Word documents.


Quite a few moved to mac, several others are using linux. I know quite a few who won't bother to open a word document. I don't know any who use it themselves for their own work. I know of one person in physics who has his secretary type it his documents in word, but that is it.

After constant nagging (I don't know if it's just me or also others), announcements and letters from the rector and such are usually sent in both word and pdf as well.

All the emails I have with colleagues are either latex documents or text emails using latex notation. I'm not aware of a journal or conference in my field that doesn't prefer and greatly encourage latex. Quite a few won't accept anything else (some of them take PDF so you can bypass that).

Like I mentioned earlier, I like lyx, as it uses a latex backend but enables WYSIWYG editing of math and such and it is very configurable.

Whenever I do the mistake of playing around with microsoft I get angry and dump it rather quickly. It got to a point that I took old exercises that I wanted to update one question in, and after wasting a couple of hours modifying a single equation I would copy the whole thing to lyx in a quarter of the time and get it over with.

Only thing I'm not sure yet is presentations. I usually use beamer, but there are a few things that powerpoint can be nicer, although you have to be very very very careful as to how you use it so that you don't abuse it.

But again, whenever equations come into play, it's back to latex (or using a latex plugin for powerpoint)



    odt is still a problem of course, but personally I refuse to send or
    receive office documents from people in the university, and they
    manage to send PDFs for whatever formatted documents they want to
    send or text otherwise. Very few things actually need to be
    formatted as it turns out (and even when they are, unless it is PDF
    it usually arrives in the wrong format).


        2010/7/5 Ori Idan <o...@helicontech.co.il
        <mailto:o...@helicontech.co.il> <mailto:o...@helicontech.co.il
        <mailto:o...@helicontech.co.il>>>


            So you decided to write in docx format and you expect people to
            review your work?
            I did not even looked at it because of the format.
            If you write it in OpenOffice even if it does not look the best,
            people may help you.
            The issue of how it looks can be fixed later.
            You may even work with simple text file to begin and later on
            transfer it to a good word processor to do the formatting.

            --
            Ori Idan



            On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 4:31 PM, Raz <razi...@gmail.com
        <mailto:razi...@gmail.com>
        <mailto:razi...@gmail.com <mailto:razi...@gmail.com>>> wrote:

                Hey Nadav
                When i started i tried to work with open office in
        Hebrew, but i
                simply spent too much time
                trying to fix things, indentation, merging pictures and
        so on.
                also, how can ask for people to send me their comments ?
        I did
                not see
                track changes.


                On Mon, Jul 5, 2010 at 4:18 PM, Nadav Har'El
        <n...@math.technion.ac.il <mailto:n...@math.technion.ac.il>
        <mailto:n...@math.technion.ac.il
        <mailto:n...@math.technion.ac.il>>> wrote:
         > On Mon, Jul 05, 2010, Raz wrote about "Re: linux beivrit":
         >> > Open office would have been a much better choice (or lyx,
                or latex or a few
         >> > others)
         >> I tried open format. does not look good at all.
         >
         > Hi,
         >
         > A lot of things can be said against Open Office (although I
                personally
         > disagree with most of them), but I don't see how you can say
                its output
         > (I assume you don't mean its UI) doesn't look good. What
                didn't you like?
         > The fonts? The default style or layout? Or what?
         >
         > In my experience, you can create beautiful documents in Open
                Office, and it's
         > not harder to do so than with with Microsoft Office, so I
                wonder whater
         > problems you are referring to.
         >
         > Anyway, it's probably too late now for this document
                (converting formats
         > is a harder issue), but it's something to think about for
                your next
         > document :-)
         >
         > --
         > Nadav Har'El                        |      Monday, Jul  5
                2010, 23 Tammuz 5770
         > n...@math.technion.ac.il <mailto:n...@math.technion.ac.il>
        <mailto:n...@math.technion.ac.il <mailto:n...@math.technion.ac.il>>

                         |-----------------------------------------
         > Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Boat: A hole in the
                water surrounded by
         > http://nadav.harel.org.il           |wood into which one
                pours money.
         >

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