Large parts of Sunday and of Monday were given-over to producing a LAΤΕΧ version of my paper on incomplete preferences. Some part of to-day will be spent trying to complete that conversion.

Each of the two journals suggested by the advising editor who last rejected my paper requires submissions to be either LAΤΕΧ or in the form of a Microsoft Word file with formulæ encoded for its equation editor.

The original is an ODT, whose equations are encoded for the OpenOffice formula editor. The OpenOffice software can export a Word .DOC, but the formula would be rendered as text (rather than for the equation editor), and pretty badly at that. I used Writer2LaTeX, a plug-in for OpenOffice, to create a first-pass version of LAΤΕΧ source for my paper. A great deal of formatting went by the way-side, but the formulæ themselves seem to have come through the process mostly intact. The worst glitch so far was that U+2280 (⊀) was translated to \nsucc (⊁). (I've contacted the developer.)

I've nested the formulæ within more appropriate mark-up, and wrestled the rest of the mark-up of the paper into pretty good shape. The most glaring problems that I have right now are with the formulæ; those angle-brackets that should be rendered quite large are not, and some of the formulæ are simply too wide. And I still need to walk through the paper to make sure that my copying-and-pasting didn't go south anywhere.

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This conversion of my paper represents the first time that I have worked much with LAΤΕΧ beyond creäting bald formulæ.

When I first started doing word-processing of more than plain-text files, LAΤΕΧ itself didn't yet exist, the ΤΕΧ system (on which LAΤΕΧ is founded) was still quite new, and I had personal connections to AT&T, such that I learned and used an older system, troff, which had been developed at AT&T (to justify the development of Unix). I had (and somewhere still have) a porting of troff to MS-DOS, could get pretty much any desired result with it (unlike most troff users, I knew its mark-up pretty thoroughly, and didn't rely on macros other than those that I'd written myself), and saw little reason to learn ΤΕΧ or LAΤΕΧ. When I did migrate from troff, it was to WYSIWYG programs.[1]

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[1] There was an attempt, called Scientific Word, at something like a WYSIWYG interface for LAΤΕΧ; but, at the time that I investigated Scientific Word, it was ghastly. Its installation routine took hours, and, if the system already had a lot of installed fonts, would fail at the very end, in a way that its own programmers could not diagnose. And, if successfully installed, Scientific Word wouldn't produce decent LAΤΕΧ source anyway.

Tags: LaTeX, LAΤΕΧ, mark-up, papers, TeX, troff, ΤΕΧ

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